What is a casual and a hard core gamer?

There is a lot of talk about casual and hard core gamers in the computer games industry. The hard core gamers are people who take their gaming very seriously. They spend a lot of time honing their skills and like to compete and compare with others. For them, games is almost more than a hobby, it's aching to a way of life. As a contrast, the casual gamer plays enjoys playing games once in a while and uses games as an alternative, among many others, for entertainment and enjoyment. Understanding the difference between these two types of gamers is key to understanding many design decisions. A hard core gamer would find much enjoyment in spending hours honing hundreds of a second of his or her lap time around an F1 circuit, while this would have little appeal to a casual gamer who, to begin with, probably don't even have hours to spend on a game at any single gaming session.

As you might expect, hard core gamers make up a smaller part of the over all game audience. Hence you'd be tempted to think that most games would be geared towards the casual gamer. However, things are a bit more complicated than that. Much of the industry is made up of hard core gamers (after all, if you make games your career, then you'd really have to like them, wouldn't you?). When your trying to decided if something is fun, you usually use yourself as a frame of reference. To make matters worse for the casual gamers, most of the gaming press is written by hard core gamers, and most gaming communities on the Internet are run by hard core gamers. This imbalances the power between the casual and the hard core gamers to the hard core gamers' advantage. This results in a lot of games having elements that are not particularly suited for casual gamers, and it are those things that this blog aims to point out.