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This is part of an ongoing series of articles on Player Types in "A" list Massives aimed at the American and European market, such as EverQuest®, Dark Age of Camelot®, World of Warcraft®, Lord of the Rings Online®, Eve Online®, Warhammer Online®, etc. My first goal over the next few months is to develop a comprehensive list and description of unique player types. To accomplish this I will need your input and observations.
I have read countless articles and postings about Casual and Hardcore players. What has been missing is an actual definition of what a Casual or Hardcore player is. I know, you are thinking "well I know one when I see one." That may actually be true, but not be as useful as it could be. (Please note: I am talking about Casual and Hardcore players in Massives only.)
The most common definition I have seen is based amount of time played per week, which gives us:
Time played per week 1________2________3________4________5
Casual Me Hardcore
The problem here is that it is simply not true. End game raiders in WoW are considered hardcore and they typically have 10-12 hours of raids scheduled per week. They may need another hour or two per week for raid preparation. So an end game raider in WoW plays 12-14 hours per week. (Now he may log in to socialize or to play an alt, but so does any other player type.)
Self defined casual players report typically spending 30 minutes finding a group for a pick-up dungeon run and then about one hour doing the run. They typically do at least one run a night and perhaps two on a weekend. So a self reported casual player may easily play 14 hours a week, the same as a hardcore player.
Time played per session 1________2________3________4________5
Casual Hardcore
At first glance this makes sense. Back in EQ raiding Plane of Hate or Fear could take 6+ hours in one session, which is obviously not for everyone. Then with the raid Molten Core in WoW, raids could be saved and did not have to be done in one session. In addition, the latest expansion of WoW added some raids that take the same amount of time as a dungeon run. So currently the length of time played per session is more up to the players and not designers.
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Game Difficulty
I’m going to talk about game difficulty for a bit, and tie it into Casual and Hardcore below.
Player Difficulty
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Designer Difficulty 1________2________3________4________5
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Game Designer Difficulty is the difference between a crossword puzzle in TV Guide vs. a crossword puzzle in the New York Times. Some games are more difficult than others and some content within a single game may be more difficult than others. There are a number of five man instances in WoW, there is one "The Oculus" which is rarely run as it is considered by many to be much more difficult than the others.
Player Difficulty is how players approach a game and/or content. If I do my crossword puzzle in ink, I am making the game more difficult for me. I may challenge myself to do a crossword puzzle in a set period of time. I may make a crossword puzzle easier for myself by having a dictionary next to me.
In vanilla EverQuest, access to content was not limited by designers. Players could bring an unlimited number of people to a raid, thus the difficulty of the encounter was variable depending upon how many player joined. Raiders would brag about how few people they would bring to a raid. (The fewer the people, the more likely you would get loot.)
In WoW, instance designers tune the difficulty of an instance. Instances are designed for a certain level player to enter. Additionally a designer may make an easy dungeon for a certain level character with green (common) gear and another harder dungeon for a certain level character with purple (epic) gear.
Let’s talk about an instance with designer difficulty of 3. A player could adjust the difficulty of the instance by being over-geared and/or a higher level than anticipated by the designer, making a medium difficulty encounter into a trivial one. A player could make the encounter more difficult by being under-geared and lower level than anticipated by the designer. Thus a medium difficulty encounter can be made into a challenging one.
Designers also make assumptions as to what gems, enchants, potions, elixirs, food, etc. a group will bring to an instance. By using high-end enhancements and consumables, players can lower the difficulty by a bit.
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Observations
My first hint that the player base was changing was hearing "lol, ‘x’ is serious bizness, amirite" both on the forums and in game. Along with this came self-described casuals petitioning that they have access to all content. Their core argument is that they are paying to play a game, and should not have to work to see content they paid for. As WoW had expanded the player base, a lot of its new players came from single player RPG where it was expected a player would see all the content. In contrast, someone who had started Massives with EverQuest joined WoW with the expectation that only some people would see end-game content.
Casuals. Casuals do their crossword puzzles in pencil. They treat the game, well casually. They don’t really mind wipes, but will give up on content after a few of them. They don’t optimize their item enhancements, or their consumables. Optimization would take time away from playing and force them to grind for in-game cash. They don’t spend a lot of time learning their class, or optimizing their talents.
Casuals want to see forward progress on their progression through the game, but accept a slow pace. On the difficulty chart above, they will modify player difficulty by being over-geared and/or a higher-level character than anticipated by the designer. Additionally they may bring in a "ringer" a high-level, highly-geared player to "carry" them through the encounter. One of the keys to understanding casuals is: they could make their encounters even easier by the proper use of item enhancements and/or consumables, but they don’t care. To casuals, grinding for gold is not part of what they consider the game, and will only do it rarely and for a specific item. To them grinding is similar to running out of bullets in a first-person-shooter and having to play Tetris to reload a weapon.
Casuals have a relaxed attitude towards other players. While they certainly can and do raid, getting a casual raid together is very similar to herding kittens. They do not worry about their reputation as a player. In their minds there is always another pick-up-group or guild, so why sweat it.
