On Peggle's peculiar appeal

Offworld favorite columnist Clive Thompson's got a great new piece looking into the peculiar appeal of PopCap's popular pachinko/pinball/plinko mashup Peggle, well timed with the game's ongoing multiplatform blowout (having just been released on the DS and arriving tomorrow on Xbox Live Arcade).

Thompson chats with PopCap VP Greg Canessa, who surmises that the more interesting underlying discrepancy between the game's hardcore and casual audiences is purely perceptual:

For a casual gamer, Peggle seems too heavily based on luck. You aim the ball, but once you've dropped it and it hits the first peg, all bets are off: It bounces and careens through the forest of pegs in crazy, zigzagging patterns. For casual players, there doesn't seem to be a clear enough correlation between how they aim and the results.

But hard-core gamers see the game quite differently. When they look at the Peggle board, they see the Euclidean geometry that governs how the ball falls and pings around.

"They'll be sitting there thinking, 'Oh, if I bounce the ball off that peg it'll hit this other peg and jump over here, where it'll take out two other colored pegs," Canessa said.

I'd been doing some of my own idle thinking on the game's appeal recently and came to the [probably dullard's] conclusion that its smartest design decision was to never punish the player and make nearly every interaction a reward -- straight down to the fact that a gutterball shot that misses every single peg and flies straight off the screen earns you a medal (great job!).

Click through to Thompson's full column, though, for more on the hardcore/casual divide.

Getting Lucky: Hard-Core Gamers Penetrate Peggle's Physics [Wired]

Previously:
PopCap's Peggle overload spawns art contest - Offworld
PopCap's Peggle Extreme now free on Steam - Offworld
Frond of the dead: the first look at PopCap's Plants vs. Zombies ...
28 Weeds Later: Plants vs. Zombies will indeed feature plants ...