GTA is not a "casual" game!

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Erik Aston said:

I don't think I wrote enough up front to put my ramblings in context...

I certainly agree that casual and hardcore are bogus terms and things should be broke down in more depth. But as long as some folks are putting the term casual out there as a way to insult the new "retard" games as someone mentioned, let's examine why these games are legitimately different, and not turn things around and say all previous generations had "casual" games on the winning consoles; essentially saying anything popular is casual, which is either totally elitist or a backwards defense of the current casual boom. I have seen GTA called casual so many times in the past few weeks it was starting to bug me.

The main thing about GTA that looks similar to the "retard" games is how people play short sessions just fooling around, having fun with no effort, but the root of that in GTA's case is entirely different than the "retard" games. GTAIII really followed Ocarina as the next great game of that type, as many people will tell you. And while some question what I'm saying about storytelling, that's exactly what it is. There is a set narrative to the game, and the player progresses in a set order, but the open world is designed to give the player some level of control and a feeling of even greater control. Players don't just run around doing random stuff because they can, they create an internal narrative. I don't mean literature, I just mean in a childlike play sort of way. In Ocarina, that narrative was interwoven with the actual plotpoints which progressed the game, and created a feeling of a huge, epic story from a few pages of mostly nonsense plot. In GTAIII, the world was big, complex, and wide open enough that the player's own narrative could completely take over.

And if you still don't understand, think about what people were talking about when both Ocarina and GTAIII were huge. They didn't just talk about the main story points or the technical things you have to do to beat the game. They literally started telling their own stories of all the different things they tried and all the ways the game responded as they completed a game objective or a self-set objective.

Certainly being "pick-up-and-play" does not make something casual. It just makes something well-designed. At least if we're going to call GTA "pick-up-and-play," when it really can only be picked up easily by a limited number of people. But the fact that the fun in the game can be accessed quickly is just good design. Only elitists confuse hurdles to having fun with fun itself. And there are games of every genre in existance which are pick-up-and-play. Again, we should look at what really seperates the "retard" games from the traditional games.

When GTA was introduced ten years ago, it was pretty much the very definion of "casual" game, it was a game that didn't require practically any learning curve, still you had lots of things to do and you didn't need to advance in the game. And as far as i know, it still works alike (atleast Rockstar knows where the GTA success comes from).
I do agree that catering both "casual" and "hardcore" is a part of well designed game, which is a skill apparently not known to many.
Comparision to Zelda and Metroid, or Mario in that matter, in the OP was flawed, since in both cases you start from the storyline and you are required to advance in it, in order to get anything out of the game, although, the start isn't too hard for basically anyone. Wii Sports would be a better comparision for its nature, after all, it takes 80-100 hrs to complete all the platinum medals. Difference is, that the two games are so different, but the start of the game is the same in both; practically no learning required to enjoy the game.
But calling GTA a "casual" only would be wrong. I see it more like a "bridged" title.

Btw. you mentioned core audience in the OP, the industrys core audience is the "casual" audience.