That said, I think the industry should be careful about the use of the phrase "casual gamer." The casual gamer that Nintendo is going after -- soccer moms, older gamers -- is not the same as the casual gamer that helped propel the PS2 to break 100 million units.An interesting point, especially about the 'casual gamer'. In many ways users of social networks are casual gamers. Whether we're looking at Habbo Hotel (another great GamaSutra article I need to read more thoroughly) or college students playing with Facebook Apps - hell, just creating and managing your online counterpart to your RL persona - it's all a game. It's a game that can have profound real-life consequences, but it's still essentially a mediated form of play. This kind of idea buttresses my argument (is it really challenged?) that the modes of creating social spaces in mod communities is actually very similar to the way non-gaming online communities are constructed by users.
In one way or another we're all casual gamers, as the Wii is helping us see.
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