The “casual or hardcore” distinction has a lot of problems. First off, nobody can agree on what “casual” and “hardcore” mean. When I was the producer of a massively-multiplayer RPG, I was often amused by players who played the game for 20 hours a week and called themselves “casual players.” These people had the equivalent of a part-time job playing a video game, but because they saw other people playing even more than they were, they assumed they were “casual”. Needless to say, this breed of “casual” player isn’t what we’re marketing to when we create a “casual game”.
So before we can use those words, we need to add some meaning to them. I think there are really two axes involved here: what challenge people want in a game, and how much time they can allot for a game. Let’s tackle each axis separately.
Casual Test #1: Do you want to be challenged by a game, or engaged?
Although many people switch back and forth between these two, it’s still a useful distinction. People who play “casual games” like to be engaged by the game. People who play “harcore” games like to be challenged by the game. An engaging game isn’t too easy or too hard. It doesn’t expect you to get dramatically better at the game, at least not at too fast a pace. A challenging game ramps up the difficulty quickly, or else it has points of extreme difficulty (such as tough boss battles), forcing pretty much any player to practice repeatedly until they’re good enough.
I have a confession to make, one that would get me kicked out of the Hardcore Gamer Guild if there was such a thing: I played most of God of War 2 on “easy mode.” I was just in the mood for something engaging — not too easy, but not too hard — that would keep me preoccupied for an hour each evening. On “normal mode”, I found that I had to repeat boss battles�many times to learn the techniques, and I just didn’t want to.
God of War 2 is a pretty challenging game: it constantly pits you against obstacles that you are probably not good enough to beat. You will be forced to repeatedly face these obstacles until you succeed. It can be played as an engaging game if you set it on easy mode, but there’s a significant stigma attached to playing a game on “easy”. This stigma is probably intentional!
If you’re playing the game on normal mode and you’re repeatedly failing, the game will ask you if you want to switch to easy mode. This is brilliant, because it makes hardcore gamers feel better about themselves. If they keep practicing, knowing that they could have chickened out at any time, their eventual victory is all the sweeter. People who don’t want to practice a video game over and over again just switch to easy mode and don’t look back.
Let’s look at other games via this lens. Grand Theft Auto 3 is somewhere in between: it’s challenging, but only when you choose to be challenged. You can also just play engaging mini-games for as long as you want. So I’d say GTA is accessible to both casual and hardcore players. This is reflected in the large number of people who played the game in unusual ways.
Bejeweled is engaging without being too challenging. However, the XBox 360 version has some very challenging aspects: it’s extremely difficult to unlock all the XBox 360 achievements in Bejeweled 2. This gives the game some hardcore appeal, at least to some players.
I often switch back and forth. I do sometimes want to be challenged by my video games; it really depends on my mood. I think games that have a mix of engaging and challenging aspects have the broadest appeal. Mixing the two elegantly, now, there’s the tricky part.
Next up: casual question #2.