Political intrigues in the White House! Are you curious enough to participate in them? Then start playing the new online game Wikileaks: The Game and find yourself just in the President Obama's study! You'll see how Julian Assange is trying to get very valuable information from under Obama's very nose! Use your mouse to help him plug his USB flash in the President's computer to download the secret data. Wait Obama to fall asleep and bar from being noticed! Play Wikileaks: The Game online and be involved into Assange's journalistic scandals!

2007 was a banner year for casual games. Traditional video game companies finally woke up to the phenomenon that is casual games and announced they're joining the bandwagon. More casual games were released on more platforms than ever before. And, according to the Casual Games Association's (CGA) 2007 Report, casual games is now a $2.25 billion a year business!

But, don't you go trading in your Nissan Altima for a Mercedes CLK just yet, my casual game industry friends. 2007 was indeed a year of great promise, but for the most part, of it was a year of promise unfulfilled. And we only have ourselves to blame.

SAN FRANCISCO--In his keynote session for the Casual Games Summit 2008, PlayFirst CEO John Welch talked about "The Promise of Casual Games"--the "promise" being that the once scoffed-at genre will soon eclipse hard-core gaming as nongamers flock to it.

"Casual games are really, really big. You can tell just by the size of the room we're in this year," Welch told a packed room at the summit, taking place here as part of this year's Game Developers Conference. "The point here is we have the opportunity to elevate video games to become a first-tier form of entertainment, like TV. We will have succeeded when 'casual games' goes away as a category, and 'hard-core games' is the niche."

One of the big problems is that it's hard to define what a casual game actually is, Welch told the audience. "For a long time, what dominated our industry was 'Try before you buy' games. What was a casual game? It was a game with a Web version, and to download the full version you paid $20," he reminisced. These days, casual games can only be loosely defined as those titles that are friendly to new or occasional users, and are intuitive and accessible.