Between aliens, hackers and birds: Non-casual mobile games and casual game design
Brendan Keogh · 2015
issue of video game magazine Edge did not display a high-defi nition render of an upcoming blockbuster game on its cover.It simply showed the increasingly ubiquitous logo of technology company Apple, creators of the iPhone.'Apple has changed the video game industry irrevocably' the corresponding feature starts.'And the simple truth is that it has changed it without even really trying.It did it with a handheld device that has no buttons, no sticks and no ports for physical media, and it did it with a virtual storefront that was created, in the main, to revolutionize the way people bought music, not videogames' ( Edge 2012, 77).As devices that traditionally brought together digital screens and buttons, that video games would appear on mobile phones in one fashion or another was inevitable.But it was not until the rise in popularity of the iPhone series and the parallel rise of casual games that mobile games began to be treated as 'legitimate' games -games worth paying attention to.This, as the Edge feature reports, was despite Apple's ambivalence towards gaming and the device's utter lack of buttons.Smartphones such as Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy series have fostered homes to a broader and more eclectic ecology of video games than