Defining Casual Gaming & Core Gaming

I have a PSP 1000 that my beautiful girlfriend gifted to me for Christmas. It has received a ton of play time from me, her, and her little eleven year old sister who was obsessed with Loco Roco in the winter. Well, actually, all three of us were obsessed with Loco Roco sometime or another this past winter.

Loco Roco is what most would classify as a casual game and while gaming genre classification can be somewhat subjective, I think that perhaps that whole casual/core game thing is over-simplifying things. Some believe the Wii started this mess and all the core gamers who felt threatened by casual gamers started decrying games like Loco Roco as casual games, when they wouldn’t have even considered Loco Roco a casual title until the Wii entered the scene.

Loco Roco is at it’s simplest, a platformer which has sort of become a casual genre of sorts to most, but I strongly disagree and I want to explain what I think the difference between a casual gamer and a core gamer is.

It’s not the games one plays, it’s how much one plays them. A core gamer may only play cutesy art games, but if that gamer plays them a lot, then they aren’t really playing casual games. Games may facilitate different experiences for different players to make it easier for their particular playing styles by changing difficulty levels, but that doesn’t make them less core, more casual, or vice versa as a gamer.

Here is my individual definitions of a core and a casual gamer:

Core Gamer - plays a lot of games.
Casual Gamer - plays some games.

Still though, I am flawed in my thinking because this over-classification and over-simplification of gamers causes a lot of problems in the industry. For one, girls still are marketed bullshit, and guys are still marketed too much testosterone. Even worse, boys are considered core gamers, and girls are considered casual gamers, and this causes problems within gaming communities such as online video game forums and chat rooms.

Young gamers bark back and forth at one another criticizing another gamer’s playing habits while comparing them to their superior gaming habits, and they’re strong in these beliefs, even though they’re baseless. The real problem begins when these young gamers enter adulthood and still feel this way about gaming.

These false beliefs are perpetuated through misinformation and clique-esque behavior that is too complicated to dive into in one post, but I must consider all of this when deciding on a proper definition for casual and core gamers, and currently my only solution is to dissolve, or at least attempt to dissolve my disillusionment when it comes to describing myself as a gamer and others as gamers.

Gamer - a person who plays games.

Maybe, just maybe, the above definition will help the industry and help the consumers who are a part of it, and ultimately play a big role in shaping it. These stereotypes must be thrown aside if gaming is to grow past fancy graphics, new online capabilities, and cliches.

We’ll see.

- Kyle