here's how the term "casual" is confusing: it means different things when used to describe an audience and when used to describe games.
casual gamers, are mostly associated with non-hardcore and non-core gamers (pretty much exactly the complement of those). which, is understood as the group who played video games from the past 2 decades.
casual games, however, are associated with titles like:
- DDR, singstar, guitar hero (some disputes this), etc
- brain age, face training, my word coach, etc
- cooking mama, fishing master, etc
- wii sports, wii fit, brunswick bowling, etc.
there is some correlation with "casual audience" playing "casual games" (both terms as loosely defined above), but the correlation is not anywhere close to 1. maybe 0.3.
and that is essentially how this whole "casual" vs "hardcore" arguments arise, and how miyamoto himself talks about making galaxy appeal to the "casual crowd" or reggie highlighted "picross" as a casual game at the nintendo E3. in their minds they know to differentiate the terms, but obviously, they're not gonna be 100% clear on what is "casual" every time they talk about it.
the Wii is an epidemic.
