Todd Kerpelman is Creative Director for EA’s Pogo division, as well as one of Pogo’s most talented game designers. I’ve spent way too many hours playing his brainchild, Phlinx. Anyway, on to the interview:

In your experience, what are the most important elements of a fun *and* popular casual game?

Well, obviously, I think one the most important aspects to having a popular game _is_ that it’s fun. Honestly, if you’ve got a game that’s fun enough, a lot of the conventional wisdom around what players want and what kinds of games they like tend to go out the window.

But with that being said, I think accessibility is certainly one of the keys towards making a casual game successful. This is especially true in the downloadable space, where you only have an hour to get people to like your game, and there’s dozens of other games just waiting to be downloaded if the user gets frustrated with yours. In general, you want people to be able to pick up and play your game and feel like they’re doing something correct within the first minute. This doesn’t mean that games have to be simplistic, though. There’s a lot of really complex games out there, but the successful ones do a good job of easing the player into it.

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