Challenge Versus Engagement
Over at Making Casual Games, Eric talks about the difference (which is getting fuzzier each month, IMO) between a "hardcore" and "casual" gamers. His first criterion is whether or not the player prefers to be challenged or engaged by a game.

That's a very interesting question. Honestly, I think I fall more on the "engaged" side of things... and I always have been, even in my truly hardcore gamer days. I like enough challenge to give me a real chance of failure, enough struggle to keep things interesting, but I have a pretty low tolerance for getting my butt kicked, or re-playing levels until I manage to finally "get through" them. I think I ended up leaving Return to Castle Wolfenstein (the 2001 one using the Quake 3 engine, not the pre-Doom one or the Apple II one) for about two years because one boss encounter was just too frustratingly hard. And I was too proud to switch the difficulty level back down to "easy."

I tend to up the difficulty level of RTS games only after my current difficulty level has proved TOO easy. If I'm winning every single game, I'll probably bump it up a bit. But if I'm losing even only half the time, I'll tend to back off. Something like 70-90% victory rate is the point where I feel that the game is "fun" without being too stressful. I enjoy playing City of Heroes these days, where the prospect of failure (and "XP debt") is more of a spice to keep the game exciting than a common (or punative) event. And I've long been fond of jRPGs (like the Final Fantasy series), where the average 2-hour gaming session only occasionally ends with a party wipe.

But I still rise to a hint of challenge. Like taking on "impossible" odds in Rise of Nations. Or sucking up a nasty game-threatening random surprise in an RPG (though that one is a bit older, from my more hardcore era).

So am I a casual gamer, or a hardcore player who's just backed off a little to get a real life?

(Vaguely) related meanderings through neural pathways best left unexplored...
* RPG Design: The Brute Force Problem
* Why I Gave Up On D&D Online
* What Makes a Good "Casual" RPG?
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Labels: casual games, Game Design, Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:21 PM (Permalink)