Towards the end of my dissertation period, one of the forums I’m on had a big discussion about hardcore and casual gaming. I kept meaning to write up my thoughts on the matter, but looming deadlines meant I never really had the time. More recently, I was asked to define hardcore and casual games and gamers as part of a job application, which gave me some serious motivation to set my thoughts in order and write them down somewhere. Today I’m going to adapt what I wrote, and expand it out a bit to cover some things that lie outside of the original question’s boundaries.

The games industry is currently obsessed with notions of ‘hardcore’ and ‘casual’ games. The main reason is simply a matter of profits: the market for traditional video games has grown steadily since its conception, but has been eclipsed in recent years by the phenomenal growth of the ‘casual game’ market. Everybody wants a piece of the pie, so many developers are exploring this new customer base and retooling their games to be more accessible for the casual gamer. To briefly flash over some high-profile examples, Fable II has a much more forgiving death mechanic than its predecessor, Dawn of War 2 features smaller battles and no base-building, and Team Fortress 2 has greatly streamlined its class roles and audio-visual information. But despite all the interest in casual games, there’s a great deal of disagreement over what casual games actually are.

In my opinion, ‘hardcore’ and ‘casual’ simply represent different attitudes to play. I see it as something similar to Richard Bartle’s attitudes of MUD players, in that players rarely fit one exclusive category but you can usually break their tastes down into some combination of these common attitudes. I also doubt that ‘hardcore’ and ‘casual’ are the best words to use to describe these attitudes, because they have a certain binary tone – if you’re not hardcore you must be softcore, if not casual then intense. These terms are trying to describe underlying attitudes to play, and I suspect there are more than two. Nevertheless, these are the terms everyone is currently throwing around, so let’s stick with them for now.

As I see it, hardcore gaming relates to Bernard Suits’ lusory attitude. Hardcore gamers accept all the frustrating rules and limitations that constitute a game because their goal is to overcome them. They will endure repeated failure, learn from their mistakes and gradually improve until, ideally, they can stream through the game without error.

Casual gamers are less masochistic. They want to be in control of their game experience, and don’t like it when the game begins to wrest that control away. While hardcore gamers savour the feeling of accomplishment that comes after mastering a game, casual gamers just want to sit down and have a fun experience from the get-go.

And that’s it. If you came here looking for a definition of hardcore and casual gaming, you can stop reading now. You’re done! The rest of this article will discuss the other extraneous issues often tied up in the casual/hardcore debate, and why they are dumb.

A lot of people seem to talk as if games, or gamers, must either be casual or hardcore. I think this is totally misleading. All games feature some combination of hardcore challenge and casual intuition, and all gamers enjoy some mixture of casual and hardcore games. I do sometimes talk about casual and hardcore games, but only to denote games that are particularly hardcore or casual – the majority lie somewhere in-between. Probably the biggest source of arguments in this regard is that games can be played in different ways. Tetris is a good example; there’s a lot of people who take it very seriously, but the majority of players just want to shuffle some blocks around while taking the bus home from work.

I don’t think there’s any strict link to genres, as many people assume. I’ve read articles claiming that 2D platformers are, by their very nature, more casual than MMORPGs, but I think that’s a total misunderstanding – I can’t believe anyone would say World of Warcraft is more hardcore than Mega Man 9. Part of the problem is simply that people can rarely agree on the definition of genres. I had to spend quite a lot of time researching genre theory while researching an essay on the subject of game genres, and going off my conclusions I have no problem accepting that someone might make a casual strategy game or a hardcore puzzle game. Kurushi was pretty hardcore, right?

That said, I can accept that there are going to be some general trends relating to genres. Online FPS games are generally going to be pretty hardcore due to their competitive nature, and social simulators lend themselves to casual gameplay, but the point I want to make clear is that this isn’t a hard rule. TF2 is a more casual FPS game than Battlefield, and The Sims is more hardcore than Animal Crossing. There’s no real reason why you couldn’t make a hardcore social sim – Dwarf Fortress, perhaps? – or a casual deathmatch game, provided you think outside the box a little.

There’s a strange kind of presumption among gamers that hardcore gaming is ‘true’ gaming. I imagine this is partly due to the name itself – a hardcore gamer, presumably, would spend a lot more time playing their game of choice than a ’softcore’ gamer, and would be better at the game. Few would want to stand up in front of their fellow players and describe themselves as a softcore gamer, especially when most discussions about the subject take place on gaming forums (virtual locker rooms in which overblown egos collide in an endless struggle to prove they are the ‘best’ player).

There’s also a historical factor. Old games – particularly the ones people still remember – were generally more hardcore than modern games (after all, if this wasn’t the case, there wouldn’t be such a large, previously-untapped market of casual gamers for PopCap and Nintendo to make a fortune off). These games were marketed as entertainment for young people, leaving us today with a younger generation that have grown up with traditionally hardcore games and an older population that have not.

To a lot of the dedicated young gamers chattering away on forums, games in the style of Metroid or Final Fantasy are seen as good, traditional, ‘true’ games, while the recent influx of casual titles such as Brain Training or Virtual Villagers are seen as, essentially, ‘false’ games – silly little things that your parents might play because they suck at Halo. There’s an obvious track of reason behind this idea, but it’s very blinkered, built on the assumption that the industry has already explored all viable forms of gaming. The underlying truth in this matter is simply that hardcore gamers are very elitist. They play games because they want to overcome challenges, so of course they don’t see the point of games where there is no challenge – the fact that these games are often written-off as being ‘easy’ just goes to show that they don’t understand the philosophy of casual gaming.

There is a general divide in player demographics between young, hardcore players and older, casual players, but I think this is a temporary effect of the historical situation outlined above. To some extent, the idea of your parents playing Brain Training because they suck at Halo rings true, but the problem is not that they can’t play the game; more likely, they just don’t understand why they should. And why should they play Halo? Why should I play with a hoop and a stick? Why should your grandma play with Pogs? It’s different strokes for different folks.

The thing I’d like to emphasise is that this is not an innate relationship. In 40 years’ time we’ll probably see pensioners playing large font edition remakes of Contra: Hard Corps. Your grandchildren will probably grow up playing some kind of casual, augmented-reality RPG that doesn’t involve such baroque artefacts as characters, hit points or saved games. The content of mass-market entertainment has always been determined by contemporary fashions and technology, and I don’t see this changing any time soon.

As far as I’m concerned, the whole ‘casual vs. hardcore’ debate is just a shock to the system as people come to terms with a ‘new’ way to enjoy games. I don’t really think it’s all that difficult to understand, either – hardcore gamers enjoy the satisfaction of mastery, casual gamers prefer gameplay to be fun in itself, and most actual players are a mixture of the two. It’s difficult for committed hardcore or casual gamers to really appreciate each other’s philosophies, but I don’t think this is a major problem unless they happen to work somewhere within the games industry.

A similar, but (in my opinion) much more interesting point of discussion is ‘gamers vs. non-gamers’. Active gamers are very much in the minority – in Europe, they represent around 30% of the total population. It’s my opinion that a lot of the most popular new wave of casual games, such as Wii Fit, are successful because they target non-gamers. But do non-gamers who play Wii Fit become gamers? Does jogging on the spot become a videogame if you’re shown a graph at the end? Have personal trainers around the world been GM’ing live-action fitness RPGs for decades without knowing? This is all stuff I’ll return to in the future, once I’ve thought it over some more.