why has the term "casual" become a derogatory term among gamers?

to the point it seems many gamers see those marked as "casual" as being inferior?


I started gaming back when it was far less "mainstream" than it is today, and I remember most of society viewed gamers in general as being inferior, to the point if you said you were a gamer in high school you would be essentially ostracized for the rest of your school days..

as such, when people refer to a "casual" in a derogatory manner, it reminds me of how gamers in general were once treated...


I believe we "geeks", be we Gamers, DnD Players, Anime fans, Comic book nuts, etc. should be more accepting of what others like or enjoy, as we were all once looked down upon for what we enjoyed..

I always took "casual" to be a category of gamer, neither good or bad.

They just don't play as much as hardcoe, or they don't play deep games.

Nothing wrong with that. But I agree with the whole "it shouldn't be associated with a negative connotation".

Casual is not a term used by gamers, casual is used as a term by self conscious losers who fixate on gaming as their sole achievement in life, ergo they judge others to defend their only capability. To a NORMAL gamer, a casual gamer is someone who casually dips in when they have a moment to spare. It's not an insult, it's just a gamer with too little time to enjoy the hobby. Don't confuse the two.

I don't understand the concept either, by definition, I am a 'casual gamer', yet like the depth that is usually claimed to be removed to cater to 'casuals'. I don't get it, but now wonder if it'll end up on the auto-censor list like some other terms....

Ha, I can think of somebody in particular that uses the term how describe there.

I actually think I'm more casual nowadays. I try to play as much as possible but it can be difficult.

My question is, is a specific game considered casual? If so what elements does it contain? If somebody argues "casuals killed gaming" what in the world can that even mean? Does streamlining make a game more casual? If so, how can a person that is a fan of Skyrim (a game that is extremely streamlined from previous installments) make that argument? This is something that has been bother me for quite some time and now is a good as any to discuss this. This is not directed at anybody in particular, but I've seen this argument on this forum before.

Its not aimed at gamers, its been around much longer. I golf, I take the game serious vs some of my friends play who only play a few times a year. they have been casual golfers since the 70's. its a just a way of defining your interest level.

Thank you. I agree 100%. Pretty much the only people that use the term as an insult are losers with no life.

Huh... and here I've always thought it was for people who mainly play "casual" games, you know like 'bejewled' or 'angry birds', and that the "casualization" of hardcoe games was to reach this market through simplification and streamlining.

Like how Normal difficulty has become the new Easy, and why a game like Skyrim needs a Legendary difficulty patched in later so it can provide for people who wanted a Hard mode (rather than Normal labled as Hard).

This, although this does not give those in the gaming industry an excuse to make games easier, which seems to be the case, in my opinion.

Casual is just somebody who plays very little, play for the excitement. So a "casual" would only lick the icing off the cake while a "what term is the opposite (normal?)" would delve in and enjoy every crumb. I don't see it as an offense. Just a term to apply to what crowd you are trying to get. If you want a "casual" crowd you put flashy elements to keep their interest, because as I stated before they are merely here to lick the icing. I do have a slight dislike when developers do however just make their game flashy as in putting too much icing on the cake, and too much icing is just gross so you know..

Look at AcetoolGuy's post like 3 or 4 above mine.. Pretty much that.

Depends on what you mean by casual. I no longer play nearly as much as I used to. This is due to boredom as well as just being busy. But I know a lot about games, lore and so on, so I personally do not feel I am casual. I don't have anything against gamers like that, or against any gamers really. It's only when game companies start trying to accommodate casuals that I harbor negative feelings for them. Which to me a casual is someone that doesn't know a great deal about games and do not care to.

An example of this supposed accommodation and the negative effects:

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1481425-the-only-route/?p=23205855

They've effectively killed gaming.

But rockstar saved us.

I don't dislike casual gamers. I just don't like the casualization of some games. Butchering them and hacking them into little pieces of their former self. A simulator game by its very essence is complicated. When you strip away too many features in the name of a broader market you lose all that made you an individual.

I also don't like games that do this in general. You have to do your own niche and make your own games to thrive in a market this saturated. When I see companies simply designing a paint by design game I get a little depressed. I fully believe that both sides need to be in equilibrium, but feel this is often not the case. With casuals being preferred due to a... much easier dollar to person ratio. Or at least on the surface and in short term.

