With the meteoric rise of Facebook and the stealth invasion of the smart-phone that now has some iteration of its species lurking in every other pocket across the country, there was equally been an explosion in the number casual games aimed at non-gamers to try and grab the attention of this burgeoning neo-gamer demographic.  Games along the lines of Bejeweled or Diner Dash have become hugely popular by being well polished and being incredibly easy to pick up for anyone who hasn’t grown up with a mouse, keyboard or control pad near welded to their hands.

There has been a lot of anger and resentment from traditional gamers towards this kind of development as they see their hobby being invaded by what they might describe as “ordinary people” or at the least, non-gamers, but really it can only do good.  Introducing people to gaming who don’t know that they like it yet is something I personally approve of and something that can only ultimately benefit the industry as a whole, even in light of reports of some shady business practises by certain casual game publishers.

There is however one type of game that aggravates me and I think is an awful introduction to the medium and could do a lot to put off new gamers.  This is the type of game where it artificially delays the gameplay and limits you to a certain number of actions per day.  This means if you have a virtual tower to build in something like iOS title Tiny Tower, then you’re not going to be able to play it when you want to and you will have to wait until the game decides you’re allowed to play.

The delaying of gameplay is becoming a very common mechanic to include in casual games found on social networks or on iOS and android devices.  I first caught on to it when I got my iPad and instantly downloaded a selection of free games, including We Rule and Godfinger, both titles that employ this delayed gameplay technique.  What these games do is let you perform a certain number of actions and then show you when these actions will recharge.  It will normally take several hours before you can do anything again, forcing you to put the game down and come back later, unless of course you pay a small amount of money to buy more actions.

For me, this is the most transparent and aggravating thing I have ever encountered in a game.  I am all for a business model that relies on microtransactions and there are many online games that make the model work.  I am unlikely to ever put any money down for in-game digital items, but I can see how it works.  What this is however is the requesting of money to carry on playing a game that has minimal entertainment value as it is.  Paying for the privilege to plant more vegetables on my virtual farm is not something I can ever see myself wanting to do, but judging by the amount of reported revenue from casual gaming developers, that is not the sentiment amongst everyone.

To summarise, these games are telling you when you can play as opposed to the other way around.  On paper, it might sound good that games are limiting how much you can play and will stop you from wasting excessive amounts of time on them, but for me, I don’t always have a huge amount of spare time anyway, so if I do get some time that I can spend playing games, I don’t want to be told to come back in another 12 hours when my action points have recharged.

For me, I know that not all games are like this.  I know that this is a very specific subset of a genre that is unique to mobile devices and social networking platforms.  There are parallels to be drawn in certain browser based games, and although I still don’t strictly speaking approve of the mechanic, if you want to see it done really well, The Kingdom of Loathing and Echo Bazaar are two shining examples of being interesting games without becoming beg-fests.

For other people new to gaming, if these games are among the first few things they experience, they are probably going to be put off or expect everything else to have similar elements.  It would be like if someone’s introduction to television involved them watching one of those late-night phone-in betting programmes.  It would be so misrepresentative and would almost definitely put them off.

Getting hooked into these games can transform you into a slave to a machine.  I knew somebody who in the throes of a Farmville addiction actually scheduled breaks at work so that he could take the time to harvest his crops and would very carefully calculate when he would be able to do things on his virtual farm and set reminders using a combination of Outlook and the alarm on his watch.  This is totally backwards.  You should tell your computer when you want to play a game and not the other way around.

There are so many wonderful games out there made by highly talented developers.  This is in no way meant as an attack on casual games (I’ll admit that I had a small Diner Dash phase at one point) but more as a caution to avoid anything that dictates to you when you can and cannot play it.