This week in Game Studies, we have been studying what it means to play a game. We used casual games to better understand this concept.  Casual gaming is a game where people don’t have to expend much time or energy into the game for it to progress, but it is just fun to play while playing it. Casual games usually have many overarching missions that are menial but make the game have more substance and add more things to do to keep players in a mind-numbing state of play as long as they can. Minecraft, which can be played casually, has personally hooked many hours of my time doing something ridiculous such as farming, making cows breed, digging straight down for hours, and just walking around. There is a little more personal satisfaction that can come from casual games as opposed to pure progression as in other types of games. There is more of a sense of self-satisfaction rather than game achievement, for example building a house in Minecraft makes the game easier, but building a nice house in Minecraft is for your own personal appeal.

We watched some gameplay of Stardew Valley, a casual game that involves building all the elements of a town and discussed what makes Stardew Valley a good example of how play can involve something that would constitute work in another context.  Laying down roads and making farms together would not be considered entertainment if it were being done in real life, but a lot of these types of games are popular and can really absorb someone when playing. Another example was Sims, which was just living in real life but had a very big moment of popularity. 

One thing I think is that maybe people are trying on something that they normally wouldn’t get to do. And that triggers a part of their brain that gets satisfied from the tasks.  The tasks are not that difficult that they need to think about them, but they are interesting because they are productive in some way.  

When I first came across this concept, I remembered something that Professor Cody told us, which is that almost anything can be made into a form of play. This is a very interesting concept because this means that theoretically we could make menial tasks into a form of play, which makes doing work that is undesirable a little bit more desirable and might make the experience of certain workers a little less tedious.I believe there are uses to this outside of the video game market, and can be utilized in the workforce among assembly line workers and people who work in jobs where the tasks might be repetitive and difficult.

In theory, if we applied games to more mainstream tasks, it could be easier for people to both learn and perform jobs.