What does Casual Gaming mean to you guys?

[Dark Sage]

I have often heard the term "casual" in a derogatory way referred to gaming. Video games, the players, the developers, etc. There seems to be a phobia of this casual thing going on.

But the thing is, what exactly is casual gaming? I am genuinely mystified by this question. Casual these days is one of those words that are thrown about and used so much that they've lost any sense of meaning, like paradigm. What I mean is, it seems that people use casual in different ways. Some use casual to refer to the crowd that occasionally picks up Tetris, some use casual to refer to something of a lower difficulty, some use casual to refer to a non-serious gamer, and some use casual all too often to refer to anything they personally don't like.

With these conflicting definitions used, it can be a little difficult to judge what it even is. My second question is if something being more casual is a bad thing and if so, why?

Please post your answers here, I'm interested in knowing your opinions.

[HF Makalov Fanboy Kai]

to me it means people who just have fun with a video game and nothing esle.

sounds alright with me.

[buttmuncher.ops]

You'd have to know the games I'm talking about but the best example I can provide are people who play League of Legends as opposed to DotA 2 (although it is in open beta.) While this would not bother me one bit when DotA 2 is actually released because I respect the type of gamer people choose to be, I would use casual as an insult to any LoL player who passes judgment on DotA 2 when they've never played it to know the difference in skill level and understanding of game mechanics to be successful in a different metagame within the same genre. I've personally played both with a hardcore mindset (successfully) so I can safely speak for both sides and thus it enrages me when a casual presumes to know more than they've actually experienced.

Otherwise it doesn't hold a negative connotation for me.

[The Blind Archer]

It means playing video games as a hobby or form of recreation. Simple as that. Anything beyond that is getting into e-sports territory.

[viyut]

A casual gamer would be someone who plays a game just for the fun, and nothing else. A casual gamer also doesn't spend several hours a day playing a game.

And to my point of view being a casual gamer is a good thing, hardcore gaming doesn't sound fun at all!

[Galenforcer]

Usually I refer to it as playing through the game leisurely at whatever pace and don't care about how time-savers or expert tips.

It's like spending days on end grinding to beat one boss, when there's a complicated way to win at a low level.

[Phoenix]

I don't think it's bad in the slightest.

For me casual gaming is playing a game with no intention of beating the living crap out of it. Like in Metal Gear Solid games you can go for dog tags or search for those model pictures throughout the game, Halo you can go for skulls and insanely high difficulties, and in FPS or RTS games you can try to maintain a really good K/D or W/L ratio. Casual gaming wouldn't focus on any of that for me(unless it was easy and didn't require hours of time investment).

Games I'm serious with:

Battlefield 3

Ace Combat Assault Horizon

Games I'm 'casual' with:

Mass Effect 1 and 2

Sims 3 Pets

Tekken 6

(only games I own are on that list, I've been doing a lot of gamefly renting lately )

[Vorena]

Casual play to me is anything about a game that does not take the game to any sort of in-depth level. People who play games like this are casual gamers.

For example, take most people here in Serenesforest. I hardly define many of the people here as casual gamers. We understand Fire Emblem to a degree not many other people do and attempt to manipulate the game with our understanding of it to levels not many other people would. When you are trying to shave off turns every chapter in systemic ways (look how dondon does his 0% growth runs), and these are strategies can sometimes be repeated. To me, that is not casual play anymore.

There are varying degrees of casual gamer, and the meaning gets built around people you know. But for the most part, what I said above is how I view it in general for any game.

Here is another example.

There are so many glitches in Ocarina of TIme that people can practice and attempt to speed run the game without tool assist. Some methods are more complicated than others. This goes beyond a casual gamer of Ocarina of Time in my opinion. I have done these sort of speed runs before in zelda and beaten the game in 4 hours. There are methods that can get it done in an hour, but I find them too difficult to do. So while I am not setting any records, I casually like to speedrun the game of zelda.

[Loki Laufeyson]

A casual gamer would be someone who plays a game just for the fun, and nothing else. A casual gamer also doesn't spend several hours a day playing a game.

And to my point of view being a casual gamer is a good thing, hardcore gaming doesn't sound fun at all!

