Casual vs. Hardcore: What Makes a Gamer?

I've heard a lot of discussion about casual gaming - what defines it and whether or not it poses a "threat" to hardcore gamers.

Why would anybody care about the intricacies of gamer labeling? Many times, these arguments are made with the aim of placing one group against the other: the casual gamers aren't "real" gamers and are "posers" for trying to move into a subculture that has been established for years, while the hardcore gamers are people (mostly male) who live in their parents' basement and have no social lives due to their obsessive attachment to racking up the most headshots. Both views are based solely on stereotype and these arguments, in many instances, are aimed at dividing the gaming culture: the true gamers from those who simply play games. 

Let's try to break down this monstrosity. I have heard a number of ways of defining a casual gamer vs. a hardcore gamer. However, most arguments come down to three main factors:

1) number of hours playing

2) type of game being played

3) the difficulty at which the gamer chooses to play

Right away, I see some problems with this.

Let's take this hypothetical woman as an example: She plays Bejeweled with a seriousness and dedication that many would put toward training for a chess tournament. Hour after hour she sits, racking up points. She is always near the top of the leaderboard, meaning she out-performs the average skill level of the average player.

Breaking it down by the numbers:
1) she plays a lot of hours of Bejeweled and is on par with a hardcore gamer who spends the same amount of time questing in World of Warcraft. Does this make her a hardcore gamer?

2)But wait, the game she is playing is Bejeweled, one of the games that almost defines the casual gaming genre with how often it is used as an example by people having this debate. If Bejeweled is the quintessential casual game, then you must be a casual gamer if you play it, correct?

3) Difficulty is subjective. On the surface, Bejeweled is a very simple game. It only has a few criteria that one must keep in mind in order to play it. In that sense, it is an incredibly simple game. It does not require you make a difficult series of jumps and navigate a physical puzzle like many platformers, nor do you have to manage your health bar and eliminate threats while proceeding to your objective. You can lose the game and start over, but you don't necessarily have to approach your whole strategy differently as you would if, say, playing Mass Effect and realizing that the route you were trying to take through the enemy base was not allowing you enough cover and that if you run past the giant hangar and into a smaller corridor, you can funnel your enemies into a much more manageable shoot-out.

I find these discussions problematic because they start to meander into blurring the very lines their argument has tried to create. Does that really help us better understand whether or not we can call this Bejeweled Master a casual gamer? That's not even touching on the subject of the variety of games she plays. If she plays Bejeweled and only Bejeweled, does that make her a casual gamer? What about XXRageKillAholicXX on Xbox who plays hours of Halo? Would he be a casual gamer because he's not playing a wide variety of games, even though he is playing a game that is more "hardcore" than Bejeweled? (Apologies, XXRageKillAholicXX if you do indeed exist. If so, kudos on an interesting choice of gamertag.)

Somehow, I imagine this is what you'd look like.

And this isn't even touching on the subject of gendering the casual vs. the hardcore gamers. I guess I should save that can of worms for another day. Long and short of it: there are women who have long term relationships with their consoles of choice, just as there are men who want to play the occasional game of Tetris on their phone and be done with it.

The "Threat" of Casual Gaming?

Some of you may be wondering what the "threat" is that hardcore gamers are so worried about? In part, with the sudden rise of casual gaming, there is a fear that developers will stop funding projects that are aimed at the hardcore gaming group. After all, if a casual game can be played by both the hardcore and the casual gamers, then wouldn't it financially make more sense to fund the latest iteration of Angry Birds rather than put time, money and a lot of technological investment into making LA Noire, which doesn't tie in nicely to an established, successful game genre and pushes the boundaries of animated character's emotive abilities? Both Angry Birds and LA Noire are great games, but the latter implies more financial risk. There is more time and money invested in the development with a potentially smaller number of gamers who are willing to risk putting down $50+ on a game they may not enjoy.

I fully understand and sympathize with the concerns that casual gaming may bump out games that are more challenging. After all, I'm some where in between the casual and the hardcore gamer, and I regularly struggle with not finding enough games that strike my fancy. I think it would be a serious mistake for the market to focus on one niche at the exclusion of all others. Economically speaking, that would simply flood the market with multiple versions of very similar games, creating too much competition. If gaming companies provide a variety of types of games, then they have a better chance of seeing success.

The one thing I don't sympathize as much with is the snobbery of difficulty levels. It's great that you can beat Dragon Age in Nightmare mode in your sleep. Why, though, were forums lit up with complaints about the developers of Dragon Age II expressing concern that the difficulty was too hard for certain gamers and so they would make sure that the Easy mode they provided before did not set the difficulty so high that it frustrated players who found themselves overwhelmed in the first game? Even after repeated assurances that the game would still have multiple levels of difficulty and that Nightmare mode would still exist, people were bitching and moaning about people having to have a "dumbed down" version of the game.

Now, there are legitimate complaints about the difficulties being unbalanced in Dragon Age II - but that's not the issue at hand. The primary complaint, before the game came out, came across more like "I'm such a bad ass, all you whimps can suck it" as opposed to a legitimate concern for their gameplay experience being compromised.

There seems to be a general disdain for casual and easy modes. I simply cannot understand it. If you don't want to play a game on Easy or Casual, then don't. Most of the games that provide a number of difficulty levels will provide you with at least two, if not more, difficulties above Easy. So what if a game developer wants to make the game accessible to a wider variety of gamers with different skill sets? It means they're more likely to sell more copies of the game, thus making more money and being able to fund future projects. I'm legitimately curious about this - does it all boil down to a dick-measuring contest about what a skilled player you are, or are there real reasons that effect your gaming experience if a game provides a difficulty level below what you play in?

So, what's the point?

Gamers are gamers. If you play games, you are a gamer. The more we try to create these mostly-arbitrary labels for each group, the more we're going to convince the men and women with the big bucks funding game developers that there are only two types of players they need to market to. The more limited we become in who is and isn't a purveyor of fine gaming entertainment, the more limited our selection of games for sale could potentially be.

The gaming world is expanding and changing. It has always been constantly evolving. So, there should be just as much room at the table for the social gamers, the casual gamers, the hardcore gamers, and the rest of us who aren't scared to pick up a controller and kick some digital ass.

I don't pretend to be an expert. Disagree with me? Feel free to let me know in the comments. As long as you keep things civil, I'm all for debate.