Bing Gordon, Chief Creative Officer and co-founder of Electronic Arts opened the 2006 Casuality game conference as keynote speaker. The three day game conference opened June 27, in Seattle, and focuses on the growing role that casual gaming is playing in more and more people’s lives. Gamasutra provided coverage of the keynote.

Gordon opened by underscoring the vast numbers of people playing casual games; members of EA’s Club Pogo gaming service logged over 225 million hours of game time in 2004. While casual gaming appears to be a growing category, playtime was still dwarfed by Blizzard’s MMORPG, World of Warcraft. The market also doesn’t monetize as well as larger media like TV, the former averages “6.6 hours watched a day at 21 cents an hour” while casual games pull “24 minutes played a day at 5 cents an hour.”

Gordon also emphasized the roles that scoring systems play in establishing the community, and encouraging further game play. Club Pogo’s two status symbols are game “badges” and points. The game badges are highly sought after within the Pogo community, and appear to be a pre-cursor to the “achievements” offered over Microsoft’s Xbox Live. Similarly, point counts “provide a sense of place and rank in a community.” Pogo users can trade their points for real-world items, but many don’t, preferring to keep their status levels.

On casual game development, in Gordon’s eyes, game playability and accessibility rules over the games “beauty.” The advantages of the casual game development cycle and the relative simplicity of the play mechanics makes it easier to experiment with game play balance through rapid prototyping. This allows developers to quickly iterate through play styles.

Gordon clearly seeks to emphasize the importance of community in the casual game sphere; when a game is easy to pick up and play, there are low barriers to entry for new offerings in the category. If a publisher can lock in users through community, this will help succeed in the casual gaming sphere.

With casual gaming garnering more attention, online, in places like the Xbox Live Arcade, and with Nintendo’s Touch Generations offerings, the competition for gamers will only become more intense.