Casual gamers into core gamers

There's a theory that the 'new gamers' that Nintendo are bringing to the gaming market, those consumers that had never gamed before Dr Kawashima or Wii Sports, can be weaned onto 'proper' games. That if they knew about Zelda or Advance Wars they would cast aside their Sudoku and Rabbids. David Jenkins, editor of Gamecentral on Teletext, said as much on an edition of the much-missed Games Night on the slightly-missed xleague.tv satellite channel.

I've only got anecdotal evidence to the contrary but this is my experience. My mother-in-law received a DS for Christmas last year from her dog (don't ask). She's in her sixties and, to my knowledge, had never gamed prior to having a go on my daughter's DS a few months before her dog's purchase. Along with her DS she also received two games (from the dog, her budgie or her husband), Dr Kawashima's Brain Training and Sight Training and has avidly played them both since Christmas.

Over the summer, I decided to put the theory that these types of games can lead less experienced gamers towards 'proper' games. I own - and love - Professor Layton and the Curious Village and I thought that this would be a good choice of 'proper' game to lend to my mother-in-law, as it has the trappings of a real game but is essentially a series of unconnected logic problems. I knew that my mother-in-law liked sudoku puzzles and similar, so Layton seemed a good fit for her potential gaming habits (and a cracking game to boot).

The next time I saw her, she cursed me (not literally - she's not a witch or anything) for giving her Layton, as she could not get on with it at all. The 'gamey-ness' of Layton's story and structure meant that she could not enjoy, or even get to, the kernel of the game, the puzzles. If you didn't have to traipse around a village chatting to weirdoes to get your puzzles but instead the game just lined up ten puzzles a day and was called Dr Layton's Puzzle Training I truly think she would have lapped it up.

I'm not going to try to extrapolate this experience across the whole of gaming but I think that the sales figures for traditional games compared to the new gaming experiences typified by Brain Training tell their own tale. Whether Nintendo's market strategy this generation will backfire next generation when those non-gamers they targeted this time around do not see the need to upgrade to improve their gaming experiences (casual games hardly tax the hardware) only time will tell.

And my mother-in-law? She's just bought a Wii....