Binge Gamer

Nintendo of Europe’s answer to Reggie Fils-Aime, Laurent Fischer, let his viewpoint be made very clear while speaking with CVG. You see, when asked about casual gaming, Fischer went off on a tirade that disproves the existence of casual gamers. What the tirade did not disprove, however, was the existence of Bigfoot, Aliens, or the early-90s boy band Menudo:

For me, you are a gamer or non-gamer,” he told CVG at Nintendo’s German HQ yesterday. “I think most of you know that you can spend ten or twenty hours on an internet flash game and have not realised. The guy who plays these games regularly - he’s a core gamer.

But wait, there’s more!

I don’t like this word casual so much. Because people consider that casual needs to be something easy. If you’re good at any game you can play at a high difficulty level.

Now, I could easily take a pot shot at Nintendo and say that there were casual gamers, and that they make up more than half of Nintendo’s market. So I will. The Wii is the perfect console for the “casual” gamer in that the games are simple, good third-party games are very few and very far between, and outside of Nintendo most Wii titles are nothing more than a series of mini-games tied together by a very thin plot. Sometimes this works (Boom Blox), and sometimes it doesn’t (Um… everything else?).