In a lot of ways you are right. Casual Games is an extremely hard to define term. We took a shot at it again this year, but the reality is that I don't think we'll ever see a full and complete defition of casual games. Some people like to define them by their player-base (ie Soccer Moms), but that's flawed because there's many other types of people playing casual games. Even if you expand the definition to people that play in short bursts of time it isn't right, because you have some extremely hardcore casual game players who will go for many hours at a time.
On some levels even games like WoW have aspects that are extremely casual. It's very easy to get into, they do a great job of holding your hand, and you can with some success play the game in relatively short play sessions (though you can't get to level 60!)
In the end, the definition we are using I think is the most appropriate one we have, but as we point out in the paper, it's still pretty flawed. Anytime you have this nebulous of a definition there's going to be edge cases, and things that possibly fit, and others that don't. It actually took several years before we even found a name for this aspect of the game industry, and in the end it's one that most people aren't happy with, but don't have a better suggestion.
Hehe maybe:)
Seriously though, one of the goals we have with the wiki is for the main information to be continuously updated, so there might not be a need for another large-scale paper like this. We may move onto much smaller reports on more targeted areas of the space such as designing for upsell, production issues, skill-based gaming, etc.
I posted some compilations of the shots I got here in Ottawa. I made a couple dual-screen wallpapers, a couple triple-monitor wallpapers, and one single screen wallpaper from the images.
I have a 5x zoom on a 5 mega-pixel camera so the moon isn't too small. All the images and video shows the full-res moon. I'm hoping that next time around I'll have a telescope setup so I can get some much better closeups:)
I also dumped the pics into Director to line everything up and export a movie which is available on the site too.
As a couple people have suggested, challenge the charge through your credit card company. You'll have to double-check your credit card usage agreement, but for most US cards, you have 60 days from the first bill the charge appears on to challenge something. Once it's been challenged, it is up to the vendor (Microsoft) to verify with the credit card company that you really did authorize the charge. In most cases, this won't happen, you'll never have to pay the bill, and it will go away.
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In a lot of ways you are right. Casual Games is an extremely hard to define term. We took a shot at it again this year, but the reality is that I don't think we'll ever see a full and complete defition of casual games. Some people like to define them by their player-base (ie Soccer Moms), but that's flawed because there's many other types of people playing casual games. Even if you expand the definition to people that play in short bursts of time it isn't right, because you have some extremely hardcore casual game players who will go for many hours at a time.
On some levels even games like WoW have aspects that are extremely casual. It's very easy to get into, they do a great job of holding your hand, and you can with some success play the game in relatively short play sessions (though you can't get to level 60!)
In the end, the definition we are using I think is the most appropriate one we have, but as we point out in the paper, it's still pretty flawed. Anytime you have this nebulous of a definition there's going to be edge cases, and things that possibly fit, and others that don't. It actually took several years before we even found a name for this aspect of the game industry, and in the end it's one that most people aren't happy with, but don't have a better suggestion.
Hehe maybe :)
Seriously though, one of the goals we have with the wiki is for the main information to be continuously updated, so there might not be a need for another large-scale paper like this. We may move onto much smaller reports on more targeted areas of the space such as designing for upsell, production issues, skill-based gaming, etc.
I posted some compilations of the shots I got here in Ottawa. I made a couple dual-screen wallpapers, a couple triple-monitor wallpapers, and one single screen wallpaper from the images.
I have a 5x zoom on a 5 mega-pixel camera so the moon isn't too small. All the images and video shows the full-res moon. I'm hoping that next time around I'll have a telescope setup so I can get some much better closeups :)
I also dumped the pics into Director to line everything up and export a movie which is available on the site too.
http://www.dubane.com/lunareclipse2004/
Enjoy.
As a couple people have suggested, challenge the charge through your credit card company. You'll have to double-check your credit card usage agreement, but for most US cards, you have 60 days from the first bill the charge appears on to challenge something.
Once it's been challenged, it is up to the vendor (Microsoft) to verify with the credit card company that you really did authorize the charge.
In most cases, this won't happen, you'll never have to pay the bill, and it will go away.