Originally, this was going to be an article on the nature of the casual gamer, and more specifically, the term associated with the “casual gamer”. But the more I began to consider and think about what was or wasn’t a casual gamer, or casual games, I began to find myself with more questions than answers.
First, what are casual gamers? More importantly, what’s the metric for defining a casual gamer? Implicit in many of the articles I came across in my research, was the inference of casual gamers as a dichotomous model; but can a casual gamer be more casual than another? We can certainly argue that “hardcore gamers” can see themselves as degrees or gradations of “hardcore” relative to other gamers, but what about casual gamers?
This may be a patter of common sense, but when you have people and organizations in the industry referring to casual games and casual gamers as a large group, you’re implying a dichotomous model: players are either casual, or they’re not.
That sounds atrociously antiquated and far too simplistic. Defining someone as being in a state of being versus not suggests that you can have internal consistency.
Second, where does the term casual begin? Even if the term “casual gamer” emerges overnight as a polychotomous term, how do we determine the bare minimum labels? Is it someone who plays casual games more so than so-called “hardcore” games? Or is it someone who only plays infrequently? If I choose to play a game such as Battlefield or Assassin’s Creed, for example, and only those games - but only then infrequently - does that make me a casual, regular, or hardcore gamer? How do I identity myself, and how do others identify me?
This is even more troublesome when we have to consider that an industry has emerged – a lucrative industry – around a vague, abstract conception of casual games. Even more disconcerting is that our idea of time as an independent variable may not be the most honest or reflective variable in this sort of study.
If someone plays Minesweeper for several hours a day, but another plays Starcraft 2 for only 2-3, who is the casual gamer? Some people may say both, since one is restricted by time, whereas the other is restricted by complexity.
However, these labels are relative, and if pitted against each other, who is the more dedicated gamer? Does complexity or time determine how “hardcore” or how “casual” a gamer can be?
What about investment? Does the man trawling several discussion forums for the latest tips and news make him a more hardcore gamer than the man who does not? This insinuates that people with full-time jobs can never be more “hardcore” and thus relegated to the casual label by default due to time. Additionally, this also implies that non-gaming priorities are deteriorations of gaming hardcore-ness, turning people into more casual husks of their former gaming selves.
Thirdly, how should we treat other casual gamers? This is a question that rarely comes up in the industry, but anyone that studies Social Identity Theory knows that this question is central. Just as how we may have gradations of the casual gamer, we must also account the likelihood – nay, the reality – of casual gamers with relative conceptions of casual between themselves. Could some casual gamers not consider themselves more hardcore than other casual gamers, and thus they are no longer casual gamers because of that relationship?
This sounds like an absurd question, but this is very important because this problem insinuates something central to the casual/ hardcore debate: the issue is ultimately about group-ego and power, buried and blanketed by abstraction. People can take pride in casual gaming, being casual gamers, just as how people can take pride in hardcore gaming and being hardcore gamers, but at the end of the day, so what? If one group is more or less casual than another group, then does that mean the other group is more or less hardcore? If that is the case, then can we assign an absolute value for casual versus hardcore in the first place? If not, then what purpose does such a debate serve other than to reinforce insider-outsider relationships?
If someone can’t be hardcore simply because they are more invested through some arbitrary metric than another group, then should the casual-hardcore dialogue even exist in the first place? Does such a debate serve any sort of research purpose?
These aren’t answers, I know. None of these are answers. But they’re questions that emerged during my research as I sought to understand whether an absolute value could exist. But ludology, narratology, and gaming studies have yet to construct sufficient epistemological tools for understanding casual and hardcore relationships. Instead, gamers use them for their own purposes. And when we use something for our own purposes, we should first be asking ourselves what that purpose is, and questioning it.
On one end, we can argue that such usage is innocuous; calling someone casual is simply another way to establish insider or outsider status relative to another person, and it’s a handy enough abstraction that nobody bats an eyelash. But on the other hand, you have an organization such as the Casual Games Association, the use of genre categories such as “Casual Games” or companies that argue they specialize in “Casual Games” - without any consistency in the methodology of their findings. You have a field where study can become invalid because there is no consistent understanding of what some of the most basic, crucial terms of some of the largest and most industry influential groups mean.
But what can we do about it? What can analysts, industry professionals, and gamers do about it? Perhaps we can’t find a clear definition, and instead we’re doomed to languish in vagueness. At the very least, I believe, we can start by defining our priorities, asking ourselves to discuss what makes someone a casual gamer, or what makes something a casual game, or the distinction is ultimately irrelevant. From there, we can establish minimums, and from there we can understand group relations, both within and outside our own self-defined labels.
Then, we might finally get somewhere.
Joe Yang
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