As video games become more and more mainstream the industry labels of "core games" and "casual games" become less and less useful. I'll look at the forces that drove the categories, what's breaking them down, and how it changes how we should think about games.
3. As one of the few female CEOs in gaming I tend to get consulted when a reporter is
writing on women and games, and I got this question a few months back. When I tried
to answer I got stuck because I felt like there were a ton of assumptions baked in that
I wasn’t sure I agreed with.
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5. This is the top 7 most played games on Kongregate in the last month. Two are pretty
clearly casual (though idle games are not a genre mentioned) but most are in genres
that are not considered casual: FPS, MMO, CCG
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6. And our demographics fit the core gamer stereotype: overwhelmingly male, high
weekly time spent on games, play console games
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7. This is part of the reason why I don’t like the concepts of “core” and “casual”.
Kongregate is a site dominated by classic “core gamers” and the 5th most played
game in the history of the site, Learn to Fly 2, is a cute launch game involving
penguins that anybody could pick up and play.
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8. But more than the muddiness of their meaning the reason I hate “core” and “casual” is
because every time we use those terms we are implicitly devaluing certain types of
game experiences, usually that of females and older adults. By calling any type of
gaming “core” we’re automatically calling the rest peripheral.
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9. The definition of casual suggests that it something people do occasionally at best
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10. But my friend Lida, who exactly fits the classic stereotype of a casual gamer – female
in her mid 40s – is a great example of why that is a very bad assumption if we
assume they play irregularly.
We were chatting about games recently and she mentioned that she’d never
considered herself a gamer but was shocked when she realized quite how much she
was playing solitaire when she examined her stats.
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11. I asked her to send me screenshots of her stats and because she’s a Chemistry PhD
she did a thorough analysis. She’s played 300 hours of solitaire since she got her
iPhone 6, so she’s playing about 15 hours a week – it’s her go-to downtime hobby.
Lida prefers the games that are difficult, and tracks her her win rate to see if she is
making progress and improving her skills.
What’s casual about this? Essentially it comes down to: non-violent game familiar
from previous play
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12. Here’s another woman whose experience breaks the labels we use: my grandmother,
an upper middle class lady from Waco, Texas who died 25 years ago and probably
never touched a computer in her life.
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13. She loved to play bridge and mahjong, belonged to clubs to play both. She was both
very good and very competitive at it – so much so that the family’s first clue that she
was going senile was when my mom saw her misplay a bridge trick.
Now in video games we would call bridge and mahjong casual games, but if you think
about the gameplay that doesn’t really make sense. They’re deep, high-skill co-op
mulitplayer games
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14. I don’t think there’s any significant difference between the source of my
grandmother’s enjoyment of games in her lifetime and that of someone playing
League of Legends today: skill, achievement, social connection, competitive drive.
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15. Games seem to be one of the most universal aspects of culture. Every ancient culture
has its own board games with the oldest specimens dating back 5000 years, likely
played mostly by elites
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16. Games spread culture to culture as fast or faster than other types of knowledge.
Playing cards were first invented in China in the 9th century. They reached Egypt
around three hundred years later where they developed the 4 suit/52 card pack
structure we’re familiar with before arriving in Europe in around 1300.
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17. By 19th century card and board games were dominant social activities for those with
leisure, which was increasing with the modern economy.
Since these games were inherently social they spread virally through groups, adopted
by families and communities rather than individuals. Everybody played, game rules
were taught by family or friends, and as such had strong social endorsement.
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18. But video games, when they arrived in the 1970s, spread differently. Crowding around
screens, keyboards, and joysticks the games were necessarily played more
individually. Arcade games were destinations, PCs and consoles were special
purchases, so games were bought and played by the adventurous, the novelty-
seeking, and the early tech adopters ! and those were overwhelmingly young males
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19. The early game systems were marketed to families but the industry quickly doubled
down on the tastes of young men. First person shooters became one of the most
popular genres and improved graphics allow for more realistic gore and less realistic
female breasts.
The density of gamers within the young males increased to the point where playing
video games became automatic. It wasn’t a geeky subculture (though it was that, too,
within that), it was what everyone did. The social endorsement, the passing of
knowledge, though restricted by demographic, was more like the way games used to
pass through communities, pulling in males who might not have searched out games
on their own.
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20. But even though women and older generations weren’t willing to go out and buy
dedicated hardware to play unfamiliar games didn’t mean they weren’t playing video
games. Microsoft bundled solitaire with windows and in the 90s it was hard to walk
into an accounting department without seeing someone quickly hide it on their screen.
