Abstract
Casual games are a serious business, reaching a wide audience of players and generating billions of dollars in revenue, but serious games have struggled to find a market breakthrough. Considerable scholarly work has been published on principles for both serious game design and casual game design, but less research has been done on how to integrate these two approaches in order to realize the advantageous qualities of casual games in serious game projects. “Thinking casual” holds potential for making serious game projects both more feasible and more impactful. This paper introduces the term “activist-casual” to characterize a design framework based on the goals of conscientious design and confluences between serious and casual game design principles. The proposed activist-casual framework comprises ten hybrid principles, as well as five conceptual guardrails against the harmful tendencies of the commercial casual game industry. This approach could help activist designers overcome the challenge of limited development resources and create meaningfully impactful games.
Published Version
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