Hardcore and Casual Gaming.

Spun off from the crash thread.

There seems to be difference in opinions in what these mean, and some feel they should or will mingle.

Personally I think they should stay away from each other as much as possible, and the focus on casual gaming by the bigger companies is unhealthy to the industry if you ask me.

To me, casual gaming is games you play to fill up 5 minutes or whatever of time. I play Solitaire on my ancient (2008) iPod at night, which is fine, and I admit that one pictionary like game for smart phones is a good idea (Until I hear they ruined it with ads). They're cute little time wasters, like many flash games.

Hardcore gaming is one where you invest time to improve on, with a narrative and escalation of gameplay or even narrative. This can include Zelda or Dark Souls.

I don't mind casual gaming as a whole ,but I feel like due to the success of smart phones and angry birds, companies are trying to find ways to cash in on them and it rubs me the wrong way at times.

edited 3rd Jun '12 9:12:30 PM by Thorn14

Haven't played Marvel: Avengers Alliance, have you? It doesn't really fit either of your categories.

edited 3rd Jun '12 9:13:07 PM by CorrTerek

My guess is almost anyone who calls themselves a hardcore gamer would refer to Zelda players as casuals.

Not really. Zelda is easy but its not a casual game.

Nope.

edited 3rd Jun '12 9:15:41 PM by Thorn14

I define hardcore gamers as people who specifically set aside a part of the day to play games, and casuals as people who just play to kill time and nothing else. There's a lot of room in between.

Thorn is using Hardcore/Casual but he's referring to types of games instead of types of gamers. Basically iOS games like Angry Birds, Bejeweled and such would be casual while a Dark Souls, Zelda, Mass Effect, The Witcher, etc. would be hardcore, if I understand this corrrectly.

I say this because people use these two words to mean a lot of different things, and it can confuse the thread.

edited 3rd Jun '12 10:59:41 PM by Anfauglith

So people like different things than you and this is bad and pushing the industry in the "wrong" direction. Got it.

Yes. And I was hoping to make this thread in the hopes we could discuss the different meanings.

Instead, as I should have expected, people will read it as me going "CASUAL GAMERS ARE SCUM"

For the love of god.

I didn't say people liking other things was bad. I simply think that the industry trying to cash in on the casual market in a giant game of "Me too me too!" is unhealthy for the industry as a whole.

edited 3rd Jun '12 11:30:50 PM by Thorn14

Let's not hurry to conclusions and keep this free of flame wars. Let's prove that we can handle these threads.

—

What do you call mingling these two groups?

edited 3rd Jun '12 11:40:54 PM by Anfauglith

Foolish, or not something I can understand maybe. I'd have to see examples of them merging to see how it could work and be the "future" of gaming (which I wouldn't enjoy that much, why can't we keep them separate?)

And I did have it in my OP.

edited 3rd Jun '12 11:33:16 PM by Thorn14

Ah nevermind that about the OP :/ Sorry. Anyways I have trouble imagining a game where these two groups are merged, which is what I was trying to ask with my (poorly worded) previous question.

edited 3rd Jun '12 11:41:24 PM by Anfauglith

Hmmm... its kind of hard for me to define what a casual and a hardcore game is. That's mostly because I look at things using spectrums, and if I had to define using that, then I would use fun being served on a flatter to fun having to be earned to describe the two ends.

edited 3rd Jun '12 11:53:26 PM by shadowryu

Anyways I have trouble imagining a game where these two groups are merged, which is what I was trying to ask with my (poorly worded) previous question.

Really? The latest Ninja Gaiden release immediately came to mind when you described that. It's definitely not tailored to veteran players and gives a newbie enough of a challenge "hey, I'm finally winning at Ninja Gaiden!"

He' not referring to difficulty level here, he's referring to the purpose of the game. A Hardcore game is one that pulls you in with an immersive story and requires hours of playtime to finish the story and fulfill the player's purpose. A Casual game is one that you can turn on between other tasks, play for a little while, and then go back to the rest of your day as if nothing ever happened.

If you're an anime fan, you can think of it this way: Hardcore games are like episodes of the show that move the story forward, give you character development, and maybe even make you think. A casual game would be a filler episode about a cooking contest of doom that doesn't have any connection to the rest of the story.

We already have examples of them ombining any time there's a minigame you can unlock and play at the menu screen of your game.

edited 4th Jun '12 5:34:55 AM by Journeyman

That description is more fitting towards the players or their attitudes rather than the game. I've played Mass Effect 3 in between writing parts of my stories and while waiting for something.

The problem with dividing games into "casual" and "hardcore" is that some people have different opinions of what that constitutes. For example, the Pokemon games are cute, aimed towards younger audiences, and can be picked up and dropped off at almost any time during play. On the other hand, some people invest a lot of effort into grinding their Pokemon, making the best team possible, and researching things like E Vs and move lists. Pokemon wouldn't fall into either "casual" or "hardcore"; it's how the individual player regards the game. And after all, there's plenty of people who take Pong and Tetris very seriously.

I don't think "casual" and "hardcore" are the best terms to describe different kinds of games. Most of the descriptions I've seen here on the forums describes "simple" and "complex" games more than "casual" and "hardcore". "Casual" and "hardcore" are better words to use for the attitudes of players towards the game.

You took the words right out of my mouth. Casual and Hardcore are words that describe attitudes. You can be a hardcore Tetris player, or a casual Starcraft player.

A better division for games might be Simple and Complex, though even this misses a lot of nuance. In essence, you could consider a simple game simple to learn and easy to master (Tic Tac Toe), where a complex game would be difficult to learn and even harder to master (Dwarf Fortress).

It's not really the game, well, there are some games that are certainly casual (Angry Birds and pretty much every smartphone game out there) and others that appeal to the hardcore market, but it's mostly about the people who play them:

Casual gamers are usually naive and judgmental.

Hardcore gamers are usually elitist and judgmental.

Pick your poison~

Remember the good old, pre-DDR days when Halo, Madden and Grand Theft Auto were the unholy casual gamer trinity? When Metroid Prime, Elder Scrolls, Half Life, Tom Clancy, and such were the games for "real gamers?" Yeah, me neither.

That line of thinking still exists.

It's why I think the differentiation between hardcore and casual is about more than what those terms actually mean. It's also bound up in considerations of "high" and "low culture", and concerns about the artistic merit and validity of the medium.

edited 5th Jun '12 5:11:51 AM by Nicknacks

Oh, I thought Wii party titles, Kinect's follow the leader and Modern Warefare were the new worst games ever and proof casuals will buy anything that "real gamers" don't like. Even then, I guess there is dissension. Casuals are everything wrong with Brawl, wait, Modern Warefare 2 broke some record? Damn call of duty casual...no lets attack motion plus because Sports resort is above Modern Warefare 2 on ___ chart.

I don't even care for all the titles I mentioned but the argument was old in 2002. Today Nintendo betrayed the "core" because of gimmicky motion controls even though history shows they're making the same kind of thing they always have, nobody remembers Odama apparently or the power glove for that matter. They just marketed better and took a break from pixel counting.