Casual gaming is a term that most of us who are passionate about the video game medium are conditioned to hear as a pejorative. Casual games are superficial, we think reflexively. In trying to please everyone, they're designed for the lowest common denominator.
They're shiny and bland, lacking grit and friction. Casual gaming can encompass real beauty, though. It can include PopCap's blissful dopamine machines like Bejeweled, or Regency Solitaire’s delightfully frivolous mashup of solitaire and Jane Austen.
It can also come in the form of 2006's Wii Sports, the fourth-best-selling game of all time, the game that sold 100 million consoles, the game that changed the gaming landscape. Nintendo's casual gaming era during the Wii and DS days seems like a blip now. Boxed out of its birthright by PlayStation and Xbox and a hardware arms race it didn't believe in, Nintendo, through a mix of desperation and inspiration, found undiscovered country: new players, new ways to interact with games, and a new aesthetic of calm minimalism and self-improvement.
But those new players proved tough to cultivate in the long term, and when Switch hit big, Nintendo eagerly ran home to the fans. People like my in-laws, who like video games, who are always game for a bout of Tekken with their grandkids, who play Royal Match on their phones, and whose Wii is still under the TV but hasn't been turned on in years. Casual is a constituency, then, one that's been all but abandoned to the absentee landlords of the smartphone app stores.
Casual is also what it says it is: a vibe, a skillfully curated atmosphere. It's relaxed, it's upbeat, it's easy and chill. If casual were a place, it would be Wuhu Island.
Wuhu is the setting of Wii Sports Resort, the 2009 sequel to Wii Sports, and now it's back in Nintendo's latest motion-control sports compilation, Nintendo Switch Sports Resort for the Switch 2. Wuhu is a paradise of healthy leisure and sporting spirit, where quirky avatars in colorful outfits compete under crystalline blue skies on golf links of emerald green. The architecture is cleanly modern but also voluptuously curved, and the soundtrack is cheerful muzak, crying seagulls, and constant applause.
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