More or less. Only i see casual gaming as someone who plays and/or buys games of their favorite series and takes their time through it versus going balls blazing into it and spending hours and hours finding every little thing and "outsmarting" the game. The way hardcore gaming is often described just....ugh...its not something i would do. To use FE as an example, a "casual" player is someone more like me who just plays it to enjoy it and doesnt try to figure out every little tweak and quirk in it. Or resets because a level up wasnt so awesome that one time around. A "hardcore" player wants to kick the crap out of the hardest mode of the game. They want to break down level averages and junk like that and manipulate the RNG in their favor. So yeah..."hardcore" is too much effort for me. I like to have fun. But i do play games for long periods of time and sometimes want to 100% a game, so i guess im somewhere in between.

[Aethereal]

I dont think it means worse, but that the casual player is less invested. This might be through time or energy, but usually a combination of both.

[Racer]

People who have fun and take their time with games. Or maybe someone who just wants to finish the game and not get all the achievements

[Excellen Browning]

Casual gamers, to me, are the people you see at school/college/university playing free internet games... They have some fun with them and then leave them when something else to do pops up. They don't make time for video games (to me that's the most important aspect of hardcore gaming), but when they have some time to kill, they may turn to some easy, fun and easily leavable game to entertain themselves. They generally don't buy their games and one other aspect is that they're not (often) competitive about it a.k.a. dying a gazillion times in MW1-2-3 is okay because we're just in it for the fun.

[Naglfar]

Casual/hardcore is a sliding scale directly proportional to your level of focus on performance/skill/competition/whatever is relevant. It's the extent to which you take it seriously, or how emotionally invested you are. It's not a complicated concept at all, but apparently some people consider "casual" to be synonymous with "fun" somehow. Others think "casual" is something to be frowned upon. I'm not sure which is a worse omen for our gene pool.

[Snowy_One]

To me a casual gamer is someone who has picked up the game and is playing it largely for enjoyment. They don't obsess over objectives (ergo, rushing as fast as possible), are willing to waste time doing things hardcore gamers would shudder at (using sages other than Tormod), don't care so much about stats (they do care, but no where near the degree that a hardcore gamer does), and generally play to have fun instead of LTC or anything. At least that's when talking about FE.

IMO, casual gaming is a good thing, a very good thing. In any game, only a portion of gamers will be 'hardcore' and it rarely is the majority. As a result, game developers make things for the casual group and it usually means things that are fun instead of things that would challenge a hardcore. I would rather have 'useless dialogue' or 'pretty graphics' over 'taking fifteen hours to do simple things' and you get that with casuals. Plus, casual systems usually are both fun to break and enjoyable when done, when hardcore systems are designed with the notion that you're going to break it anyways so they find ways to account for that.

[Ike-Mike]

He does not exist. This is a made-up word from traditional users to describe the downmarket products (which they believe are stupid and retarded). The so-called “Casual Player” is just a moving target that depends on whatever the perspective of the downmarket is at the time. In the NES days, the ‘casual player’ played Tiger Electronic games. Today, the ‘casual player’ plays Wii Sports. Often, the casual games of yesterday can become the ‘hardcore games’ of tomorrow and vice versa. It depends on which way the pendulum is moving.

[Junkhead]

A casual gamer is he who takes the game home, beats it, and then abandons it, thinking there's nothing left to it.

Saying casual gamers just "play for fun" is silly. Harcore gamers can have fun as well, even if they can also get butthurt over losing.

[Celice]

Casual games are games in which the goal is to take up time, and entertain the player. The experience alone is what is most important.

An actual game is more concerned with creating a world in which the player interacts, with more emphasis than just some basic gameplay to entertain. Casual gamers enjoy both--an average gamer often shuns casual games as being of little content.

Enthusiasts and extremists believe there's one way to play a game and it's an intended way.

[Rehab]

My biased definition of a casual gamer is one often unwilling to go outside of a certain comfort zone, and somebody who treats games as, natch, something casual. Somebody who doesn't think much while playing, and doesn't want to.

[Balcerzak]

In the NES days, the ‘casual player’ played Tiger Electronic games.

Oh man. I remember those. I had a handful of them that I absolutely played the shit out of.

[Original Alear]

It has pretty much no meaning to me whatsoever.