Boredom-Fueled Blog

I’ve noticed two new terms come into usage lately. Maybe they’ve been around longer, but I’ve just noticed them in the past three or four years. The terms are “casual gamer” and “hardcore gamer.”
People seem to think that the terms depend on what kind of games you play. People seem to think that a hardcore gamer will play things like “Call of Duty” and “Medal of Honor,” and that casual gamers play things like “Cooking Mama” and “Mario Party.”
The Wii has gotten a reputation (at least, in the back of my mind it has) that it is for casual gamers because a lot of the games have childish animation. Nintendo has even said that they want the Wii to appeal to casual gamers. One such instance of this that I’ve noticed is in “Super Smash Bros. Brawl.” In previous Smash Bros. games the difficulty scale goes “Very Easy; Easy; Normal; Hard; Very Hard,” but in Brawl the scale goes “Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard, Intense.” I think this was done to give casual gamers the sense that they are playing “Hard” when they’re actually playing “Normal.” (I’ve actually complained about this before…)
According to Wikipedia (which we all know is the most reliable source there is), a hardcore gamers are “those whose leisure time is largely devoted to playing or reading about video games,” and a casual gamer is a “type of video game player whose time or interest in playing games is limited compared with a hardcore gamer.”
Apparently, hardcore vs. casual is not based on the kind of game (as I previously thought), but on the amount of play time. So, a person who spends seven hours a day playing “Wii Play” could be a hardcore gamer, and a person who plays “World of Warcraft” five minutes a week could be a casual gamer.
That set me straight, and I hope you learned a little something to… I try to teach and impart wisdom here, instead of just talking about random things that nobody cares about.

Nintendo