Alexander Verbeek

I like creating. I love gaming. Creating games is my passion.

A question of definitions

January 10, 2012

[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”492” caption=”Casual or something else?”]Parabolic throw: We all know it's real use. (Angry Birds)[/caption]

For a little while now to aid me in researching this topic I have been searching for information in the form of articles, post, statistics and other resources. It was not long before I realised something that made my task very difficult initially.

The field of games is, quite frankly, absolutely huge. This is a very good thing. We all like to be able to choose from a wealth of games to pick and choose the ones that suit our preferences, and to have some variation every now and then. Unfortunately this also made it very difficult for me to see the forest from the trees.

To be able to draw some sensible conclusions, I really needed to be able to divide all those games into two big categories to analyse the differences. Thus I had to create some definitions. Of course there are issues with this approach. There’s a ton of different games and almost as many genres, and it can sometimes be difficult to say which of these categories a game belongs to because of overlap.

Casual Games

These games are developed for the general public, people who do not generally consider themselves gamers. They might encounter the game by chance or they might just be looking to pass the time for a short while. As such this audience naturally has a short attention span given their situation. If the game doesn’t spark their interest they will stop playing quickly. Thus it needs to be easy to play and give rewards quickly. To target the widest possible audience they are often non-violent arcade games. The prime examples would probably be Bejeweled and Angry Birds.

To summarize, casual games are mainly characterized by these characteristics:

Core Games

Games like these is what most people thing of when they hear the word video games. It is the foundation of current gaming culture. This historically mainly referred to modern games with high-end technologies, such as the latest Call of Duty, or strategy games and simulators with great depth. But it also includes the recent trend of indie games such as for example Minecraft and the Humble Indie Bundles. These games are meant for an audience familiar with gaming, who are looking to challenge themselves and spend more time on games. There is also a huge variation in genres.

I had a lot of difficulty finding a good term for this category. I didn’t like the word traditional because it has some negative connotations and I also did not like hardcore because it would imply a smaller audience than it deserves. Core seems just right.

Core games mainly have the following characteristics:

Of course these categories are not set in stone. There are undoubtedly exceptions to rules and anomalies which don’t quite fit, but I believe this to be accurate for my purposes.

Next post in this series: Analysing game industry revenue