Salen: Game trends - smaller, casual

Well there's a couple of things I think that are happening. One is that there is this idea that games become smaller. So there's this thing called casual games. Which is looking at the life style of gamers now, particularly people that are moving into their twenties and thirties and forties. That they don't have time to spend 70 hours a week anymore to play through a big console game. And so they idea is that games now are really becoming scaled down in scope. And they're thinking about: How can we create games that somebody might play for five minutes several times a day? And how can you create a very interesting gaming experience about that? How can you create games that are potentially cross platform? That part of that game might take place on my computer and part of it gets ported to my cell phone and I play a little bit there later. I can send content to somebody else and maybe watch something on TV that's connected with the game. So that's thinking about stretching out that game play over the course of the day across platforms.I also think that games are moving towards things that are not games. So some of the most popular kinds of games, things like Second Life is an example of something that people often call a game, but it's simply a persistent world space that allow a community space where people can go, they can build things, you can play games in that space. But it's not a game in the sense that there is a particular goal that you are trying to achieve as a player.I think there's going to be more and more kinds of games that are kind of hybrid in form. So that there may be aspects of it that are very gamery. Meaning there's very specific missions, there is a very specific goal that you are trying to achieve. But you can also participate in the game world without gaming it in the traditional sense.The interesting thing is when gaming became very digital for a while... Move from the real world really into the screen. And then there were years when all gaming took place on screen in this virtual world. My feeling is that there has been a trend now for people to want to move away from the screen. And for me it's this idea of a return to the body. Because in the 80s and 90s there was all this discussion about virtual avatars and what does this mean to have a digital representation of yourself and your body, and I think we are really interested in that idea to disembody the human. But I think we've gone through that conversation and now kids are growing up and having 17 avatars that represent them means nothing to them. It's not a big deal.That there now is a kind of return to a sense of how can I take that game out of the screen and bring it back into my physical space? How can my body become part of that interaction?'And that's where your scene's beginning to get this hybrid forms and this genre of game's is called pervasive gaming. That is looking at games that are played in the real world, but partially played mediated via some kind of technology. And so people are now becoming more and more interested in that line between the virtual and the physical. The virtual and real. And try to figure out how games can become the thing that mediates that relationship. And I think we'll see more of that.