While I do not think that casual games were inevitable, we are also experiencing something of a perfect storm of combining factors that is aiding the rise of casual online games. One factor is the simple issue of changing demographics: the first generation of people who played video games as children are now well into their forties, have less time on their hands than they used to, but are looking for video game experiences that work for them today. Game developer Jacques Exertier predicts a second boom in game development for senior citizens in a few years' time. The less obvious second factor is the widespread presence of personal computers in the industrialized world. A woman in her seventies told me how she came to play downloadable casual games: ''In 2000 I acquired a computer because one of my sons moved to Italy with his wife and child.

I wanted to email them. Some friends showed me a computer-based Mahjong game, which I found amusing since we had played it on a beautiful set in my childhood home. Shortly after, I found some games in a CDROM magazine from the library where I worked. This included Mahjong, Yahtzee and various puzzles. That was how it began. The next game was QBeez, which I got completely hooked on, and so on.'' This player probably would not be interested in buying a console for playing games, but she had a computer, and through that computer she had access to video games she enjoyed. The third and final factor is the pure economics of video game development. During the last thirty years, game development budgets have been doubling for every new console generation, and roughly doubling the amount of games needed to be sold in order to make back the money spent to develop a video game. The current top retail video games have typical budgets of around $15 million and need to sell one million copies to make that money back. If these trends were to continue, a video game released in the year 2064 would have to sell a billion copies in order to be profitable. This is an unlikely scenario, so what will happen instead?

The basic facts are: the development cost of a game does not translate directly into value for the player, and growing video game budgets appear to be reaching a point of diminishing returns. The economics of video game development are already quite uneconomical, so to speak, as players often do not finish the games they've purchased. Half-Life 2: Episode One6 is a short game by modern standards, taking only around five hours to complete. Nevertheless, only 40 to 50 percent of players actually complete the game.

Because of their smaller scope, casual games are generally cheaper to develop than the larger hardcore games that have driven the video game industry for so long. The rise of casual games shifts the perspective from technical graphical fidelity to more mundane questions such as: how does a game fit into the life of a player, and how much meaning can the game acquire from the context in which it is played? Casual games are an alternative answer to the old question of how to make games that players feel are worth their time and money.