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INTRODUCTION
The following are some general strategies for casual game design. We will touch
on these issues again as we look at specific games.
Know Your Audience
As with any product you want to sell, you must know your audience. A fantasy
game about elves and orcs presents a harder sell to middle-aged women than a
game about cooking. We don’t want to stereotype, but you do need to develop a
sense of your audience’s interests, because a lot of successful casual games build
off of an established interest.
Piggyback on Neuroses
Sometimes nothing makes a better game mechanic than an established obsessive-
compulsive behavior. Often these behaviors, like not stepping on cracks, organizing
record collections or cleaning up kitchens, ...