Poll: How do you feel about 'casual' gamers?

[Lionsfan]

My only problem with them is their mysterious ability to cause "hardcore" gamers to develop spontaneous cases of mental retardation and verbal diarrhea.

It's frightening and uncanny.

That's not just a gaming thing though. You could say that about everything that gets popular and has a new influx of fans


Personally, I don't really care, play whatever you want to play. At least you don't think Video Games are exclusively for lonely shut-ins and future murderers

 

[SidheKnight]

As long as there are enough games to cater to every demographic, I'm happy other people can enjoy gaming like me.

The existance of Wii Sports doesn't make my Assassins Creed experience any less gratifying.

 

[Erttheking]

Gaming is supposed to be about having fun. I'm not going to get worked up because someone just wants to play Call of Duty and not be a massive nerd like me and dedicate 60 hours into a game that's half about running around making friends and half grinding through annoying dungeons so you can go back to running around and making friends. (Talking about Persona 4 FYI. Seriously, who cares about the combat in that game? I mean there's nothing wrong with it, but it gets a little grindy and the characters are just so interesting. But hey, some people aren't into that crap and I'm not going to get my panties in a bunch over it.)

 

[corneth]

I think I could easily be considered a casual gamer, considering that I spend ~4 hours on video games a week. I don't play Farmville or Wii Sports, but I don't really understand the blind hatred of them either. I like playing video games, it's fun and relatively cheap if you play the amount that I do, I'm just not going to spend 300+ a year on getting AAA games as they come out.

 

[Twilight_guy]

Define 'casual gamer'. It's one of those terms that people use but nobody knows what it means.
In general, I'm happy to see non-"hardcore" gamers as it means that video games are becoming bigger and thus more legitimate and hopefully less feared. Less people will claim games make you evil when everyone played angry birds and you can point that out as an example that everyone knows. Course it wont help with people who think FPS games are too violent.

 

[hermes]

I don't care. Gaming is big enough; they don't bother me and I don't bother them.

I am more concerned with the amount of people trying to be elitist by using "casual gamers" as a pejorative term.

 

[jklinders]

Nothing wrong with casual games. I enjoy them myself when I have little time to put into a major game.

I also enjoy "hardcore games" Whatever the fuck that means when I have time for them.

Can't we just get along. Devs will put games where the money is so as long as you keep buying your game type of choice odds are good you keep seeing new titles there.

 

[Gabanuka]

The time spent arguing about games could be spent playing games.

Play what you want, I'll judge you silently and recommend better ones but in the grand scheme of things I really don't care.

 

[deathzero021]

i don't mind them at all. i can't say i'm "super happy" that gaming has become casual. i really don't see any benefits from it becoming casual. Sure there are more games coming out, with a larger budget, but again, i don't see this as being a positive thing. A lot of these large budget games have primitive gameplay and dumbed down difficulty or complexity for the casual market. it's effected the majority of games and therefor there aren't a lot of games i like anymore.

basically everything is being made for casual players or a large audience. it sacrifices the minority for the larger majority so that it can make more money. There are practically no large companies making games for smaller groups or genre's anymore.

but the indie scene has become huge over the years, mostly thanks to it becoming easier to get involved in game development and PC becoming an easy market for indie titles.

So overall, i don't mind the casual players, i just don't like what it's done to the quality of the majority of games out there. i don't hold a grudge though, it's mostly the money that's caused the problem with large companies. it's become TOO popular in a sense. Again this is just my personal taste on games though, the majority are probably happy with the changes, or completely unaware of them.

 

[babinro]

Casual gamers lead to companies streamlining their games.

In my eyes this is a positive (even though some call it the main negative). There are plenty of gaming systems that worked, but were improved on. We could arguably in thanks to the casual gamers and growing gaming market for these changes.

 

[Berithil]

The only way it affects me is that most people I know who claim to be "gamers" are not the people who I can have a long discussion about various games with because they are "casual".

Other than that, I really couldn't care less about what games you play or how much you play. I said in another thread that if you claim to be a gamer, and all you play is "casual" games, I'll most likely roll my eyes, chuckle, and then try to introduce you to some better games.

As long as I have my preferred types of games, I don't care. But if companies start trying to water down their games to appeal to a larger "casual" audience (which, unfortunately, is a possibility), then I'll be irritated.

 

[Lieju]

I am a 'casual gamer' when it comes to something like most shooters or fighting games, but hardcore when it comes to platformers and RPG's.

I see nothing wrong with people enjoying games, or only some kinds of games.

