I have 635 pictures on my Flickr feed and the closest I have to a picture of my mom is this. See the leg in the background? That’s my mom, the 57 year old gamer.The guy in the picture is her brother, the 54 year old NON-gamer. We try to play Wii with him and he still has to look to see which button is “A.”

My mom, on the other hand, has been playing games since Atari. I remember her playing Space Invaders with us for hours. Later, she got into Nintendo and the Mario games. She’d use that time playing Mario to talk to my brother and I about what was going on in our lives. She tells us the only reason she started playing games to begin with was to talk to us, but the truth is, she likes to play.

For years and years, the game companies have catered to the mostly male, mostly young players they had. Nintendo, with the Wii, started looking at a whole new crowd of gamers, the casual gamers. While I wouldn’t exactly classify my mom as a casual gamer, since she owns more game equipment than I do, I do know that she’s pretty happy with the fact that more than just the usual violent, shooter-type games are coming out. She has never liked those games much, and now she feels like she has a lot more games to play than before.

The ones that are really capturing her attention, however, are the ones that are much more open and interactive, like Fable 2. While these sorts of games do have some element of violence to them, they aren’t horribly bloody like others. Mom calls Fable 2 “Zelda, all grown up.” I have to agree with her. These sorts of games are incredibly fun for people who aren’t into the regular old shoot ‘em up games that are so very common and are so very sucky, in my opinion.

Tell me, Shaktronic-ers, what games are the more casual gamers like my mom playing?