10 Reasons You Need To Stop Being Snobby About Mobile Games

3. Leave “Casual” Out Of The Conversation

“Casual” is now too vague a term to be useful. It can be argued that casual, as an insult, started with the rise of Facebook and mobile gaming combined, but it seems to have lost all meaning these days.

Some delightful souls like to use it to call games played predominantly by women less than worthy examples of gaming - what I like to term “If it ain’t got guns, I dunt want none, hun” - where others use it against people who don’t play games often enough, measured by a midichlorian count determining who can and can’t be a “gamer”. And further still, some like to drag everything NOT console or pc based into Camp Casual.

In mobile gaming, the fact that most folks like to while away any commute time with something from the app store should not automatically equal a casual tag. Neither should a games marketing, or inclusion of monetisation. As even triple A studio games are using microtransactions now, any perceived line is increasingly blurred.

Most of the gaming police who only want to call certain arrangements of pixels “real” need to loosen their grip on the reins and appreciate the range of mobile games that offer very real entertainment and low barriers of entry to gaming - such that everyone with a smartphone can get a look in without needing to pass some imagined hardcore gaming exam.

And leave the mom or grandma slurs out, plenty of dads and grandads love a sudoku/Tetris/cooking chef game too.