 

[Entitled]

I don't identify as a "gamer" to begin with. I like many things, and a large number of these things are either old-school thinky-fiddly PC games, or indie art games.

But that doesn't oblige me to care about the idea of "gaming" as if that would be a single thing, and I have no need to "tolerate" all games that I don't like, or their players whom I don't like. I don't care about how many people play games, I'm not compelled to feel glad about the size of the interactive entertainment industry, but I don't feel any particular need to purge "gaming" from them either.

Now, if someone DOES think of themselves as a "hardcore gamer" as importantly as they think of their nationality, gender, or religion, and THEN they claim to hate casual gamers, that's both kind of pathetic, and also dangerously bigoted and hateful.

But if you don't, if you recognize that gaming is just a hobby, then "hating" casuals is nothing more serious than "hating" Twilight fans, hipsters, PC elitists, EA games, truthers, or furries: It's really just voicing your opinion that you don't feel and think like that other group of people, and you don't sympathise with their attitude.

 

[Catrixa]

I'm starting to not see as much distinction anymore. By some definitions, I'm a hardcore gamer. By others, I'm casual, and this distinction usually depends on your definition of "a lot of time playing games" (although, to be fair, if less than 60 hours a week counts as casual to you, wait until you move out, cute highschool/middle school/college student who lives at home. You'll be "casual" like the rest of us when you aren't living at home anymore). Hell, even the "casual" gamers are moving away from the "we only play super simple cashgrab games and clones of those games" and are looking for more. So, what? What's casual? What's hardcore? Can these things even be things anymore? Do we care?

 

[mechashiva77]

As much as I would like NOT to be a casual gamer, I ultimately don't have a choice. Funding, time, and college limit my ability to play everything I want severely. This will probably change once I find a job and my own place.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

Not fond of casual gamers by any stretch, but the ones I hate the most are the console owners that keep throwing money at Call of Duty and that shit. They've basically made it acceptable to pay £10 for 3 maps for a multiplayer shooter and been the cause for the constant bollocks military shooters and the reason developers now nickel and dime us up the arse. They're the reason we get sold games in pieces and the reason why everything now has to have fu****g multiplayer in it, with perks and level up crap.

The worst people in the industry tho are MS and Sony, for keeping an ailing, decrepit console generation going so much longer than they should have. Hardware and software used to be roughly on par, with new games designed to push the latest hardware to its limits and new hardware built to power through the latest software. Consoles killed the innovation 4-5 years ago. Hardware has so far outpaced software now that there's pathetically little that could tax a current day GTX680/690.

So yeah, I dislike casual gamers for leading developers to make pathetic "apps" and cooking-dancing-singing hand waving shit, hate console shooter gamers for paying for so much shit from developers that getting shafted is now par for the course and I resent MS/Sony for their part in crippling innovation for the last 4 years. And developers in general for jumping off the PC platform and onto console development, leaving my beloved PC with the scraps of their development tables.

 

[Rooster Cogburn]

I don't have a problem with casual gamers. I think I go out of my way to be inclusive and appreciate their perspective on gaming topics. In a lot ways, I'm not far removed from them, anyway. But there are so many franchises that I feel have been negatively impacted or even ruined chasing their dollars. I hate that. If that makes me bad, then I'm bad. But don't construe it as hatred of casuals, because it's not.

 

[Sonic Doctor]

Will people stop dividing players into these stupid sub-categories!? Let people play their damn games, the word "hardcore" can buzz off too, playing games that require you to pour some time into doesn't make you "hardcore" nor does enjoying a game like Angry Birds make you "casual"

It bothers me to no end.

Could someone define both a "hardcore" and "casual" gamer for me? In the end, both enjoy games, so why are they divided by these stupid overused words?

I think the definitions depend on how serious you take your gaming.

As in, you can still be hardcore and play Angry Birds.

Example:

When my mom plays Angry Birds:
When she beats a level, she gets maybe two stars and immediately moves on to the next level. Plus she only plays for a few minutes to kill a bit of time before she has to do something else.

When I play Angry Birds:
I spend at least a couple hours trying to get three stars on ever level and I don't move on to play the next level until the last level I was on is three stared. I also don't move on until I'm certain there is or isn't one of those secret objects in the level. I play while I ignore everything and time passing by me.

So, my mom is casual, and I am hardcore. Basically if you play a game in the way like I do, then you are hardcore.

Of course, as I've seen people point out, you can be both a casual gamer and a hardcore gamer. You are one type with one genre of game, while you are the other type with another genre.