Are you looking for a casual experience?  Apparently 24% of the US and UK population is.  No, I’m not talking about sexting, Grindr, or Craigslist hookups- I’m referring to casual social gaming. 

Popcap Games, the world leader in casual game production, recently released the results of a survey revealing that an estimated 100 million Yanks and Brits play casual games on social networking sites regularly.  

The survey also revealed that the average social casual gamer is 43 years old and female.  I’d put even money on the fact that this user also has 3 or more cats and loves Twilight.

All joking aside, this is serious business.  Popcap estimates that casual social games will bring in an estimated 1 Billion USD in 2010.  Not too shabby for products that are essentially free to play.  

Casual social games have proven to be such a growth area that MySpace is now counting on them to save the aging social site from obscurity.  When all else fails, copy Facebook.

Compared to traditional game development where one title may take 2-4 years and millions of dollars to develop, casual social games are fast and cheap to produce. 

Facebook sensation Farmville was developed in 5 weeks, and eschewed the traditional development process in favor of an agile system that brought developers and designers together on equal footing.   The results speak for themselves.

It’s not only casual game developers and interactive design houses that are pushing the medium forward.  Some of Gaming’s biggest names are hopping on the bandwagon. 

The father of the PC Role Playing Game and Massively Multiplayer Online genres, Richard Garriott (aka Lord British) has honed in on social games as the “next big thing” and is currently partnering with Facebook to launch his next innovation- a high-end social gaming platform called Portalarium. 

But you don’t have to be an official “game god” with a fancy royal title to get in on the Facebook fun as a developer.  Austrian developer Platogo has recently released a Wrapper that will make any game or app Facebook-friendly with no muss or fuss.  Wunderbar!