Casual is when a game can stay out for as long as possible.

Same can be said for a console. The X360 is selling in Japan because some casual owners find a little interest in it, not much like the Wii but it is getting users nonetheless.

Wii Sports and Wii Play is a prime example casual gamers are making those sales skyrocket.

perhaps nontraditional gamer is a better term?

This is one of your best observations Soriku. I am going to take it a step further by combining yours, Avinash's, and my own thoughts.

This is just how I classify it.

Non-traditional are the new demographics entering the gaming market (like my brother's 60 something in-laws or female)


Casual gamers is a broad term that can mean mainstream or gamer-lite. They are usually from the 18-35 or under 18 demographic. These are the people who stick with Madden, Pokemon, Halo, Final Fantasy, Smash Brothers, Mario, etc.

Hardcore play the obscure stuff.


Why does this matter?

Well non-traditional gamers can be or can become casual or hardcore gamers. Some older gamers are picking up tradition puzzle games, RPGs, and platformers. My girlfriend plays Counterstrike (which is too hardcore for me... God she's so hot).

Just reading your post makes me wonder what the hell you are saying due to the lack of distinction we have for those two words. Sadly, that will almost certainly never be cleared up in the same way that the average English speaker will never know the difference between an actually theory and the hair-brained idea they came up with while they were drunk stupidER.

That said, I personally think that mainstream and casual have too many different connotations unto themselves to make a solid relationship between the two.

To some people Britney Spears is the example of something mainstream, and even Halo isn't that well known to the general public. You couldn't sell 15 different brain-destroying gossip magazines each week with Halo on the cover of each, but if you put Britney on there you can guarentee one of my customers will buy every last one of them in a single trip to my store. And even a lot of guys, 99% of whom wouldn't be caught dead with a copy of "People" (the title is a lie), not only know who Britney Spears is but can probably sing you one of her songs on demand (almost certainly that baby hit me one more time crap), probably knows who her ex-husband is, how many kids she has, and the fact that her 16-year old sister is pregnant.

Virtually no individual video game gets that sort of recognition, and the ones that do go well beyond video games. If you wanna set up a fight between Britney and Pokemon, you have a show. What else (in gaming) competes with that level of notoriety among the general public in the US, or anywhere else really?

With that said, FF is certanly not mainstream in the way many other games are. It's much closer than most, for certain, but ask 20 random people in their fourties what they know about FF and they'll tell you nothing. Literally. So much so, in fact, that they will probably say "nothing." But they probably know Mario and Pikachu, and maybe they've heard of Halo.

So, for out purposes, if we can have a set vernacular I'd like it to be something liek this:

Casual - People who play it don't play lots of games. Hell, that might be the only game they play. Were talking Brain Age and the like, but a lot of Madden fans will fit here too. Casuals often buy a system to play one game and one game only, then they either try a few others out or they give the thing away to their kids after they get bored with it. No matter how simple the game may seem to us, for some people it may take years to get to that point even if a sequel was released that the player didn't purchase.

Mainstream - Refers to the industry only. These games get recognition outside of gaming, but the details are going to be vague and most people that hear of it won't have tried it. Also, unlike the casual games they will not be known for lasting players years on end unless they have an awesome online experience (which casuals tend not to care about). Halo and Mario would belong here more than in "casual."

Mainstream gamers do put serious time/money into the machines. Not like the hardcores, but most certainly more than casuals. A casual in any environment tends to be someone who simply does it to pass time, so I think that it's better to look at casual gamers from that perspective.

Of course, either word can be used either way. Which is why this topic exists to begin with.

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! 

On here I've noticed that casual is almost always used derisively to describe Nintendo and a supposed indicator of Wii's imminent doom.  I wonder if people spoke so much about casual gaming when Sony was on top.

Casual and mainstream are unrelated terms. Mainstream merely denotes success. Casual denotes a particular play style of a game; "short-session game" or "social game" are more descriptive terms.

Neither are demographics; even hardcore gamers play casual games. This suggests casual is a genre, but it is still a poorly defined one, often a catch-all for these short session and social games.

There is no casual, only Zuul.

In all seriousness, I don't believe you can define a gamer as casual or hardcore; there's really more of a pair of spectrums, of interest and attention, which gamers fall into (with quite a series of sub-spectrums of interest in the form of genres). Those we traditionally call casual are fairly low on the attention spectrum, or fall into the "simple gameplay" section of the overall interest spectrum; often both, but not always.

As what is "casual" and what is not, you could classify (just as said earlier) casual as a "pick up and play", meaning basically a game that doesn't require much learning to be able to play the game and that the game has a lot of things to do that don't require much skill. Good example would be GTA-series.
In the opposite is "hardcore", which games are complex and require skill to get started and to have something to do in the game. Something like Master of Orion would fit this category.
Or one way to describe would be casual= not much to do, hardcore= much to do, which seems to be the most common uses.

In general, the black and white casual-hardcore is pretty empty and doesn't tell much about anything. I think Iwata using the word "casual" was because of making (one more) difference between Wii and its competition.

In general, there are many definitions that describe games and gamers better than just "casual" and "hardcore".