Make things as simple as possible, without making them simpler. You need to have a lot of features and unique things to do, but you need to do them simply. RPG's were once thought to be a niche that would never survive. Now people can't scramble fast enough to make them. They have in many instances lost a lot in translation from older games to newer. Lack of spell crafting is a big easy to make example. There is no reason it shouldn't be in the game. Who cares if some people found it too complicated. Find a way to make it as simple as possible without removing the features.

Now over the course of game to game you might lose one or two things. I don't think when people are arguing of casulaization that it happens all at once (though it can more often than I would like). In a long running series as more and more features are cut or stripped to appeal to a wider audience until your a very generic game. This will simply alienate the ones who put you into this position. The casual market can be very fickle and if they lose interest and you no longer have your core fans you've sunk your own boat. I've seen a lot of companies do this. It is the gradual reductions over generations of a series that add up to a whole lot of loss.

So do I fear making things simple and easy or quick? Not necessarily. I don't like the way the video game publishers and developers seem to define it though.

Edit

I also feel that both more serious gamers and casuals benefit from their own games now diluted. I mean it would svck pretty bad if in Angry Birds you needed to suddenly grind like crazy to upgrade your throwing stat and embark on a quest and epic story 50+ hours long. Likewise if there is a game clearly designed for more serious gamers I don't feel diluting it is a good thing. Sometimes certain games only function properly in one side or the other. Getting players from one group or the other demanding features will only make the game weaker and no one will be happy. Example Star Citizen. That game is being designed for a very specific and niche crowd. I don't think suddenly going back and making it easy and casual is going to end all that well. It's a space simulator which by its definition has a certain level of complexity and depth needed of it.

Is it [censored] that not everyone has time for more serious heavy time investment games? Yes. It really is. I understand and have been there, but I'm not going to go and ruin their series just so I can get some half baked idea of what it would be like to play the more serious version in a quarter of the time. That's life. Some games you can play and some you can't.

Please, regale is with the tales of how these inferior gamers ruined every game for you.

*The young child looked at the golden medallion pinned to the man's chest and asked, "Grandpa, how did you get that medal?" The old man's eyes glistened with tears, as he proudly said, "I stuck it to those casuals, put them right in their place."*

Anyway, I think that the term is meant in a derogatory manner, just like nerd and geek, but that is only one interpretation. I think most people view casuals as the COD/Battlefield crowd, or the online FPS types. I was one, somewhat, until I got into Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim. Some might say I ruined those games with my foul stench of "newb," but you know what, who cares? The companies that produce these game want to make money, and they do that by pulling in a larger audience. If that means some things are slimmed down, that's what happens. That being said, the product shouldn't suffer as a result.

Even with my interest now shying away from FPS to RPGs or action games, I still consider myself a casual style gamer, as I have so many ther hobbies that I can't devote a ton of time to gaming. Sorry if that ruins your games as a result, with companies targeting the limited amount of time I can play, but their jobs are to maximize profits, so can you really blame them?

I couldnt have put it better.

Pretty much this any more.

It's gotten to the point that the word "casual" appearing in a post is a sign that I should stop reading that post right there and just move on down the thread.

I agree with parts of these posts. I think of a casual gamer as one who plays casual games. It's not an insult, it's a descriptive term. It depends more on the type of game than the frequency of your play.

I think of casual games as those with little depth (story, history, lore) where you can jump in for 10 minutes every 6 months and not be confused about what you are doing. A non-casual game is one where 10 minutes isn't enough time to recall where you are, or what you were doing the last time you played. Neither is "better", but only one might fulfill your gaming needs.

I like deeper games (Morrowind, Oblivion), but others like something faster. I haven't played Skyrim, but I keep reading that the simplification I saw from Morrowind to Oblivion continued. I do see this as a means of pulling in "casual gamers" looking for something they can jump in and out of. I look for depth, so this is something I'm not happy about.

I haven't played a game in over a year, but I still don't see myself as a casual gamer, because I don't play what I consider casual games.

