Casual Hardcore Playing

Last night I went for the first time in a long while to the monthly IGDA meeting of the San Francisco chapter. The lecture was about the latest CSI Game, which doesn't sound that exciting until you see the demo data: the CSI games' biggest group of consumers is women beween 35-50. The audience that no one else can get to play games is the one that is crazy about this particular game.

Robin and I noticed that a lot of the talk was about "casual gamers", as in, "Casual gamers want an authetic experience," "casual gamers want accessibility." It struck us both, I think, that the core audience for the game exhibits anything but "casual" behavior. They are crazy for the game. Over 80 percent finish the games, and 76 percent (I think - I don't remember the exact number) are repeat customers. They probably don't play any other game but this. Isn't that sort of focused attention the definition of "hardcore"?

There's a big semantic problem here. The tendency these days is to almost ghettoize the games that don't appeal to the standard male 18-34 demo as "casual games." Hence, everything from mobile games to kid's DS games to free flash games to CSI The Game are lumped into "casual." Robin suggests on her post about this that perhaps there is a subset of adventure gamers who just aren't being serviced by the industry currently, or maybe that there is a burgeoning audience for these types of games.

I think it's important to understand that "game", in this context, stretches far, and includes a wide variety of experiences. Some game reviewers slam adventure games precisely because the play element is so trimmed that it is virtually nonexistent - even some of the puzzles are obscure and illogical. But we call them games because they are interactive and still feel like a game experience.

I happen to be a fan of adventure games. But I also will admit that I play them often with a walkthrough or a guide handy, because it's not as rewarding to me to solve the puzzle than it is to see where the story goes next. So I can understand wanting to lose oneself in the narrative and get swept away by something like The Longest Journey, which I truly loved. And that's also why I have a high tolerance for games like Final Fantasy VIII, that really rely on story to overcome broken game mechanics.

Even though I think I'd be classified as a hadcore gamer, I am very open to the kinds of experiences described by the panelists on behalf of their customers: cinematic pleasure, immersion in a beloved IP, the continuation, in essence, of a franchise and a show.

But to call it "casual" seems odd. We need a new definition of "casual" games, and a new way to define games that are, like adventure games, driven more by story and character than by agency of the player.

Comments

[dariusk]

I posted some thoughts about this a few months ago. I think it it comes down to a question of literacy, myself (as well as community involvement and a few other factors).

[jane]

Hm, that's interesting Darius - seems like there is a "Breadth" axis and a "depth" axis here, and then there's the thrid time factor axis. Left to my own devices I would score highly on depth and time factor with a game like Oblivion (which I played for 30+ hours the first week)... but I don't get into a whole lot of games. Maybe we should have personality profiles and tests and names for various configurations of how your behavior plots along these axes.

[Chris]

In our research into the gaming audience, we found that focussed attention on a single game was indeed a property of the casual segment.

Of course this depends upon how one chooses to define 'hardcore' and 'casual'. For our study, we used self assessment - only players identifying as 'hardcore' were considered hardcore. (A common alternative choice is to use number of playing hours over a time interval as the distinguishing factor).

Players self-identifying as Hardcore played many different games, with varying degrees of dedication and focussed attention. For instance, our H2 Manager sub-segment were hardcore by self-assessment but not associated with completing games, which was more associated with the H1 Conqueror sub-segment.

It was quite common for a player in the casual segments to play one game for a long period of time - for instance, one of the case studies was a middle aged female player who played only The New Tetris, and had been doing so for over a year.

According to the data in the DGD1 survey, the sort of behaviour you are talking about probably correlates with the C4 Participant play style, but this is only a supposition on my part.

However, as a contrary position on the same point, the Participant play style was the only segment for which we did not identify a significant Hardcore segment. Since 'hardcore' was determined by self-assessment, it may be that if we used a different criteria, this cluster would have subdivided into hardcore and casual clusters, and your claim above would be validated.

If you are interested in looking into our research, the free brochure we produced is here:
http://www.ihobo.com/res/DGD_brochure.final.pdf
(although there were some inaccuracies in this initial report).

Alternatively, there is our book '21st Century Game Design', which goes into considerably more detail on the research.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1584504293/qid=1128166892/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-4230092-1057604?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

(Note that this study purposefully avoided focussing on gender as a prime factor, instead identifying differences in play style)

Best wishes!

[Toad64]

Wow, I had no idea there was such a broad definition of what a casual game could be. I guess I always think of casual games as the kind you find on Pogo and those other online gaming places.

[kuwang]

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[mik]

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