Bust the Casual and Hardcore Myth
The Words Don’t Mean What You Think
By Shaun Hatton - June 18th, 2008
Ever since the Wii made its debut in November 2006, a great artificial divide between gamers was brought to the forefront of game media. On one side of the fence, we had a camp called “Hardcore” or even “Core” gamers. The people on the other side were labelled “Casual” gamers.
But what does that even mean? It’s been cause for much debate and brouhaha. And for what? So snobs (aka the hardcore camp) can feel good about themselves while putting down the “Casual” audience, of course! Every form of entertainment has its fans who are snobs, and gaming is no exception.
What’s interesting (read: lame) about the Hardcore versus Casual split is that there’s no real, universally-accepted definition of what constitutes each side. In fact, it’s just a bunch of bullshit. Despite the lack of a concrete definition of the two sides, I’ve observed that a vague one seems to exist for each. They are:
Hardcore: Someone who plays hours a day. Typically Hardcore gamers play online and have an affinity for first-person shooters. Hardcore gamers are highly competitive.
Casual: Your mom and dad and grandparents. Anyone who doesn’t play hardcore games and anyone who plays the Wii, DS, or mobile games. These people are looked down upon and are typically thought to know nothing about video games.
With that out of the way, let me reiterate that these definitions are complete bullshit. I didn’t make these up. These are my observations on what they are, which is based on reading countless gaming blogs and forum posts.
Yes, there are different kinds of gamers. But you know what? They’re more than just two types! And Hardcore and Casual, as ridiculously interpreted above, are stereotypes. And what do we know about stereotypes, people?
They are bad.
So let’s think about this again. Gaming offers different genres of games, and each genre offers games of varying difficulty because, let’s face it, everyone’s different and everyone likes different things. There is no universal taxonomy for games. No Kingdom, Phylum, Class, etc. And thus, to try to classify games as either Casual or Hardcore is ridiculous.
Hardcore and Casual shouldn’t be terms used to describe the types of games people play, but how they play them.
If you think of someone who plays a Breakout clone on a Blackberry under the stereotypical Hardcore/Casual definitions, you’d be inclined to think that that this person is a Casual gamer. There’s one such person I see every day on my evening train. She seems to be in her early 40s and every time I see her, she’s hunched over her intense game, her thumb dashing madly left and right over the tiny trackball. For an hour.
Every day.
If that’s not hardcore, I don’t know what is.
And then, on the other hand, there’s me. I’d like to think that I’m pretty hardcore into gaming. I mean, I have a lot of video games and systems. I try to play video games at least once a day. Due to outside factors such as writing, errands, and meetings, I find that the time I actually have to play games every day is far less than I’d like it to be. There’s just too much to do at any given time, so I will casually pick up games and play them a half hour at a time if I can. Although I have several handheld gaming devices, I don’t always play one while commuting. In fact, I usually prefer to listen to music or read.
Sometimes I play casually, like when I’m relaxing via a few rounds of Street Fighter 3. But other times, I’m playing hardcore, like when I get into the Tetris groove on the train and nearly miss my stop because I’m near my 400th line.
You might be wondering what kind of gamer you are. You can be a hardcore player of a “casual” game, and you can be a casual player of a “hardcore” game. These words, the way they’ve been (and will continue to be) tossed about in the gaming community, mean nothing. And it’s time for everyone to realize that.
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2 responses so far:Oh Shaun; you’re such a casual gamer, I bet you play your Wii in a nursing home ;)
I agree that the casual/hardcore gamer divide can create a bit of a class war. Core gamers tend to get super offended when you call them a casual gamer, like it’s the ultimate insult.
On the other hand, it is clear there are three separate camps. There are people who take their gaming very seriously — too seriously some would argue (I used to play Halo 2 with folks who would practise with the battle rifle once a day). There are those who bought a Wii so they can do yoga, and have probably never even heard of Call of Duty. And there are those who fall in the middle — they play for fun when they feel like it because it’s a hobby rather than an obsession.
That’s my two cents, anyway.
That’s a good way of looking at it, David. It’s obvious I’m not a fan of the artificial Casual/Core split but it’s important to note that there are different types of gamers. I just detest that budget titles get lumped into the “casual” classification just because they tend to be shovelware. Even casual game players have standards, you know. It’s this misuse of the term that I’m speaking out against.
If you think of a game like Donkey Kong or Pac-Man, there really isn’t a lot going on. The games aren’t very in-depth and yet these days titles like this are shrugged off as “casual” despite the fact that they’re extremely difficult to master and that there are people who have notoriety for being the best in the world at these games (King of Kong, for instance).