What kind of gamer are you?
So now "Casual Gaming" has caught on (like CRAZY). The whitepapers suggest that this demographic is the fastest-growing in the games industry, and lots of people with lots of money are jumping on board the bandwagon. This market is dominated by an older, female audience - pretty much the polar opposite of the traditional "hardcore" market, which is younger males.

It's tough to define the two, but in general, the casual gamer plays a few games for amusement - preferring simple mental excercise games that are often of the "match three" variety. The casual gamer may go days without playing, and will usually not devote more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a sitting to their game. The hardcore gamer, of course, is a highly competitive young male who plays to crush and devotes many, many hours each week to his "sport." It's often younger guys with little demands on his time.

The mainstream industry has focused on the hardcore gamer, because these guys spend a LOT of money on games. But the casual games business is really taking off.

And then there's me. I have a fairly demanding job, a family to take care of and spend time with, a mortgage, church responsibilities, and a highly demanding "hobby" (making games). But I also love PLAYING games. I've been playing videogames since before Pac-Man became news. I enjoy a good casual game just fine, and I also love a solid hardcore game when I have time to devote to it. But I can't take a whole week of evenings off very often like I did to play through F.E.A.R. I don't have the time nor the patience to replay through long sequences between save points on console games because someone was worried the game was too short. I'm more likely to say, "Oh, cool, I have fifteen minutes, let me run a quick game of Ricochete: Lost Worlds." (Which I *STILL* haven't come close to completing, but I have fun trying).

So what kind of gamer am I? Is there a cool word for it. This category was recently referred to as "interstitial" by a recent GamaSutra article, but I hate that term. It's obscure, and it implies that it's a pretty narrow category. I don't think it's narrow at all. I think there's a huge gulf between what's coming out catering for the hardcore audience, and what's coming out for the casual market.

It's in this no-man's land that games like Outpost Kaloki reside. Outpost Kaloki has quite a bit more depth than your usual casual game, and has a little bit more of a learning curve to it. It's nowhere near the scale or complexity of your mainstream "Sim-whatever" game. Though I imagine a hardcore player who tried Outpost Kaloki out would grudgingly admit that while it's simpler fare than they are used to, it's still a lot of fun. And I think casual gamers could figure it out pretty quickly and start having a lot of fun with it pretty quickly as well.

Void War also occupies that gigantic twilight zone between the extremes. If anything, it errs too much on the side of hardcore, particularly with its competitive multiplayer focus. But it's not a mainstream game - it goes for depth rather than breadth. Kid Mystic has a LOT more scope and scale than a traditional casual game - but nobody would mistake it for a mainstream, hardcore title. And as long as I'm doing some obligatory plugging of games on my site, there's Mythic Blades - which is actually the most "hardcore" style indie game on my site, but it's still geared for a different audience than the die-hard Tekken fanatics.

But they occupy this fuzzy limbo of an ill-described audience of players that doesn't even have a cool-sounding name. Semi-Casual? Semi-Formal? Or that "Interstitial" word. But can you really describe the variety of gaming experiences that fill this ocean of possibility with a single word?

So what kind of gamer are YOU? If you were to descibe yourself as a gamer with one or two cool-sounding, buzzword-friendly terms, what would it be?

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:36 PM (Permalink)