Casual vs. Hardcore for Game Designers
Friday, August 6, 2010 at 7:13AM
Once upon a time, a casual game was something you didn't spend a lot of time or money on. A hardcore game was one you did. Obviously! And then we all grew up and things got complicated.
When I was playing Farmville, a casual social game, I engaged in sleep-shifting to maximize harvest times. I kept spreadsheets to work out the best min/max on crop mastery. I lurked in wikis and forums searching for better strategies for farm layout and tree/animal ratios. If those aren't hardcore behaviors, I don't know what is.
Arcade games would be considered casual through our modern lens, too. But King of Kong surely demonstrates that the play behaviors could get pretty solidly hardcore.
Conversely, when I played World of Warcraft, I toddled around for a little while looking at things and sometimes also killed stuff. There was no power-leveling, no raiding, precious little questing. I didn't have a lot invested in the game emotionally. I dabbled. Was it not, then, a casual game for me?
There's a suggestion that our modern usage of casual and hardcore are really code for "a girly game" and "a manly game." More a gestalt of design and marketing cues than specific design elements. I think there's a lot of truth to that.
But as game designers trying to make great games -- and get as much audience share as we possibly can -- we really need to look at this from a different angle entirely. Forget thinking about casual and hardcore as types of games. They aren't. They also aren't player archetypes. Casual and hardcore are types of engagement.
Sure, some game mechanics are more and less rewarding of deep, hardcore-level engagement. It's not easy to be a hardcore player of, oh, Tic-Tac-Toe, for example. At the same time, some games -- particularly MMOs and AAA titles from big studios -- require a significant investment in time and money to get to a sort of baseline level of enjoyment, rendering it more difficult -- though not impossible -- to enjoy those games on a casual basis.
I strongly prefer games that give me choice in how much I want to engage. It's just good design to make a game experience immediately rewarding, right? And it's likewise good design to make a game more rewarding the more a player puts into it. But I reject game designs that funnel you toward a hardcore experience to such an extent that you cannot continue to play it on casual terms if that's what you prefer.
This is why I'm annoyed by games like, oh, World of Warcraft, which have a sweep of backstory you're never exposed to in a casual experience of the game. You have to engage in hardcore research behaviors to even discover they exist. Or games like Halo with a steep learning curve simply for handling the basic interface of the game.
This is also why I wish there were a button that let me skip parts of a game I'm bad at and find unrewarding to keep trying. I'm stuck on Super Mario Galaxy because I am not capable of leaping from one moving, hole-filled platform to another at the speed the game requires. I've been stuck on that level for a couple of years now, and it's been about that long since I even fired up the game. Does this mean I've fundamentally lost Super Mario Galaxy? Or does it mean the game has lost me?
We transmedia designers talk a lot about depth of engagement, and we like to draw pretty triangular graphs that demonstrate how the bulk of your audience will always be lurkers, dabblers, spectators. Casual players. What does this say about games that consider themselves hardcore? I don't know about you, but tells me they're leaving money on the table.
Game designers, forget about casual games and hardcore players. There's a false opposition there. Instead, think about depth of engagement. Try to make your game accessible to casual and hardcore engagement styles at the same time. The discussion has long been framed in unproductive language that won't ultimately help anyone to make better games for more people. And at the end of the day, we can all agree better games are what we want, right?
Reader Comments (11)
I cannot applaud this enough.
-- Chuck
I suppose the question is, is there a level where having scaled returns for scales of investment becomes unfeasible on the design time/developer investment?
So yes, I have to agree with the blurring of casual and hardcore. I believe that EVERY game needs to have a "casual" mode or equivalent. I like games that offer a bit more challenge than an "interactive movie" yet are not so difficult or so hand-eye-coordination oriented that I cannot complete them.
A hardcore game (though I rarely use this word) is anything that's not casual. Casual is the oddity.
A casual game is one that has been designed to allow you to leave at any point. WoW is not a casual game because if you're in the middle of a raid, and get up and leave, you lose and have to start over. Most video games are like this. If you get up at the wrong time, you lose progress.
Now, think about farmville, which I believe is the most popular and pure instance of a casual game. When can you get up and lose progress? The answer is never. Peggle is another good example. Tetris is not, nor is pacman.
You can put a deep story behind a casual game (no examples immediately spring to mind, but it can be done). You can have no story behind a non-casual game (tetris?).
I definitely don't think of them as girly or manly games. I believe it completely possible to make a "girly" non-casual game and a "manly" casual game.
http://insultswordfighting.blogspot.com/2008/01/new-taxonomy-of-gamers-what-we-talk.html
Anthony: To be sure, not every game will offer the same range of engagement options. We have a classic "accessible vs. deep" problem in the ARG world, because doing both equally is resource-intensive and not always a good investment. But if you start designing with an eye toward a broader range of user experiences in mind, the work will surely benefit.
Brian: *nodnod* I talk about the difference between playing a game to BEAT it, vs. playing a game to SEE the game. Not everyone is interested in a competitive challenge.
