Casual gaming.
It’s an industry populated by games that wouldn’t even register to the average Halo fan, and yet these games are the ones that have been embraced by the mainstream. As hard as Spike TV, Microsoft and Kevin Pereira try to make you believe that FPS games and the latest iteration of Madden have really taken hold with the general public, they certainly don’t have the same kind of recognition that a simple game like Minesweeper or Solitaire does.
The Zeebys, a new awards event created as a joint venture by Gamezebo (who?) and the Casual Games Association (again, who?), aims to recognize and promote these games that millions of people enjoy simply because of their ease of accessibility and the comparatively low entry requirements.
Strangely, the website is sponsored by Lifetime, who you may know better for movies of the week that inevitably star Judith Light as a rape victim, the mother of a rape victim, or as a cyborg trained to hunt down and rape rapists and, subsequently, their mothers. How they became associated with what is by default the antithesis of the execrable Spike TV “We Hired Sam Jackson Because We Disdain The Intelligence Of The 18-34 Year Old White Male Gamer” Videogame Awards, is anybody’s guess, but it gives me a newfound respect for Lifetime, and by association, Vagisil.