For a while now we have been attempting to classify certain sects within the general game player population.  Currently we use the terms Casual and Hardcore to describe fairly broad groups of people, both of which implies certain characteristics that in many cases are not well assigned or completely wrong.

As for the definitions I will be using Wikipedia, not because they are the sole authority on topics such as this, but because they can be considered an aggregate opinion of the topic.  According to Wikipedia a casual gamer is “a type of video game player whose time or interest in playing games is limited compared with a hardcore gamer.”  A hardcore gamer is a “type of gamer [who] prefers to take significant time and practice on games, in contrast to a casual gamer”.

So according to Wikipedia the difference between a casual gamer and a hardcore gamer is the amount of time and commitment to the game being played.  If we use this definition we could infer that casual players don’t really play games that often only playing when the opportunity presents itself and hardcore gamers spend the majority of their free time playing games.

While these definitions can describe people who are either casual or hardcore players, it is far from the norm for the two groups traditionally identified as such. Studies have shown that in fact casual players spend more time playing games in aggregate than hard core players do.  Additionally in games that are traditionally considered hardcore games such as World of Warcraft there is a large contingent of players who identify themselves as casual game players within the context of the game.  We can see that the monikers of casual and hardcore start to get blurred with this information.

This begs the question is this just a game of semantics? In a lot of ways yes, but the fact remains that designers, players, and pop culture uses these terms.  As gaming becomes more central to the leisure time of people, as has been happening over the past decade, these distinctions will start to translate into politics and eventually into policy and law.  It does a disservice to the gaming community and to frankly all of us to use this nebulous and ill-defined classification system.

So what do we do? Can we do anything?  Yes we can, we can start using terms that better define these large groups.  Casual players are casual in the way they play their games, but it does not mean that they don’t like games, don’t play as often, or aren’t as committed.  Hardcore gamers aren’t spending their whole waking time playing games only to boast about it afterwards.  Hardcore gamers enjoy the challenge and complexity of a game and plans to play in order to get the most out of their experience playing games.   The terms I feel are better suited to these classifications of people are episodic for casual and committed for hardcore.  I feel that these two terms describe these two groups more accurately and don’t carry the baggage the other terms now carry.