Feature: What Defines a Casual Gamer?

So there I am. It’s 5 ‘O clock on a Wednesday morning. The sun is rising on a crisp, cool winters day. Chairs, cables, controllers are all strewn about after the previous nights activites. No, I haven’t woken up bright and early to seize the day. I’m still up, and in about the second hour of a conversation that has encompassed much of the morning.

It looked kinda like this.

This is the aftermath of a Gears of War 2 LAN that I had hosted with a few friends. Most of our LANs end around 3 in the morning with an hours long discussion about video games, it’s something that I look forward to almost more than the gaming itself. This LAN was no different.

This time around our discussion centered around casual games, casual gamers, why so called “hardcore” gamers are mad at Nintendo, and what exactly defines a casual game or a casual gamer.

So what makes a game “casual?” Is a casual game merely a puzzle game? Such as Peggle, Bejewled, Tetris even. Or perhaps it’s any game which attempts to shoehorn in casual elements, like Gears of War 2’s casual difficulty setting. Could all iPhone games be considered casual games? Are casual games defined by the shovelware that is released on the Wii seemingly every day? Is Wii Sports a casual game? Is everything that comes out on the Wii a casual game because of the accessibility of the controls?

Not a game at all!

These are all wonderful questions, but, honestly, to me, casual games are timewasters. They’re games that are made for people who view games as toys, not people who want to have an experience when playing a game. All puzzle games would seem to fall under this genre. As competetive as certain versions of Tetris may be in Japan, I just can’t see how they are anything other than timewasters to everybody else. This also includes most Wii games. They’re not an interactive entertainment experience. Wii sports is fun, sure, but can you really call it an experience? Wii Fit isn’t even a game. It’s some sort of excercise scam that everybody buys for reasons I’ve yet to comprehend. The millions of mini-game collections that almost all universally suck, they’re casual games.

Timewaster? Casual game.

So, if that’s what a casual game is, a timewaster, what is a “hardcore” game? I suppose hardcore games could simply be defined as games played by “hardcore gamers,” I’m tempted to go with that simply because “hardcore” games cover so many genres, but that’s a lazy definition. As I said above, casual games do not offer an experience. This is what “hardcore” games do. They give you an interactive experience that evokes emotions, and gives you memorable moments that you’ll remember for years down the road. Casual games cannot do that. Examples of hardcore games are easy to come by. Bioshock, Halo, Call of Duty, Final Fantasy, Diablo, Baldur’s Gate, KotOR, WoW, etc., so on and so forth.

However, I find a gray area when it comes to sports games. My brother, who I view as a casual gamer, could be described as a hardcore sports gamer. He plays and buys most sports games that come out. I’m sure he has memorable moments from these games. Making that hail mary pass to win the game at the last second; hitting that buzzer beater; and doing whatever you do in baseball that’s impressive (Bases loaded, down by 3, hitting a homerun to win the game? Ya, that sounds good). Yet, he is no more than a casual gamer in my eyes. Why is this? Probably because he has no idea what makes a game good, and does not appreciate the other genres and what makes them good, even if he doesn’t particularly enjoy them.

I actually also find this when I think of the Halo franchise. Since it became such a huge title there’s many people out there that know nothing of any other video games, they just want to shoot stuff. This would seem to be an example of a casual gamer who plays a hardcore game. I think this comes back to the whole “experience” thing. These type of people don’t want an “experience,” they want the rush of adrenaline they get when they kill somebody in the game, they are looking for a purely visceral feeling. Sure we all love the feeling of chainsawing somebody in Gears of War, but we understand why, technically, that game is good. Why the shooting is good, why it’s unbalanced, or why the maps suck.

The future of games? Perhaps...

So it is us: the few, the chosen, the proud, the hardcore gamers, that are going to help expand gaming as a genre. We’re the ones that understand why a game is good or bad, why it’s unoriginal, derivative, and uninspring. It is us who will hunt down any good game that we can and claw and scrape to get the money to buy it. We are the ones driving the industry, not the casual games and gamers.

Author: Ryan