Let's All Kongregate: The Business and Aesthetics of Casual Gaming

Ben Aslinger

Wed., June 10, 3:30–4:30, Inn Wisconsin (2nd floor, East/Southeast)

On the first day of gaming class, students receive the recommendation to check out games such as Rag Doll Cannon, Dreams, I Wish I Were the Moon, or Shopping Cart Hero on Kongregate as a way to play more games and to practice honing a critical vocabulary with which they can describe, criticize, and analyze games. This has proven especially useful in the classroom since many college students, spending what little dollars they have on ramen noodles, often don’t have access to the newest console hits. In the current economic downturn, much has been written about the growth of casual gaming, but surprisingly little has been written in the business press about how casual gaming might be monetized, how advertising and marketing dollars on casual gaming portals might be distributed, and what the rise of casual games means for publishers, developers, and players. Even as commentators work to deconstruct and redefine the category of the gamer, arguing that the category’s associations with pale, white, male, and socially awkward players always erased a significant corpus of actual players and certainly doesn’t describe the range of current players, casual gaming still bears the specter of the unwashed masses crashing the gaming party – a characterization that makes it more difficult to pry apart and explore the aesthetic differences between casual games and the way that casual gaming provides “missing” gamers, senior gamers, and a new generation of gamers the opportunity to reflect on what constitutes good game design, fun play experiences, and what casual games can do. Casual games have been treated as a monolith, as if the aesthetic and development differences between these games didn’t matter. Television scholars have reclaimed devalued programs such as soap operas as worthy of critical and aesthetic analysis, and the same reclamation should happen in game studies; game studies needs to go further in addressing a variety of games and distribution mechanisms, not confining itself to the most commercially successful titles released by the major publishers for PC and console play.

In this paper, I examine Kongregate, a site that has been dubbed the “YouTube of games,” in order to address issues including: how generic categorizations work in Kongregate, how the experience of playing a variety of games in Kongregate works to solidify and/or challenge generic categorizations, what “hardcore” game players learn from engaging with these games, and what lessons game industry professionals might take from their play experiences on Kongregate. Drawing on trade and popular press accounts of Kongregate, my own play experiences, participant observation in Kongregate’s message boards, and gaming scholarship from both education and media studies scholars, I argue that Kongregate provides a critical venue that allows players to explore new modes of game play and encourages developers to explore new avenues of game design and distribution.