Why the hardcore/casual dichotomy?

[NoNameMcgee]

I think it's just a silly way of pushing people apart.. We should all be open to playing different types of games.

If pushed, I personally wouldn't classify myself as Hardcore or Casual, I am somewhere inbetween. I am not very good at games, and I don't want challenge in my games. I don't play games constantly or for very long (lately something like 2 hours a day and that's only because I haven't been working or studying.) On the other hand I do care about games and the games industry and I like games that try something new and different, though I love FPS games. On the other other hand I can be found playing Peggle or Bejeweled too.

I'm not even sure if I would call myself 'a gamer'. It seems to imply games are a big part of my life, when really they are not (and shouldn't ideally be for anyone.) There are better things in life than games.

 

[Mechsoap]

It's quite easy, really. A Hardcore gamer (normally just called a gamer) is someone like most of the people here. We talk about games, argue about them, discuss them and play them. A casual gamer is someone who occasionally plays simplistic games and doesn't spend any of their free time talking about them.

If you think people who play Bejeweled and Farmville don't spend their free time talking about them, you are very much mistaken.

true but its not as indept and passionate about it

 

[Susan Arendt]

It's quite easy, really. A Hardcore gamer (normally just called a gamer) is someone like most of the people here. We talk about games, argue about them, discuss them and play them. A casual gamer is someone who occasionally plays simplistic games and doesn't spend any of their free time talking about them.

If you think people who play Bejeweled and Farmville don't spend their free time talking about them, you are very much mistaken.

true but its not as indept and passionate about it

Sorry, but that's just not true. There are certainly people who play casual games lightly and don't care about them that much, but there are people who care just as much about those games as we do about games like Dragon Age or Modern Warfare.

 

[Baby Tea]

A movie buff is someone who is well educated in cineamatography, not just enjoying good movies but have a distinct and displayable deep knowledge of the subject matter
Audiophiles are quality obsessed displaying a care and attention to detail in reguards to not just quality sound but often musical composition as well

They denote more than just a passing interest, same with gaming a movie buff doesn't call themselves a movie buff because they own a lot of movies they do so as an indentifyer that movies to them are precioucs and are to them not just merely something they do infrequently to pass the time

The coverall term "Gamer" is an identifyer that videogames are precious to that person and they consider their gaming interest as being a big part of their lives and their identity and the primary focus of their leisure time

My point is this:

Then who is to say what is 'hardcore' and what isn't?
What makes a movie buff? Where is the line of knowledge? My wife considers me a movie buff, but I know that my knowledge isn't really sufficient at all to say that I am. So am I, or am I not? I would say no, my wife would say 'yes', a 'bigger' movie buff would say 'no', who is the deciding factor here?

I never owned a Playstation, and have very little first hand experience with Playstation-only exclusives. I used to PC game, and now I play on my 360. Am I hardcore? It's my main form of leisure entertainment, I know a fair bit, but I never had a Nintendo, either. Or a SNES, Genesis, N64, Gamecube, Gameboy, Game Gear, Virtual Boy, Dreamcast, or the newer DSi.
Am I hardcore?
Where is the line here?

Who has the 'authority' to claim whether or not someone is 'hardcore' or 'casual'? What is someone only has time to play for 30 minutes a day, because their job and life demands the rest of it? Are they not hardcore based on time played? What if someone owns every console and plays fairly frequently, but knows very little about the gaming culture? Are they hardcore?
Says who?

The terms are objectively undefinable, because the definitions are so subjective!

 

[wkrepelin]

That's not the whole story, though. I mean, Adam named the animals.

Sometimes "this is this because it is not that" isn't harmful. But mostly this was an excuse to use the phrase "Adam named the animals" because I saw it written as graffiti somewhere and I thought it sounded smart.

Lol,

 

[hurfdurp]

When I was setting up my xbox for the first time, going through the settings and such, they wanted me to describe what kind of gamer I was, and there was the option of 'recreational'. I think that is a pretty fitting middle-ground, as it doesn't pigeonhole you into an extreme.

 

[EightGaugeHippo]

Where I come from a hardcore gamer is not a title to those skilled at a game, it is someone who plays games nonstop, unemployed, no people skills atall. Anyone who says they are hardcore gamers are just sad in my opinion. In the end, we are all gamers in a virtual reality that has no real meaning. To me, If you insist on being called hardcore, it does not show your VR prowess, it is just clarification that you have no puropse in the real world no true skills or experinces of your own, just a pittyful addiction to a fake world.

I dont really use the term Casual gamer, I just call anyone who is not "hardcore" a gamer or a human.

