Why 'Hardcore' & 'Casual' Game Labels Are Worthless

In the past decade, many U.S. video game enthusiasts have sought to divide those who play video games into two groups: "Hardcore" gamers and "Casual" gamers. This division has persisted, even as video games have become an ever-increasing part of popular culture. According to market research firm The NPD Group, last year 63 percent of Americans played video games for entertainment, as opposed to 53 percent of Americans going out to the movies. With more people from all sorts of ages and backgrounds playing video games, why do the "hardcore" and "casual" labels persist? With a group so large, do these labels even have meaning anymore? I posit that the reason these labels are still with us is because people find trying to understand larger trends and groups a lot more difficult than simply setting up two easy to grasp, mutually exclusionary labels. I also think that the difference between "hardcore" and "casual" gamers is ultimately meaningless.

Chris Bateman, a consultant for market-oriented game design, conducted a study of gamers that self-identified as either casual gamers or hardcore gamers. What he found was surprising: many of the markers used to divide gamers between hardcore and casual were fairly close. When asked to rate themselves on "game literacy"-- that is, how well they knew the abstractions and conventions of video games and felt comfortable with them-- 95% of hardcore gamers surveyed respondents said they thought of themselves as very games literate. The amount of casual gamers surveyed who felt the same way was 85%. How often they played video games wasn't a reliable divider, either. In this same study, 81% of the video game players self-identified as hardcore said that they played video games every day. The percentage of casual gamers that played video games every day was nearly half. So while the casual players surveyed might not self-identify in the same way as a hardcore gamer might, many of the casual gamers surveyed, nevertheless, played video games every day and felt very familiar with how video games worked.

In a talk with website Eurogamer this past March, no less a luminary than Shigeru Miyamoto himself-- creator of the Super Mario Bros. series-- has said he hopes that playing video games will become as socially acceptable to the public at large as watching a movie. However, there seems to be some real resistance to this mainstreaming by those that consider themselves to be hardcore gamers. As Ian Fisch said in a Gamsutra Blog discussion on the difference between casual and hardcore gaming, casual gamers "...bought Wii's (sic) because the Wii controller and games are simple and unintimidating, the same reason my grandma bought a macbook." With some members of the video game enthusiast community, there is a real backlash against "casual" gamers, who play games on the Wii, or browser-based games instead of "hardcore" games like first-person shooters on the PC or strategy RPGs on a video game console.

Consider how the terms "casual" and hardcore are used in the gaming community. A game like Farmville is labeled as casual. The most common reason given for the casual label is that Farmville is a free browser-based game. What about a game like Maxis' popular The Sims franchise? The Sims series is played on a PC, and is a full-price game. Playing The Sims requires an investment of both the player's time and money. However, video game marketers and video game players for the most part would classify players of The Sims franchise as casual gamers. Likewise, the Nintendo Wii system, as demonstrated in the previous paragraph, are derided by hardcore gamers as being too simple, casual, or child-like. The Sims are played by men and women; according to a study by Charles Paulk, 60% of The Sims players are women. The Wii has been marketed to a broad demographic-- NOR reported that the Wii has proven especially popular in senior centers. Dedicated One can read forum posts where FarmVille players will suggest setting alarms to the wee hours of the morning in order to make sure they don't miss harvesting their crops. That certainly sounds like a hardcore behavior.

No, the roots of the hardcore gamer backlash against the "casual" gamer boils down to little more then entitlement and jealousy. This "other" type of person playing video games-- female, senior citizen, take your pick-- is being perceived as a threat to the status quo a self identified hardcore gamers feels they represent. The odd wrinkle in the backlash against casual gamers from hardcore gamers are not harmed by the rise of the new category of "casual" gamers. More casual gamers does not mean that there will be less games for hardcore gamers to play. Consumers spent over $25 billion dollars on video games last year, according to Today's Gamers Survey by Newzoo and TNS, and that amount should hold steady for the foreseeable future.

Anti-casual gamer discourse might also be a way for the "hardcore" gamer community to be self-policing, so that a sense of shame might become attached to a gamer in an insular community who might act differently. The self-identified hardcore gamer is acting like the casual gamer threatens the power the hardcore players had to dictate the market for video games. For years, gamers on forums and web sites have talked about wanting to not be seen as an outcast for enjoying video games, and yet when video games become a form of mainstream entertainment with a more diverse fan base, there is significant push-back aga.

Look at the popularity of Felicia Day's web series The Guild, about a group of MMORPG players lead by Day. She plays an idealized form of the relatively rare hardcore female gamer who is just like the male self-identified hardcore gamer-- a sort of exotic version of the female gamer. In the real world, actual differing types of gamers who enjoys games that the hardcore gaming community says is different is defined as an inferior form of enjoyment, an inferior form of player, and is almost treated as a threat.

There is a needless sense of entitlement amongst many whole self-identify as "hardcore" gamers, especially when studies have shown there is not that large a difference between casual and hardcore gamers. What truly unites casual gamers and hardcore gamers is the fact that they play video games. Barbara St. Hilaire, a 74-year video gamer and blogger who plays and reviews current generation console games, had strong words for the hardcore games contingent and the gaming media, after reading a Kotaku piece on the condescension towards The Big Fish Babes-- a group of nine women that met due to a shared interest in games played via the Big Fish Games casual market-oriented portal: "First of all: who gives a [expletive] if they only play casual games. I think that counts. I play Sudoku too... Why is it that these people think I'm cool but these women are stupid? It's the same... They like that game, I like different games- they're still games. You want them to play Call of Duty? Show them how to do it. Maybe they'll like it, maybe they won't. What's the difference?"

I agree with Ms. Hilaire. There isn't one.

Sources:

http://www.gamestudies.org/0601/articles/paulk
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/shigeru-miyamoto-interview?page=1

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TimTavernier/20100319/4727/Casual_Gamers_Are_Actually_More_Critical_Then_Hardcore_Gamers.php
http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2008/09/redefining-hardcore-casual.html

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120705467

http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_090520.html

http://oghc.blogspot.com/2010/03/grandma-is-seriously-pissed-off-today.html