Vegosiux said:
Who's a "serious gamer"? What's a "serious gamer game"?
Who's "the casual gamers", by the way? A hive mind of some sort? ..
I rate your response roughly a 3 out of 10 on the "Troll O Meter", not that your likely to provoke a flame war with me despite your insults and tone, better have tried.
That said cutting out all of the feeble attempts at provocation, contridictory statements (didn't like the game, but oh hey I beat it), and similar jazz I suppose there is some validity to these two questions for a potential outsider listening in.
Simply put a "serious" gamer is generally someone of above average intelligence, usually substantially so, who wants deep, fulfilling, and typically challenging gaming experiences. Someone who also generally considers gaming to be a big part of their life, to the point of it being a major hobby, taking up huge chunks of their time, as opposed to someone who "also" plays games as a casual thing.
While frequently insulted for "having no life", which might actually be true, the bottom line is that people who choose to become serious gamers are a pretty large minority of people out there, to the point where they have a constant prescence on pretty much all forums and events related to gaming. At the end of the day a serious gamer is demanding products that are worthy of the amount of time and effort they are willing to dedicate to these products.
A casual gamer is someone who isn't really "into" gaming so much as as it's something that do a bit of here and there. They aren't interested in the game, or the challenge, as much as in the basic experience, and they want to get through everything as quickly and painlessly as possible, oftentimes so they can go on to the next game. Short, flashy, and easy are the major traits casuals are looking for, even if they won't acknowlege these things. They look on serious games with scorn, taking the attitude that if you need to play something 40 hours a week to even be passable at it, it isn't worth their time, and thus products like that shouldn't exist.
At the end of the day there is a lot of truth to the general stereotype that hardcore gamer are major nerds, where casuals are relatively normal people, that happen to like some of the same things, but only want to dip in well... casually. A lot of the anger from hardcore gamers is "nerd rage" as many people put it, a lot of which comes from these people having withdrawn into heavy escapism due to not really meshing with the rest of society, and now they see the regular folks that pushed them out of normal society intruding on this refuge.
The typical breakdown is that your casual sees the hardcore gamer as a non-entity because they are a social reject, typically physically less than ideal, and really have no interest in the rest of society other than the minimum they need to keep living and support their hobby. Your hardcore gamer sees the casual as someone who has plenty of other things to look forward to, so doesn't need to take this too, as well as generally being less intelligent in general simply being unable to deal with things on as high a level as the nerd has retreated into. There is truth in both perceptions of utter outcast hood for hardcores, and the lack of general intelligence for casuals, largely because of the huge pool of casuals and aiming at them means aiming for the lowest human denominator, which is low indeed.
Tortured, withdrawn intellectuals, and the rest of society have never gotten along especially well, and truthfully there are probably slightly more of them than ever before.
Overall the differances aren't really relevent, if the industry produces decent numbers of both hardcore, and shallow, transient experiences, for casuals, it's possible to make both sides happy. The issue is simply one of numbers, hardcore nerds are signifigantly outnumbered and thus aren't as profitable to cater to, especially seeing as their products take substantially more work that churning out another flashy FPS. The industry has generally decided to cater almost exclusively to casuals, and enable everything for the lowest human denominator as a result.
There is also an issue of entitlement here, and it's actually pretty well justified. See, for a very long time computers took a decent amount of knowlege and abillity just to use. In the days of Dos prompts and such computers just generally weren't very approachable. The people who could figure them out were the smart, social outcasts, who had the time and inclination to put into them, and these are the guys video games were largely designed for. It's that market that pretty much allowed there to be a gaming industry at all, and for it to survive and grow. As computers began to get dumbed down due to things like windows (click the pretty pictures) and plug and play software and such, you began to see the everyman get increasingly involved in computers, since after a while it began to require little more than basic brainwave activitiy to use a computer, or even get online the internet. With that many users the gaming industry decided that catering to that audience exclusively, rather than the one that made them, and supported them all this time. In a fairly short period of time we've seen a massive decrease in the complexity and quality of games, as accessibility to the lowest human denominator has become more important than the quality of the games themselves. Nerds generally get upset due to being made outsiders in their own territory, which they had been chased into to begin with. They wouldn't care if offerings for them weren't becoming fewer and further between.
At the end of the day there is generally a substantial amount of dislike between the two sides, which is why issues like "Easy Mode For Dark Souls" can turn into a months long ongoing battle, involving pretty much every gaming forum you can find. Casuals believe that nerds are not worth catering to, nerds think Casuals are invaders and treat them accordingly due to those sentiments.
If the gaming industry could put it's greed on hold at least enough to cater to both sides, there wouldn't be an issue and everyone could get together under the banner of "gamer" but that generally isn't going to happen.
There are plenty of ways to tell casuals from serious gamers/nerds but usually it's something that becomes obvious by gaming habits and sttitudes. For the most part it's simply that if you aren't a serious gamer, your a casual. Casual meaning someone who puts a casual amount of time into gaming, as opposed to treating it like serious business. If you've ever gotten on a forum and complained because a game requires, or greatly favors, a 40+ hour a week time committment which "I can't do because I have a real life, and need to see my friends, family, dog, etc" then your not a serious gamer, your a casual because you have so many other interests that come first. Call it sad or pathetic but for a serious gamer the point is that it's someone who might work and make enough money to survive, but otherwise every waking minute is going to be spent gaming and developing those skills. Typically someone who renounced society due to mistreatment and withdrew as opposed to doing something extreme and self desructive, and wound up using gaming as escapism, rather than having gotten there because of it, which is why there is so much resentment in being chased of the the refuge they fled into to begin with.
Some will like this, others will not, but that's pretty much how it is. I'm not trying to spruce up either side really.