 

[Savagezion]

I would say it depends on your interest level. I do think there is a middle ground involved, but I think you tend to sway closer to one way than another. Sadly, yes, you can be a hardcore farmville gamer. There are people out there spending alot of money on farmville cash and are insane over it. 2 women in my family are this way minus the transactions. But they religiously log in every day (usually more than once) to tend to their farm and send gifts to well over 20 people. This amount of effort I would say ties (if not surpasses) the amount of effort I put into gaming.

The rise of social gaming is going to put a weird spin on this whole category thing. There are people who play those games but don't even consider themselves gamers. If you really think about it, Facebook is a computer game. It's got metrics and conditions for victory, and ongoing enforced tasks and rewards and blah blah blah. I think you're right that it comes down to dedication and interest level, but how do you gauge that when the person who's desperately dedicated to a game doesn't even know it's a game?

They may not consider themselves gamers because they know people like me or you exist. I doubt they fail to acknowledge Farmville is a game. They just have no intent on going out and buying a 360 because farmville is the bees knees. They acknowledge that they are a fan of the game but perhaps not the game industry. For that, I think their opinion is a little more stable than that of someone under the same circumstances considering themselves a gamer. Usually everyone has a video game of some kind that they enjoy, whether it be frogger, farmville, or KOTOR. However, I wouldn't jump the gun and call everyone in the world a gamer.

I don't see a problem with catagorizing people in the game industry. The problem is hardcore is a terrible adjective to use as it is too vague. Like I mentioned before someone who plays MW2 30 hours a week should be considered a hardcore fan of MW2, but they are only a casual gamer. When you exclude games from the game industry you slip into the mindset of the casual gamer. (Usually elitist, my game rocks and all others are crap) That is, only the games they are interested exist. (most "hardcore" gamers I know think farmville is not for them, but have no real problem with it as it is still a part of the industry now and on top of it doing extremely well. Farmville has managed to reach out to "non-gamers" and made a game for them. Possibly easing up their tension towards video games in general.

All media influences other media, it's just how it works due to fads, trends, and the fact that medium is directly tied to the interests of society at the time. SO as much a s some people may hate it, farmville most likely will have an impact on the game industry somewhere. It may or may not touch your favorite genre, but it will show up somewhere. Brian Reynolds, (lead designer of Civilization 2) recently co-made an app called Frontierville for facebook.

If people are going to classify gamers they need to make intelligent classifications for them and not just 2. Harcdore and casual sounds like 2 catagories thought up in a l337 community. The fact that there are only 2 catagories is probably the root of all the hositility. Your better of genre classing people over this method IMO. Although that is still flawed.

 

[sleepykid]

I'd imagine the difference between "hardcore" and "casual" would be the difference between one who consumed fast food and one who really cared about cuisine, or someone that's read only what their school has assigned them + Harry Potter, and someone who really cared about literature. You can tell who the former is because they usually won't read the same book more than once, or so I've heard.

Or put it another way, you could say that being a "casual" means you prefer breadth to depth, and being "hardcore" means the opposite. I don't know if I like the term though, because to me hardcore signifies one as being sadistic when it comes to their games, citing how painful it is and how that pain renders the other more "carebear" games invalid.

I think it gets confused if you leave out the idea of quality. You've probably heard people talk at length about what was essentially garbage of the media. I'd have a hard time believing one who was passionate about Twilight was just as much a "reader" or a "book-lover" as one whose interests were vested into things far more refined. But then I guess it's an unfounded confusion. I think people who genuinely are interested in things have a sixth sense in knowing if their company is a fellow initiate, or if to the "others" it's simply another game du joir.

 

[Souplex]

Because what the Gramers don't get, is there's already a dichotomy between them and gamers that started in the playstation era.
They don't want to be lumped into the same crowd that enjoys casual games, so they brand them as something lesser.
In fact by any reasonable definition, most of us are casual, because we play games as a hobby.

 

[jamesworkshop]

A movie buff is someone who is well educated in cineamatography, not just enjoying good movies but have a distinct and displayable deep knowledge of the subject matter
Audiophiles are quality obsessed displaying a care and attention to detail in reguards to not just quality sound but often musical composition as well

They denote more than just a passing interest, same with gaming a movie buff doesn't call themselves a movie buff because they own a lot of movies they do so as an indentifyer that movies to them are precioucs and are to them not just merely something they do infrequently to pass the time

The coverall term "Gamer" is an identifyer that videogames are precious to that person and they consider their gaming interest as being a big part of their lives and their identity and the primary focus of their leisure time

My point is this:

Then who is to say what is 'hardcore' and what isn't?
What makes a movie buff? Where is the line of knowledge? My wife considers me a movie buff, but I know that my knowledge isn't really sufficient at all to say that I am. So am I, or am I not? I would say no, my wife would say 'yes', a 'bigger' movie buff would say 'no', who is the deciding factor here?

