| Smashchu2 said: First, let me start that this is no such thing as "casuals," and "hardcore." They are just buzz workds and have no meaning. "Casual," just refers to a "lesser," gamer. "Hardcore," is anything someone likes. People call old NES games like Super Mario Brothers "hardcore," even though they are more casual (you can warp and beat it in about an hour). ... |
The point was about casual and hardcore gamers, not games. Referring to people and their activities the terms casual and hardcore are actually quite well defined. A casual movie-goer is someone who goes to the cinema according to trends, pressures and personal inclinations but has no particular investment in the activity when compared to other aspects of his/her life. A hardcore skater is someone for whom the activity has surged to a central role, thus a lot of time, attention, money and effort goes in it. So much that they develops a high fidelity to the activity, which is why they also tend to constitute a hardcore market in the business sense.
What Reasonable said, which I agree with, is that PS1/PS2 expanded gaming to people who never gamed before, save the mandatory one-off activity with a younger nephew, son or geeky friend. The typical children playing NES and Atari games were actually hardcore gamers, as all children are devoted to their games and PC gamers were a more varied marked, with adults playing flight and war simulators, but they were generally tagged with the stigma of geekdom. With PS1 I remember seeing for the first time adults buying a console to play football games with adult friends. And a surge of the family oriented genre.