Daniel: I still find that definition lacking vis a vis games. Farmville is tied to the real-world clock, and it's ticking whether you're playing or not. If you walk away from Farmville, your crops will wither and your teammates will lose their co-op. Progress will definitely be lost. Does that make it hardcore? With Portal, you can save the game and walk away at literally any instant. I exploited this mercilessly to beat GLaDOS. Does that make it a casual game? (Also, note that you're arguing against something that is not my point here, that being: casual and hardcore are types of engagement, and not types of game.)
John: I will definitely check it out. You always come bearing interesting links, thanks! ^_^
Leaving out the sexism (though you can figure out most of it: think stay-at-home-mom), the original intent was to provide games for people that can only play a minute at a time, then they have to go somewhere for 30 minutes, then play another minute, then be gone for an hour. If you can only play for a minute, then navigating to a save menu, choosing a slot to save to, etc. takes up a large percentage of your playable time. For this reason I'd call most of Portal a casual game, the final boss fight being a notable non-casual part.
The meaning has changed since then (and maybe the first time I saw it wasn't actually the "original") but to me that's what it means. If your keyboard/mouse/controller gets unplugged at a random point that you can't control, are you going to die or have to lose progress? The higher the chances that the answer is "yes" the less casual the game is.
Farmville counts as highly casual because of the sheer amount of leeway built in. If you plant a one-hour crop, it takes two hours before it wilts. If you plant a 3-day crop, it takes six whole days before it wilts. It's per-plant, so the amount of progress you lose can actually go down to a single square (though usually people plant more than that at a time). Animals and trees, to my knowledge, never "go bad." So you can do just those and have a game where you never actually lose progress!
I personally use the term "casual game" or "hardcore gamer" but never "hardcore game" or "casual gamer." The latter two don't make sense with my internalization of what it means, though I understand when others use the terms.
There are far more two to four-hour crops in Farmville than three-day ones. Not sure what you're getting at by pointing out withering is per plant -- if you stay away from your raspberries, you can be sure they'll all be withered when you get back, regardless of the gradual algorithm in place.
You CAN also play WoW and never go into a dangerous area and never lose progress because nothing will kill you. But it's not the typical player experience, so I don't see how that fundamentally changes the definition of the game.
Why doesn't this "walk away" definition make every game you can *pause* -- and that is the vast bulk of games -- into a casual game?
It used to be that "casual game" meant something you could play while waiting for the bus or in between meetings. It pretty much needed to be on a portable device (I had a Handspring Visor! Rockin'! But a GameBoy worked just as well as would a cellphone running Snake or Brick Breaker). These were the solitaires, Tetrises, Bejeweleds of the world -- with a shallow learning curve, short levels, and the ability to pause at any time. If you lost, it was no big deal, you could start again at any time. The point was to be a fun timewaster. PopCap made a ton of these games.
At some point, this term grew to consoles to mean girly games, family games, and whatnot. These days, I have no idea how I'd really define a "casual game" on a console. I might fall back to the "low barrier to entry and shallow learning curve" qualification. Personally, I don't find Portal to be something you can just "put down" in the middle of a level in the same way I can with, say, Words With Friends, Doodle God, or sudoku. You can save at any time, but the capability of saving (or as Andrea says "any game you can *pause*") doesn't make a game casual. Words With Friends is simple yet challenging enough to be something my mom would be able to play. Portal is not.
Personally, I like games with story and atmosphere. I'm casual both in the sense of iPhone games I can play at the bus stop and in that I play a good, big, "non-casual" (for lack of a better term) game once or twice a year, but in a fairly casual (i.e. n00b difficulty level) way. I put an extremely small percentage of my time and income into games. I'm big into exploring and puzzling, and really anti things with heavy amounts of hand-eye coordination.
And as a result of my gaming preferences, I understand only about half the jokes on The Guild. ;)
As the nineties saw an explosion of older, previously uninterested players flocks to a few simple games (Tetris, Bejeweled, etc). The potential for this "vast untapped market" (which has typically included a larger proportion of women) has been fueling the debate ever since.
Over time "casual" has grown to mean "that which brings in the masses of new customers". I think many in the industry think that if they can break the secret of making games women will play, they'll be the next Bill Gates.
Hence the overly-targeted girly games that try to reproduce (steal) past successes.
While I completely agree with the concept on variable engagement levels in gaming experiences, I'm afraid that in alot of cases it's just a risky and costly proposition.
A common misconception is that video game makers spend most of their time actually creating content. The fact is most of our energies goes into making the experience actually work and then spending what little time is left after that to polish it to an acceptable level.
What I mean to say is that there is a definite will to make sure the player can't skip over content that we put a lot of effort into. A palpable fear that content not experienced is work lost.
I've actually been on both sides of that argument over time. I find it hard to generalize a rule for this. Some games lend themselves very well to this, other lose what makes them interesting in the first place. Most games I've worked on have had their "casual mode" features cut early in dev as the returns don't seem to justify the costs (ie cutting something else from the schedule).
When we can see clear indicators that convince producers and execs that casual can make them money, you'll see alot more it.
Brian, I would agree and add: "low barrier to entry, shallow learning curve, very short reward cycle".
I think the reason some games can be put down boils down to how the reward loop is setup. If an objective can be started, completed and rewarded within minutes, the player never have more than a few minutes at stake and so is free to come and go.
(by this logic, Civilization would rank as one of the least casual games ever; i'll have to ponder that).
Thanks for making me think.