Joe Rheaume of Chronotron fame has been doing a fabulous job writing reviews on this site of casual games and the educational principles they are built on. As the primary sponsor of this non-profit web site I am ecstatic about all the excitement surrounding the casual game market. Web Courseworks’ casual game Gridlock Buster, developed for the University of Minnesota’s ITS Institute, has already seen 26,000 plays in just four weeks in distribution. Educators should take notice of the announcement today that year over year Casual Games have seen 20% growth. Although Wikipedia’s definition of casual game emphasizes simplicity (these are not “serious” games), more and more games are incorporating design principles of game play espoused by the MIT Games-to-Teach project. In Gridlock Buster Joe and game designer Andy Hicken incorporated the following educational game mechanics:

• Gradual, intuitive increases in challenge levelA “power up” in later levels that automates the act of changing signals, which players do manually in earlier levels; this power up simulates the real-world function of signal timing
• A “frustration meter” that visually represents the traffic engineering concepts of queue and delay
• Animation and sound effects (honks) calling players’ attention to cars that are frustrated because they have been delayed for a long time at lights
• A slightly ironic, “not-too-distant future” backstory and art

What Joe Rheaume has done quite effectively is to use the distributed game system to get Gridlock Buster on to over 130 sites globally. Note that the article indicated “MochiMedia, for example, reached a combined audience of 16.9 million in May, greater than all but two sites in the online gaming category.”