Everyone knows that there are two kind of players, hardcore and casual gamers, and that there is a clear difference between these groups… Or not? What is the difference between these groups and what separates them? And more importantly, what does this ‘gap’ do with your design process?
Although I do not know the true history of this characterization, I believe the roots of this ‘problem’ come from old video games. These old games were designed so that the computer would be able to run it, the focus was completely off the people who would play the game. These games had difficult interfaces with many options and very abstract visuals. A ‘normal’ person wouldn’t pick one of these up for a 10 minute play session, if you wanted to play a game, you had a whole lot of research to do before you could actually play. This created a technical threshold which kept a lot of players away from playing video games.
I believe the gap between casual and hardcore gamers is a usability problem and has to do with two things. The first problem that occurs is dedication; is the player dedicated enough to go through all the different assets of your game? This is not question you can particularly design your game around, but is still the biggest reason for many, many designers to create very simple games with just a few assets any person would understand in a matter of minutes. The second problem is knowledge and experience: a ‘hardcore’ gamer simply knows much more systems, mechanics and rules that apply to games than a ‘casual’ player. What follows is that designers tend to make games for the people who are already familiar with the systems they design, leaving out the people who are not so familiar with them and not making it easy for them to pick it up and play.
With the Nintendo Wii and DS, the technical threshold is much, much lower than it used to. For this generation of games, we will have to work hard to close the gap between casual and hardcore gamers by creating games that do not require a lot of dedication and even less knowledge and experience with games. Maybe all game designers should become usability experts too?
