Vincent Carrella

There are these magic moments in life when a work of art seems as if it's sent to you by the gods. It hits you in just the right way at just the right time, and usually when you need it the most - Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye - and it's cathartic, it's life-altering. After you see them or hear them or read them, you look at things differently. You change. It happens most often to me with music or books, but in games it's rare. Yet it did happen. Twice.

Imagine you're a Paleolithic man (or woman). You're a hunter of course, and sometimes a food gatherer. You spend all your waking hours in the bush and your dominant focus, your primary activity is scanning the world around you for things you can eat. But nature is a master of camouflage. Most of what you eat does not want to be eaten and has evolved to blend into the background, but you too, have evolved to compensate. You've developed a fairly sophisticated eye that (coupled with the most powerful brain in the animal kingdom) can create order out of chaos. What does this have to do with games? Everything.

Call it what you want - casual gaming, downloadable gaming, blow off a little steam in the middle of your work day gaming. Whatever it is, however you want to describe it, this industry has a problem. We don't know what women want.

When I traveled to St. Petersburg to give a lecture at the Game Developer's Conference last week I thought I might be able to leave a little wisdom behind. There has been a string of finely crafted clones coming out of Russia of late, but I wanted to know if an original, hit, casual game could come out of this fractured union. So I went to Russia thinking I'd help enlighten them, and to perhaps discover the next gameLab. Instead, I discovered something remarkable about myself.

Light. Colors. High contrast patterns and soothing musical tones. Movement. Texture. Repetitive motion and intermittent surprise. Sound familiar? It sounds like I'm describing the formula for the basic criteria for a casual game, but I'm actually describing an early childhood development toy hanging above an infant's bed. And as I was looking at this thing, watching it play music and spin, it occurred to me that casual games function to stimulate a gamers' brain much like a Fisher-Price mobile works on the mind of a small child.

Twenty-two minutes, eleven seconds. That's how long I waited. And I've got broadband, and a brand new wicked-fast Dell lap-top. Twenty-two minutes and change. That's roughly how long it takes a photon to reach Earth from the Sun. That's a full episode of Entourage, for God's sake. Twenty-two minutes. That's how long it took me to download the whopping 754Mb Nancy Drew: Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon from Big Fish this morning, and that's not counting the three minutes it took to register and the four minutes to complete the install. Why did I choose this game above all others? Why didn't size matter to me? Read on.