It is ridiculous, childish, and idiotic to use "casual" as a derogatory term. I bet a lot of those self-declared "hardcoe" gamers are just butthurt because the gaming industry doesn't cater specifically towards them and so they blame the dumbed down games on the casuals. Like seriously, how dare they treat video games as a recreational pastime activity? Makes me sick.

As far as the internet is often concerned, I'd generally agree with this. However, I don't think "casual" represents only time available/time played. There's also an attitude/preference in gameplay style. What do I mean by gameplay style?

Let's Play Scrabble!

Casual gamer: looks at their letters and casually spells out any common words they know/see. Not too much thought put into it or highest scores possible. May get bored before the game is finished.

hardcoe gamer: pulls out 2 dictionaries (may also debate which dictionaries are "valid" and how long one can take per turn), tries to use a word that maximizes potential points every turn, gets a little annoyed if game is not finished after a certain point.

...While the above are of course generalizations (and just imo), the point is that it's not always just about time spent.

imo hardcoe gamers are obsessive gamers, whether they obsess in smaller time increments or in larger ones. They obsess over numbers, over rule and combat mechanics, over roleplaying elements/lore, over "the best" strategies, the fastest, the most damage, how many different ways one can achieve the same goal, who the best character/party is, what the best unit is, or whatever else floats one's personal boat.

Casual gamers may care about those things to, but often to a much lesser degree. They're less likely, imo, to play the same game over and over for months/years, instead moving on to the next game fairly rapidly.

My husband is "hardcoe" in terms of hours spent, I suppose. And he's also liked very few games over the past 2 decades (he's picky). But despite his hundreds (maybe 1000's) of hours put into Borderlands series (and Tombraiders, Doom, and a couple others), I'd still call him a casual gamer, because 1-he doesn't want to "think" while playing a game (and he hates steep learning curves) and 2-he never goes into the same obsession mode over a game that I consider hardcoe. Doesn't care about collecting. Doesn't care about story at all. Doesn't care or even think about achieving many game-type goals, whether in-game or self-motivated. In other words, he never pulls out a dictionary. ... but he doesn't like AngryBirds, either.

http://i.imgur.com/MbYVc.jpg

I think its a situation where people who first started using the term casual to describe lazy development and not a segment of the gaming community. As in certain rpg games being developed to have a significantly less content to appeal to a larger target demographic that would otherwise become too overwhelmed with the options or learning curves previous titles had. and some where between there and now jaded fans of said series blame the gamers rather than the developers for their poor development choices.

Yes this is a reasonable stance on the matter.

i think the best solution is to either improve the ease of access to the learning curve to people who would be defined as casual, or to design the game to have virtually no tutorial what so ever in a way that discovering how to play becomes rewarding even for people who would be considered casual. games like terraria, minecraft, and starbound seem to pull in every one casual to hardcoe.

My husband would not like games like Minecraft. Still too much to learn/remember and he'd get so lost. Oddly, he doesn't like regular FPS that much overall, either. Especially today's FPS. He's an odd duck perhaps.

You do make a good point, tho, and I'd agree with it. I find for myself, as I grow older, that while I still have the same copious amount of free time (usually) that I no longer have the patience to pull out and look through a dictionary. I don't want to spend lots of time planning, thinking, making constant decisions. I'm not sure why I no longer seem to want to do that very much, but it's definitely happening to me. But I don't like the "super casual" phone/tablet/whatever games either. I rarely even bother to try new games anymore, because I know I won't get past the first 4-5 hours.

I am a charter member of CGPSNA: Casual Gamers Preservation Society of North America. We hold meetings in major cities across the country whenever we can find the time in our busy schedules to show up.

But lately we have run into trouble. A militant splinter group calling themselves hardcoe Casuals has broken off from the main group, which they derisively call Casual Casuals. And we are hearing rumors that a smaller group calling themselves hardcoe hardcoe Casuals have threatened to break off from the hardcoe Casuals. If that happens the hardcoe hardcoe Casuals will almost certainly split into even smaller factions calling themselves hardcoe hardcoe Casuals and hardcoe hardcoe hardcoe Casuals.

We will be so busy putting each other down that we will have no time left over to play video games.