The Casual Gaming Question

Is Habbo Hotel a casual game? Haro isn't entirely sure that's the case. "If you want to do well you have to invest a heck of a lot of time, and in that way you can't say it's casual." He also rejects the Web 2.0 and Game 3.0 labels -- if for no other reason than Habbo Hotel has been around since 2000. "My personal favorite is 'gameless game'," he remarked, and "I'm very proud that we have this core gameplay without going out and killing monsters."

At this point Haro began to show off some of the rooms players had created in the world. Though there's no core gameplay element, Haro has discovered that players will devise their own fun. For example, a snow-filled room: "You can see the elevation of the room.. there's no gameplay but people were actually running around and pretending they were snowboarding." There was also a puzzle room made out of stacked chairs -- it's tough to navigate to the top without errors. There are show-off rooms full of expensive items, mazes, and even kissing booths (despite the fact that the Habbo characters can't actually kiss.) According to Haro, these are "Pretty popular as well. But there's a fine line what you can do before you get banned."

Habbo Hotel also has MySpace-like profile pages. He showed a popular profile of a Finnish user. "The guestbook has more than 30,000 comments in it -- and this is just a regular user. She's just doing well in the world and being polite." There are also pages for groups of gamers who like the "little thing" characters which can follow your player, habbohotel coins which come in two varieties -- single-color and multicolor. "There's actually this huge war between the single-colored groups and the multicolored groups."