"And that is the best definition of casual that I can come up with: Casual players cannot be rated better or worse than other players." Torres finds a nice overlap with the Hicks/Hudson duality; I like his suggestion that casual players don't have metrics for comparison, because their primary goal is fun, and you cannot compare types of fun.

"In this piece, each of the departments involved in making a videogame are examined and accused of one particular vice. In making these assessments, the assumption behind each is that the purpose of the videogames industry is to make games that players want to play, and not to make the games that developers want to play." It is good, and I'm looking forward to the second part.

"Locative social media is especially interesting because it directly affects how people move through the city. It can be terrifically fun and useful for people who fit its prescribed social model." This kind of proscription (or encouragement) of behaviour is interesting, and I think there are a variety of ways to do it "sensibly". And: how did you expand the group of "people who fit its prescribed social model"? Small changes of behaviour, amongst larger groups, are much, much more interesting.

"...hard-core players are comfortable mentally manipulating Peggle's complex physics. They can build models about where the ball is going to go, even after the seventh or eight collision. A frustrated casual gamer looks at Peggle and sees chaos; a hard-core one sees causality." Oh - now that _is_ an interesting way to look at things.

"I still have nothing but respect for my more traditional industry colleagues, but I’ve stopped worrying about impressing the games industry and its pundits. Or at least, I’ve stopped worrying about impressing them first. Instead, I’ve started focusing more on the people who might be interested in different kinds of game experiences. People who fly for business more than three times a month, or people who read all of the Sunday newspaper, or people who have kids with food allergies, for example. I am sure these people read magazines and watch television and listen to the radio. But it would be short-sighted to label them ziners or tubers or airwavers. They are just people, with interests, who sometimes consume different kinds of media." Bogost is right, and I'm concerned I'm always going to be ashamed I chose to use that word.

"Here's the most important thing to understand about the mass market for videogames: these players – the ones who aren't even remotely interested in the kind of videogames the hobbyists want to play – have very specific tastes, and when something takes off with them it continues to sell, and sell, and sell. But these players don't buy many titles – when they find the game they want, they generally just keep playing that."

"The truth is that regular PC games and console games have begun overshooting the market for quite some time now. What is described as a ‘casual game’ used to be the ‘bread and butter’ of the Game Industry not too many years ago." Interesting, if perhaps a tad overwritten; some nice insight about the nature of gamings' demographics.

"People think the interface is the game, and I think that is kind of backwards. I think the game is the game, and we should be thinking what are the many interfaces to it... you touch Twitter in many ways, you touch Facebook in many ways." Raph Koster. But you guessed that, right?

"His advice for those attempting a project like this, is to get people who understand the web. DICE hired a web development director, and a web producer. "Without those people, we would have never made it as far as we have," he says. He also recommends a web tech director, which DICE did not need to hire "because we had a team in DICE who were pretty strong."" Excellent article about building games for the online age; the section on the socially-driven BH website is very incisive.

"...Nintendo understands that while play does involve competition, territoriality and rehearsal for war, it also involves silliness, laughter and fun." Oh, god, can I just marry Stephen Fry now? Oh, there's a queue. Never mind.

"By the time Joe Average has hardware that can run your fancy-pants game, it’s long gone from stores... You keep aiming your game at this tiny, pirate-infested group [of players with 'gaming rigs'] and wondering why sales are so small."

One-button game that won the NLGD gamesdev rally. Looks interesting, and Michiel was a lovely chap.

Lovely; as leonardr says, a "2D Super Mario Galaxy". Hop around planetoids rescuing kittens. Ace!

"That's a pretty serious distinction - people who play games in order to excel at them, and those who play games as a conduit to fantasy - and its only one axis of the diagram." An excellent, and very relevant Penny Arcade editorial today.

Great selection of links to Raph Koster's "Design For Everywhere" - a talk at GDC to the games industry about designing games (and, by inference, software) for use in any context. Important!

"Infinite Games are relationships" - fascinating interview with Justin Hall

Stephen Cakebread, affectionately known as "Cakey" throughout Bizarre Creations, is the mastermind behind both the original mini-game Geometry Wars, and its next generation sequel Retro Evolved.