Can these terms be meaningfully defined?
what is meaning, really
Idk man
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how about you just remember to shoot the core
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Casual is an exclusionary word used to dismiss entire genres which are deemed “not advanced enough” to be considered real gaming. It largely boils down to games which are adaptations of card/board games that gain nothing from being a video game, or puzzle games without real-time competitive multiplayer modes. Players of “casual” games can be just as invested (with both time and money) as core gamers, but their investment tends to be focused on the one or few titles they play, and not to the gaming hobby or industry at large.
Core and hardcore are the same thing as far as I can tell, and refers to all that is not casual.
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Casual is me finishing every puzzle in a Picross game
Core is me having a 60 second 40-line clear time in Tetris
Hardcore is me being the #1 Puyo player in Missouri
which I am
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hardcore is when there’s like barbed wire and landmines and burning tables
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I think it depends on what you want to use them for.
They’re marketing-derived terms and retain their use in those terms – attempting to subdivide your audience to look deeper at a smaller component and make decisions like, what demographic am I targeting? is both necessary and fraught with peril; feedback is poor enough that stereotypes live for decades past any use, if they ever had any. But the only competing model I can think of is the personal lodestone – the belief that by making something for yourself, you’re making something that will appeal to someone. The Appeal to Good Taste. And that’s liable to lead you into commercial dead ends but at least it creates interesting things. But when you’re shepherding >$150m you need to be able to make reassuring noises to folks that you understand who will be interested in the game.
As a critical device, I don’t think it’s very useful. It’s a tool to guess at what a person will like before they play it, and that’s a shallow question next to what we really want to get to, like, ‘how does this resonate with a person,’ ‘how does it challenge and inspire them,’ and ‘why is this functioning, or not, in the way it sets out to do?’.
Some background on the work I was discussing.
Anders is a good and fairly typical data analyst consultant, so this work can be seen as representative:
Warner Bros. and Ubisoft are closely tied to Immersyve, who presents and analyzes games as mapping to current psychology, along competence, autonomy, and relatedness. So competitive games and those with long chains of goals are triggering competence, open-world game and player-directed games (Steam games) are high on autonomy, and multiplayer games or single-player games with rich NPC interaction are hitting relatedness.
Quantic Foundry is a consulting group attempting to build its own dataset through surveys and apply it to player groups. It’s an example of the slightly more nuanced frameworks people are trying to build right now:
https://apps.quanticfoundry.com/surveys/start/gamerprofile/
And here’s a gloss on a ‘finding’ extracted from it; this is similar to how this data gets presented and used to companies:
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You guys
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It’s fun to read really old IGN and similar sites’ reviews and see stuff like twenty hour third person shooters called ‘good for casual gaming’ before the ‘casual’ term really took off as a marketing buzzword for stuff like Peggie.
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really old
But they’re not so ol—
::crumbles into dust::
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I’m casual. It’s me.
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Core made Tomb Raider, Hard Corps is the one with the cyborg werewolf, and casual is something that Craigslist isn’t allowed to have anymore.
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All I know is Shoot the Core, there’s nothing harder than that.
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i thought the gender differences in china was interesting it seems to fit into the hypothesis that gender differences are more pronounced in countries that are more liberal and egalitarian.
okay but what if peggle was about pegging
would that make it hardcore
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