I don't think we misunderstood it to begin with!
A casual game is one developed to target a casual demographic. As Nintendo put it in one of their Nintendo Power issues a casual gamer is in their opinion someone who picks up a game for 15-minutes or an hour or so a week while a hardcore gamer was somebody who played more then 2-5 hours a week!
They ran various polls to find out just how many casual gamers their were on existing Nintendo consoles I myself play 2-5 hours a week not the most hardcore but still under there definitions I was. These were all conducted back when the DS hit store shelves in 2004 and Nintendo had done significant research into the casual demographic.
So Nintendo began to make pick up and play games as Miyamoto calls them. Or as Iwata would later call them casual. A game that can be picked up and played for about 15-minutes and put away, a game designed specifically for the people who don't play tens of hours a month.
Nintendo set a definition for casual gaming. They said they could use those casual games to reach new demographics and through innovation target non-existant genre's. Since then other publishers have begun to classify their games as casual.
Its a new genre essentially, what defines casual. Something that is played casually games that are picked up and can be picked up by anybody who wants to blow 15 or so minutes. That is what casual is!
-JC7
"In God We Trust - In Games We Play " - Joel Reimer
