I never understood these artificial needs to categorize all and everything.
So yeah, I'm most definitely a casual grinding, not-socialising, exploring achiever, hardcore gamer.

I'm a squirrel-core gamer.

Another Goddamn label? Sometimes I hate the gaming community so much. They love to put people into categories and discriminate. Farmville players are called "casual gamers", because other gamers don't want to be associated with what they consider low-caste players. The elitist nature is really starting to piss me off.

I have been very strange in terms of gaming as of late. Most of the time i'm out reading/watching about games (news, reviews, these forums ect) than actually playing them and sometimes I just don't feel like it. hell my most played game in the past week was dr mario of all things. Not that I think there is anything wrong with that game its just very weird for me to have that be my most played game.

This describes my entire gaming lifestyle, actually.

Oh yeah, and a pox on the labels. Just more tribalism.

Thanks for that cause now I have the comfort in knowing I'm not the only one. :D

Tell me about it. For example, in my teens I was a huge Mario fan but only owned the two original Gameboy games. Everything else came from reading fan sites on the Internet.

Ahh, I miss the days when people made fan sites instead of Wikipedia articles.

Ah the safety of ambiguity. Its nice how people just shoot down these kind of gamer demographics instead of looking into into their heart and choosing one to identify with. Well, like it or not, these kind of categorizations are very important. I don't hear gamers describe themselves as "hardcore" or "midcore" often. No, its the developers who usually toss these kind of words around. All devs design games around a certain audience, and I just wanted to see what you thought these rather rough gamer-categories meant to you.

Well, I don't like these kinds of categorizations because they can and have been used by people as an excuse to be asses.

As far as devs go, I'd rather they describe what kind of game they're making and letting us decide if their game is right for any of us rather than them stating assumptions about what's expected from their players.

If it really, really means that much to you, cpugeek, I'm a midcore gamer that's sympathetic to casual gamers.

Definable categories is pretty important to actually understanding the demographics of an overall population.

There's a huge difference between a "Casual Gamer" and a "Hardcore Gamer", and it's handy to anyone working in the field to have some idea who they're aiming at.

I'd categorized myself as very casual gamer.

Sooooo casual that I actually have never beat the game before in my whole life.

Most of the times, I'd buy the games and test out the game mechanic a little bit before moving on to other games. I find myself prefer to reading about games more than playing them.

You criticize ambiguity, but the entire problem is that these terms ARE ambiguous. They're amorphous non-definitions that mean completely different things to just about everybody, and as such are completely useless for any actual demographic research.

The only place they're seriously used by developers and publishers is in PR, where someone can say "this is for hardcore gamers" and thanks to the completely undefined nature of that term, you get plenty of people who just apply the term to themselves. It's a Rorschach marketing term, not a useful designation.

Do devs categorize their potential audience? Of course they do. But they use actual demographics and meaningful distinctions, not this marketing nonsense.

I don't know what type of gamer I am, all I know is not much else interests me other than posting in forums and playing around in graphics software.

All require a television or computer monitor.

I don't know what the hell I woulda done had I been born in the 1920s.

I'm cross-core. I can enjoy everything. Best described as just a gamer.

I like what I like, son. I've been playing since the day I was born, I love learning about the hardware, level design, programming, etc, and have played hundreds upon hundreds of games.

These days, I'd probably be described as a "casual gamer". I play to have fun, I think knowing about and paying attention to all the hidden statistics in Pokemon, for example, spoils the game (Though I do study hitboxes and technique in FPS games a lot, yet I like to reroll my characters as little as possible and let the fates decide. Maybe I'm just a bundle of hypocrisy...), and I couldn't be less competitive.

I love to compete, of course, but I didn't exactly come out of the womb somewhere in South Korea with a copy of Starcraft in my hand, and my largely anti-social disposition kept me from being very popular in clans.


I'll play actual casual games like Puzzle Quest, SFCave, Rtakagi, I especially love platformers and action games, but if a game just seems too uninspired and simple, and has artwork that could be done better by the lower half of DeviantArt, I don't touch that shit with a 10-foot pole.

Perhaps that could also be seen as "midcore". As sethsez says, and as I implied by calling them buzzwords, they're ambiguous. It's all a bunch of nonsense. This coming from a guy who's head is chock-full of useless video game knowledge, I can tell you labels aren't worth investing any thought into. Do what you will, though. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe labels are necessary.

Demographics aren't strict, but I suppose they have their place. Few people but the intended audience are going to play an "early childhood" game, and though most kids shouldn't be playing adult games, the "venn-diagram" has a big overlap, plenty of people will be playing games outside of their intended demographic, watching shows, cartoons, movies outside of their demographic, etc.