Familiar card and board games quickly became some of the most popular free
content on browser portals like Yahoo!, AOL, and MSN, and the portal owners were
surprised to find the audience was middle-aged and majority female – the opposite of
what they were expecting. PopCap proved you could get these gamers to play and
pay for new genre if they could try the game first and the price was reasonable.
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21. By 2007 video game players were pretty evenly distributed across all demographics,
but the distribution and consumption of games was almost totally segregated between
young men and everyone else. That reinforced the stereotypical view of who a gamer
was with the industry, the media, the culture in general. Even though people were
playing games en masse it was a relatively silent phenomenon, where play was
mostly isolated and individual, the consumers didn’t self-identify as gamers, and often
felt guilty about “wasting time”. Social activity was strong, especially on Pogo, but
more likely to be chatting with strangers rather than interacting with friends or family.
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22. Social games upended that paradigm. First of all you didn’t have to search out
games, they came to you. And they came to you with both social endorsement and
social pressure – my crops are dying, can’t you help? Even while people complained
about spam it made visible what had been hidden, created the density of activity that
convinces the hesitant that this is an acceptable way to spend your time, and made it
possible for games to be a truly mass phenomenon again.
The other major innovation was the adoption of free-to-play as the dominant business
model. The industry had always struggled with monetizing gamers who want to play a
few games repeatedly rather than moving on. Console games turned to the pseudo
subscription of the annual sequel, MMOs to subscriptions, but casual games had
limped along with an ad-supported model. But with free-to-play that type of player is
desirable – as long as the developer can continue to push content and items worth
buying, the revenue is uncapped.
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23. Mobile has pushed things farther – not only are smartphones broadly adopted across
all demographics, they’re constantly with us, which gives them a lead over any other
platform for games. Console gamers and social gamers are discovering games from
the same two app stores, pushing games up truly unified charts. And that’s having
interesting effects.
One effect is that it increases the visibility within the industry of successful games
targeted to females – the Kim Kardashian game has gotten as much attention as
Hearthstone, which wouldn’t have happened if it had hit the same level of success on
Big Fish and Yahoo! Games.
But more important than that is that players are being exposed to games and genres
that never would have been marketed to them in the past, and finding they like them.
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24. A great example of that is my friend Megan. She had been playing card and puzzle
games on her phone for a while but got bored with Candy Crush and decided to try
Clash of Clans because it was the next game on the list, and she’d seen a
commercial. She’d never played a strategy game before but 6 months later she’s an
elder in a competitive clan with people she’s never met and has been caught playing
during parties when a clan war is going on.
And that goes in both directions. I’ve seen surveys of Gamestop’s heavy console
game buyers and let me tell you, they’re playing a lot of Candy Crush. What that
means is that hit games are again truly mass experiences, even to the point where
Superbowl ads make sense.
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25. So why am I ranting about core and casual labels if I think we’re starting to transcend
them anyway? Well, I believe that the stereotypes/shorthand of core and casual
gamers have become so deeply embedded in all of us that it’s interfering with how we
design, market, and monetize games.
We realize that the labels aren’t working anymore, so we’ve started throwing
compromise bandaids at it like “mid core”, but most definitions of mid core I hear are
along the lines of “core games on accessible platforms with better tutorials”. It’s
broadening the audience some, but still underestimating the universality of the
pleasures of games.
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26. And by understanding consumption patterns separate from genre tastes we can
better serve customer needs. Here’s another way we could split the audience
Familiarity looks different than it did 15-20 years ago. The games of people’s
childhoods are no longer necessarily cards. It’s just as likely to be tetris or Madden or
Doom. IP also helps this type of true casual get into a game.
Also by looking at the past it can help you predict the future. Looking forward to VR,
for example, the fact that it’s specialized hardware suggests that it’s likely to be
embraced again by novelty-seekers, mostly young males, and that a paid model is
going to be best for a long time. But if there are practical reasons to embrace the
hardware then we’ll see it spread much more broadly, but without that we could see it
become a big market niche but not a mass market.
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27. But more than that if we continue to stick with the labels we’ve used in the past, we’re
serving all gamers poorly. The good news is that we have an industry that is truly a
mass audience industry: almost everybody plays video games now, just as almost
everybody go the movies, watches TV, or listens to music. But we would never talk
about a “core” moviegoer or music listener. There are genres, and many genres have
demographic tilts, and they have both casual and enthusiast fans that are not
mutually exclusive. I can be an enthusiast fan of indie rock and a casual fan of hip-
hop and opera. Studio execs may chase young male audiences with action movies in
the summer, but they make the movies knowing they won’t be huge successes unless
women and older men like them, too.
So let’s stop breaking our audience into just two groups and condescending to one of
them. Games are more than that, Gamers are more than that, and the industry can
be, too.
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28. Games were likely played mostly by the elites, and spread culture
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