The Casual-Hardcore Divide

[bojackx]

I'm assuming this has already been thrown around on these forums on several occasions, but here goes.

Can you not play a hardcore game casually? Can you not play a casual game "hardcorely"?
If there was someone who played 30 minutes of CSS once a week, and then someone who played 60 hours of Viva Pinata in a week, I'd say the latter is the hardcore gamer.

And that is what confuses me. How can you decide whether games themselves are hardcore or casual? Surely it is the players that are hardcore gamers or casual gamers? Are casual games called casual games because a vast majority of people who play it casual gamers and vice versa? It just seems to make more sense to call the gamer him/herself either a hardcore gamer or a casual gamer.

 

[DazZ.]

That's why the word hardcore gamer is used solely by 12 year olds.

 

[Lilani]

I believe this "divide" you speak of is purely the construct of the "hardcore" gamers who wish to be separate from the "casual" crowd. As Jim Sterling pointed out not long ago [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/5047-Hardcore-Hypocrisy], the games which we've come to know as classics are all what would be considered "casual" games today. Mario, Sonic, Kirby...all of these are very lighthearted games for kids and adults of all ages, with simple controls, stories, characters, and goals throughout. If those games were made today, they would be considered casual by the "hardcore" crowd. But because they're the games we grew up with and they layed the foundations for the biggest game developers out there, we give them a free pass.

It's disgusting how far these elitists will take it, really. There was even a thread here not long ago saying Nintendo should stop making the Wii, because it's such a "gimmicky" and "casual" console. Yeah, let's condemn the most successful game system on the market today. Let's get rid of the console that's bringing thousands, even millions, people into games who wouldn't have touched the things otherwise. Let's keep the market small and inbred, and limited to only appeal to certain tastes. We wouldn't want to have something for everybody or anything. We wouldn't want the market to be broad or successful or anything. That would just give games far too much appeal, would bring in too much money, and would cause games to be far too diverse in subject, scope, and audience.

 

[XMark]

Casual means if you've never played the game or any game like it before you can still pick it up and play it reasonably effectively within a minute or two.

FPS games, third-person 3D action games, RTS games, RPGs... they all have interfaces and control schemes which require a fair amount of practice or previous experience in other games of the same genre for a new player to have any kind of rudimentary effectiveness at playing the game.

Pass your mom the controller while you're playing a Call of Duty game and you'll see the difference clear as day. She won't just be bad at the game, she'll be utterly confused as to even the basics of looking and moving around.

 

[Tallim]

It's purely a matter of passion and interest. Playing games a lot does not make someone a hardcore gamer. Learning the intricacies of a game and being able to put them into practice makes you a hardcore gamer.

And yes you can play games as casually or as hardcore as you like, it's just a matter of perspective.

I play games a lot and I'm pretty good but there are very, very few games I play "hardcore" where I learned all the little things about how to play and did analysis of game elements to improve my playing etc.



If the term "hardcore" is applied to the game itself then I tend to assume it is featuring many elements from the old school games in the same genre.

 

[Veylon]

What confuses me is how the expression "hardcore" has managed to attach itself to "playing a game".

Anyway, yeah, it's a silly elitist thing. There's a temptation when you like something a lot to try and preserve it, as though it will run out be ruined or something. I'm happy to play the games I like and I'm not sure why people are so eager to don sackcloth and ashes and weep over the fact that someone else is enjoying something they don't. Maybe it's that the subniche they occupy within the gaming niche feels smaller now that the outer niche is so much bigger. I don't know.

 

[Kopikatsu]

Casual means if you've never played the game or any game like it before you can still pick it up and play it reasonably effectively within a minute or two.

FPS games, third-person 3D action games, RTS games, RPGs... they all have interfaces and control schemes which require a fair amount of practice or previous experience in other games of the same genre for a new player to have any kind of rudimentary effectiveness at playing the game.

Pass your mom the controller while you're playing a Call of Duty game and you'll see the difference clear as day. She won't just be bad at the game, she'll be utterly confused as to even the basics of looking and moving around.

Most people who haven't played video games for a while just don't have the proper...something required to use a controller it seems.

I actually had a friend of mine (He's an orthopedic surgeon, so his hand-eye coordination and hand dexterity are very high) try and play the tutorial for a few FPS and TPS games. He couldn't manage any of them. Though he had markedly improved by the end of the day, he still wasn't anywhere near the level of skill required to beat the first level of Vanquish on the easiest difficulty setting when you're near-immortal.

He really just couldn't work out the concept that you have to move both analog sticks in conjunction to move/look around. He'd only manipulate one at a time.

 

[yunabomb]

Coming from a fighting game player (not a particularly good one though), there definitely are hardcore games. Fighting games, even the easy to pick up ones like Soul Calibur, have very steep learning curves. It can be pretty hard to figure out where to start, and they require precise timing and execution (and back = block surprisingly is not intuitive). No one just decides to pick up and play Blazblue for fun. It takes some investment.

There still are casual fighting game players, but they're different than people who play platformers for enjoyment.