The NYTimes (free reg. req.) runs today an article on Maya, the virtual personal trainer (the game was reviewed by Ian here at Watercooler in 2004). It includes interesting observations on how people relate to her. Ricardo Torres, from Gamespot, is right on the spot (no pun intended) when he says that even if the game looks "cheesy", it is effective. That "cheesy" adjective is the natural thing to say from somebody who plays mainstream games (read games for gamers not for human beings). I would probably have said the exact same thing: the first aspect that we notice is the look of the game and a personal trainer game is no HL2. We all -I keep including
myself- have this tendency to judge everything by the standard set by the average PS2 AAA game. Great graphics and great animations are important but normal human beings (non-gamers) are too busy having a normal life to care about things we do. These are the people who don't carry fancy cellphones (and not just because they cannot afford them) and who have no idea what service pack is installed on their machines. According to the article, Yourself!Fitness only sold 100,000 copies and, since we keep judging our world by AAA standards, we automatically dismiss that game as a tiny sub-niche. Hey, reality check! We are talking 100,000 people here! That's more folks that you or me will ever meet in our lifetime.

The NYTimes also runs an article on casual games. Again, there is not much news here, it basically reviews the usual suspects. Only a couple of years ago it would have been impossible to find these two articles on any major newspaper. Again, another example of pariah genre, casual games. Sure, they make some money and that is newsworthy. But isn't it funny how we dismiss as "casual games" what normal people play? Isn't it funny that our industry still creates by default single-player games when play has been multiplayer since the dawn of humanity? Isn't it funny that we frown upon Flash games, when a single one of those games can be played by millions of people? (read MORE people than played Halo 2). Why is it that we only care about games that make millions? Why is it that we only care about games that look realistic? Why is it that we don't stop and talk to everyday folks and ask them what they like to do for fun? By "we", I mean developers, critics, academics, gamers, you and me. It took ages for the film industry to embark in very brainy discussions about film as art and what should be filmed and viewed, only to later realize that humans were watching soap operas rather than the Nouvelle Vague. And guess what? When the inner circle realized that, soap operas became an acceptable genre (creating products ranging from quality TV such as Desperate Housewives to art films like Almodovar's). "Crappy" Hong Kong movies suddenly became the major inspiration for our current action films, from Tarantino to the Matrix. So, shouldn't we be paying more attention to non-gamers?