I never owned a Playstation, and have very little first hand experience with Playstation-only exclusives. I used to PC game, and now I play on my 360. Am I hardcore? It's my main form of leisure entertainment, I know a fair bit, but I never had a Nintendo, either. Or a SNES, Genesis, N64, Gamecube, Gameboy, Game Gear, Virtual Boy, Dreamcast, or the newer DSi.
Am I hardcore?
Where is the line here?

Who has the 'authority' to claim whether or not someone is 'hardcore' or 'casual'? What is someone only has time to play for 30 minutes a day, because their job and life demands the rest of it? Are they not hardcore based on time played? What if someone owns every console and plays fairly frequently, but knows very little about the gaming culture? Are they hardcore?
Says who?

The terms are objectively undefinable, because the definitions are so subjective!

The terms are mostly self labled I don't care that much about movies so I would never describe myself as being a movie buff (I still own/go to see movies) nor do I think many other people just call themselves movie buffs for the hell of it

It's all about personal depths not lines in the sands, we're talking about people and people are never just one thing and one thing alone thats why we adopt broad terms because they make interactions easier without having to go into detail.

I think that when people tell you that they are a "Hardcore gamer" you don't have much difficulty understanding what they mean.

 

[pakker]

That's not always true.
I know plenty of 'hardcore' gamers who know jack-shit about games beyond the 4 they play.

Beyond that, to me: A gamer is a gamer.
If you play regularly, even if it's only for 20 minutes or so a day with Farmville or something, then you're a gamer. The terms are there, it seems, to appease the egos of those who are too embarrassed to admit they play a little bit, or those who are too embarrassed to admit they play a lot. 'Casual' seems less 'nerdy', and 'hardcore' sounds cool, not 'nerdy'.

You don't call someone a 'hardcore' music listener if they have a ton of CDs.
Or a 'hardcore' movie watcher if they have a ton of DVDs.

The same for 'casual' and the reverse of those examples.
If you game, you're a gamer.

You sir, are right.

Also, I have never heard the term 'hardcore' used about someone else, the people who say it is the people going "I am a hardcore gamer" (usually written in a chat in "1337-speak" or caps). Its a way to make them feel cool about something they wont admit, that they play alot of (video)games. A hardcore gamer should play table-top and board games too


I'm a gamer, and im proud of not needing further labeling of how/when/where/why i play games.

 

[Valiance]

Obviously, it goes far beyond hardcore and casual. I hate the terms, but they're the most recognizable in this market. I guess a Type A1 completionist would be considered "hardcore," and a Type C3 wanderer could be considered "casual."

I read a couple books on the stuff, but basically, it comes down to the fact that every personality type in existence will approach a game in a different way, and the opinion which I hold that there should be options available to appeal to everyone. Give people multiple ways to tackle a problem, and let the player exercise as much creativity as they can.

 

[Baby Tea]

I think that when people tell you that they are a "Hardcore gamer" you don't have much difficulty understanding what they mean.

But nobody says that.
That's the thing: It's all marketing.
'Hardcore games', 'hardcore gamers', 'appeals to the hardcore crowd'.
Nobody has ever said to me 'I'm a hardcore gamer'. I've never heard it used in conversation.
It's marketing crap.

 

[LitleWaffle]

Hardcore: Someone who's life is mainly based on video games, not much else in their life other than that.

Casual: Someone who plays games on a degree between occasional to rare frequency. They have a lot more to their life than video games.

Oh, and with the Farmville peoples, if they talk about Farmville a lot and play it a lot, I don't consider them to be a Hardcore or Casual, I consider them to be disturbing.

 

[obex]

Well one obvious reason is that hardcore gamers and casual gamers are 2 different market segments and therefore games company's (which are at the end of the day businesses) need to know what market there game is going to be played by predominately as this changes how you market the product ie your probably not going to see a big flashy cgi animation trailer for the next bejewelled game on your tv any time soon but you might see one for Call of duty black ops

 

[The Austin]

My definition of Hardcore and Casual is a follows:

Casual Gamers: Those who are lacking in gaming knowledge, EX. One who thinks that Modern Warfare is the only online shooter, and that every other game is copying it.

Hardcore Gamers: Those who have intimate gaming knowledge, EX. One who knows that Knights of the Old Republic was done by Bioware, and Knights of the Old republic 2 was done by Obsidian.