The Live Mesh service that Microsoft unveiled Tuesday night is a peek of what Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has been working on all these months.

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The blahs and bleechs of pregnancy had Amie Fisher firmly in their grip. Nausea. Achiness. Irritability. What she needed was relief. What she wanted was a break.

She found both.

The 31-year-old freelance Web designer from Burien said it was Alchemy that gave her some of the respite she was looking for. Not to mention Text Twist and Bejeweled.

		Gilbert W. Arias / P-I
	While pregnant with daughter Luna Smith-Fisher, Amie Fisher played a lot of casual online games to take her mind off of the nausea and achiness.

These aren't the latest medical miracles or some exotic vitamin cure. They're very simple, very entertaining and very popular computer games.

"I was so tired and felt so brain-dead, they were a really easy way to distract myself," Fisher explained. "It was a nice way to check out for bit and not think about the fact I was feeling nauseous."

When most people think of computer and video games, they think of complex wonders of graphical and technological advancement -- games in which a young man hovering between the age of acne onset and college graduation sacrifices half his life to the glossy-eyed pursuit of gunning down virtual enemies in a button-mashing frenzy of gore.

But the games Fisher played while her belly was big with Baby and her brain a blur of hormones are something quite different. They're known as "casual games" with an emphasis on the casual. No blood. No guts. No problem.

Brainteasers and stress relievers, these games are instant distractions that take mere minutes to play and can be played on even the most basic home computer or even a cell phone. Their names offer a good indication of just how family friendly most of them are: Poppit! Word Whomp. Chuzzle. Zuma. Think: cute, friendly, approachable.

In the game Text Twist, for example, the computer gives the player a set of letters. The player must make as many words out of the letters as possible while trying to beat the clock. Bejeweled is a puzzle game in which the player is given a grid full of colored gems and must align like-colored stones in sets of three or more to score points.

"Casual games might be difficult to master, but they're easy to learn," said Chris Early, studio manager for Microsoft Casual Games. The company's site -- www.games.msn.com -- offers 300 card, puzzle, word and trivia games to the more than 13 million unique players who visit each month. "They provide something that pays off pretty quick. Your brain just says, 'I'm having fun.' "

Depending on whose statistics you believe, there are somewhere between 100 million and 400 million people now playing casual games around the globe. With more than half of those players of the female sex and two-thirds of them over 35, it's no wonder these humble bundles of bite-size entertainment are starting to draw unprecedented attention.

And Seattle has become a sort of ground zero for the business. It is home not only to some of the top development companies -- GameHouse, PopCap, Big Fish and Sandlot among them -- it's also a hub for some of the biggest casual game distributors and publishers out there, such as RealNetworks, Microsoft, Nintendo and Oberon Media.

Starting today, Seattle will play host to Casuality, a three-day casual gaming conference expected to draw some of the biggest players in the business.

"Seattle is probably the No.1 city for casual games," said Michael Schutzler, senior vice president responsible for overseeing RealNetwork's casual games business. "There's more talent here than anywhere else."