Since I’ve been putting my wife’s short opinions at the end of my reviews, I feel I should explain what sort of gamer she is.

She identifies as a non-gamer. This is not really true, she plays many games. But she doesn’t have all the skill and love that I do for the medium. I share with her a dislike of “hardcore”, shooty-type games, but so do many in this modern age, especially those of us who remember a friendlier time. She is a casual gamer.

By this I mean she is somewhat of a gamer, casually, but she does play many casual games, mostly on her iPhone or iPad. Tetris clones, puzzle games, a card battle game, Scribblenauts, a jigsaw game, Aqueduct and Blockwick (very pretty), Cut the Rope, Draw Something, Wordfeud (like Words With Friends but better). She prefers games that are well constructed and look nice, she is very much a design geek.

Her first proper game on the Wii (after Sports and Play, like everyone) was Okami. Fantastic game, but she found it too hard. Okamiden, on the other hand, was just right. She recently played the first third of Pikmin 1, but it started getting too stressful so I took over. Right now, as I type, she’s playing Picross DS. We’re both quite addicted to that one. She played some of A Boy and His Blob on Wii. We bought Just Dance 2 for her, and had some fun with it. We play many of the console Lego games together and with her sister, those are fine. And she loves Pokemon. We’re really looking forward to Black & White 2, we’re going to play them together. Professor Layton is another series she’s completed most of, she loved that, and London Life too.

So not all of those are strictly casual games, but there’s a skill barrier—that I realise exists for many people—that restricts the games she can enjoy. That’s not a barrier for watching games though, and she often likes watching or half-watching me play many games such as Paper Mario or Pikmin. And I often talk about games and gaming with her. So while she is not too serious a game-player, I would say that she is very much a gamer. She has a lot of knowledge from me, and we watch Good Game (a game review show on our public TV channel ABC), and Yahtzee’s Zero Punctuation reviews. She has connections to gaming culture. And she likes to encourage me in my hobby too. In fact, it was her idea for me to start this blog, probably so I didn’t yammer on about games to her too much.

So this blog is an outlet for me to be serious about games, but I find it helpful to include the perspective of someone who is a little more of an outsider. It’s also amusing to defuse my intense nerdery with a short simple statement.

Incidentally, I asked her for comment. She said: “Flower is the best game ever!” I forgot to mention that, but I’ll save it for another post. We played the demo several times the other day. It’s cool!