Paper Puzzle Games: The Original "Casual Games"

This paper argues that paper puzzle games, such as crosswords, sudoku, kakuro, KenKen, and word searches, represent the original casual games and have been overlooked by game studies scholarship. The authors contend that existing research on casual games conflates casual video games with casual games in general, and that the sustained absence of paper puzzles from the literature is a significant gap. Their stated goal is to offer what they describe as the first game studies exploration of paper puzzle games, testing how well current understandings of casual games account for this genre and whether paper puzzles complicate those understandings.

The analysis organizes its inquiry around six themes commonly attributed to casual games in existing literature: they are fun and broadly appealing in content, quick to access, easy to learn, require little expertise, offer fast rewards, and are designed with temporal flexibility. Each theme is examined for how well it describes paper puzzles and their players. The authors also consider the material, economic, and cultural constraints specific to paper puzzles, which they argue are distinctive enough to warrant separate study while remaining clearly comparable to casual video games.

The paper concludes that paper puzzle games are casual games in the fullest sense, and that their inclusion challenges several assumptions about casual games as a whole. It positions paper puzzles as an important historical antecedent to contemporary casual digital games and proposes them as a site for new research directions within game studies. The work is an exploratory extended abstract presented at DiGRA 2018, and it draws on a limited body of casual game scholarship, including work by Juul, Kultima, Consalvo, and others, without presenting original empirical data such as surveys or sample-based findings.