A Most Casual Addiction.(The Technologist)(casual video game players)

Byline: Jennifer Ordonez

Free game sites have become a furtive pastime among office workers, insomniac moms and chronic procrastinators.

Ask Patricia O'Brien, 36, about her college years and she readily admits to having had an addiction. Her habit? Tetris, the puzzle-like computer game that resided on countless hard drives during the 1990s. "I could play for seven or eight hours straight," says O'Brien, now an advertising sales manager in Chicago. "It was addictive [and] very satisfying while I was playing. But by the end, I felt like I had a hangover." Lately, she's had a relapse: Diner Dash, a "casual videogame" in which players must serve grumpy diner patrons.

O'Brien, the mother of 6-year-old twins, may not fit most people's stereotype of a serious gamer, but she's not the only one hooked on casual videogames. In recent years downloads on sites like Yahoo! Games and pogo.com have become a furtive pastime among bored office workers, insomniac moms and chronic procrastinators. Like the Froggers and Ms. Pac-Mans of yesteryear, games like Bejeweled and Mystery Case Files take little skill to learn but are challenging enough to keep players fixated on their screens. Such games are in contrast to "hard-core" titles that have darker storylines, are more complicated to play and are favored by Xbox and PS3 devotees.

The hard-core crowd still dominates the videogame industry, which generates $16 billion in the United States alone. In contrast, 145 million casual gamers will spend $690 million this year. Casual gamers average 5.1 hours of gameplay each week, up 28 percent from the year before, says the research firm Interpret.

Casual-gaming developers and Web sites, however, have yet to fully capitalize on their increasingly dedicated fan base. The industry is struggling to "find better ways to monetize its audience," writes James Kuai, a research analyst at Parks Associates. Of particular interest: the armies of women 25 to 45 who play the majority of the games. According to the Casual Games Association, ...