In short, casuals play to have fun. They are leaning back in their chairs, with perhaps a beer and pretzels nearby, and their favorite music on high. They may accept that a new game encounter may have a bit of a learning curve, but once they learn the encounter, and perhaps advance their character a bit, they want to repeat the encounter without any difficulty. They want their Player Difficulty to be low. They want to play the game. They want to have fun. They want to be entertained.
Hardcore. The website ElitistJerks basically defines hardcore. Forum conversations parse which spells to use down to the second. Hardcore players optimize every aspect of their character. Hardcores expect to wipe multiple times learning new content.
Hardcores test themselves against Designer Difficulty of encounters. On the difficulty chart above, they want to get to the greatest Designer Difficulty encounter as fast as possible. They will attempt to mitigate designer difficulty through preparation and skill, as far as that is consistent with getting to the content quickly. They will attempt instances before they are properly geared for them, making their Player Difficulty high. They define content in how far they have progressed in it.
This requires that a player get into a hardcore guild. In order to get accepted into a hardcore guild a player must have a good reputation. Not necessarily a social reputation, but being on time, with the proper consumables, studying the instance or encounter beforehand, having an optimized character, etc.
Hardcores often refer to the game as "work", and refer to casuals as "lazy". A hardcore will say that casuals don’t deserve to experience end-game content because they have not earned it.
A hardcore player does his crossword puzzle in ink. He leans forward in his chair, headset on, tunnel-focused on the game. He wants to do better this session than he did last session, however he defines that. While casual players mitigate game difficulty as much as possible, hardcore players embrace it. Hardcore players want to be challenged.
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Entertainment – Challenge axis
As I discussed above casual – hardcore is not really about time spent. My observations lead me to believe it is how a player approaches the game that defines him. I believe that casual - hardcore is actually this entertainment – challenge axis. I call a player who rates high on Entertainment as Fun-style guy and a player who rates high on Challenge, Challenge-style guy.
1________2________3________4________5
Entertainment Challenge
A guy that plays beer-baseball on the weekend, a guy in a competitive softball league and a professional baseball player are playing the same game. However the pro is going to spend a significant more time doing batting practice during the week than the other guys.
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Decisions per Minute
When doing a Dungeon Run or Raid my theory is that what differentiates Fun-style guy from Challenge-style guy is the decisions per minute they make. My theory is that Challenge-style guys utilize a greater variety of activities during an encounter than Fun-style guys. Additionally as Challenge-style guy is more focused, the frequency of activities is higher than Fun-style guy.
This variety of activities carries over to getting a character ready for an encounter. In WoW, a Challenge-style guy may equip a trinket that must be clicked on every two minutes, while a Fun-style guy would pass that up because it is too much trouble. A Challenge-style guy may write macro-commands to do activities quicker. A Challenge-style guy may bring consumables to a raid that must be clicked every two minutes.
Decisions per Minute 1________2________3________4________5
Entertainment Challenge
The interesting thing about this theory is that it is testable. It would be real useful to know when decisions per minute crosses over from entertainment to challenge to needlessly difficult. My expertise ends here, at the point of saying that it is testable.
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Fun-style guy and Challenge-style guy are not unique Player Types.
To know where a player is on an Entertainment – Challenge axis helps define a unique Player Type. Saying a player logs in for entertainment or challenge is universally true so not very helpful to us. What it is useful for is to help define and quantify unique Player Types.
For example Fun-Explorer guy may spend hours poking around a zone, poking his head into every cave and building, interacting with every non-player character, etc. A Challenge-Explorer guy may spend the same hours just trying to get up one hill. Now we have something we can quantify, and then use in design decisions.
A Fun-Raid guy likes to raid as much as Challenge-Raid guy. Fun-Raid guy doesn’t care about how quickly he gets through content as long as he is progressing forward. We like Fun-Raid guy as designers because he goes though content much slower than Challenge-Raid guy. As this article is already too long, I’ll get into this more when I write about Raid-guy. For now consider that Challenge-Raid guy is needed to defeat and teach raids so Fun-Raid guys can enjoy raids in their own style.
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Fun-Style Guy to Challenge-Style Guy
I think I am seeing that some fun-style guys are moving up the scale to become more challenge-style guys the longer they are at end-game content. This is really hard to determine, and I would appreciate any input. For example, say WoW players are mostly 1 on the Entertainment – Challenge axis, but after playing end-game content they are 2 on the scale. Knowing this we may want to design a new game to start with a 2 on the scale to attract these players.
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Entertainment or Challenge defines how players look at Massives and in fact other areas of recreational activities. My mother looks at her quilt group in the same terms. There are the quilters who make quilts from store-bought patterns (Entertainment) and those who design quilts from scratch (Challenge).
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For instance I can tell you EXACTLY why psychonauts bombed: The gameplay was fine but the GAMEWORLD was not something most people in the universe would want to experience. Game dev's are a victim of overconfidence in the coolness of their idea's. Planescape torment suffered from the double minority nerd effect, where you get a minority of a minority and then base your game off that a theme that a minority of D&D fans would know about and wouldn't appeal to anyone who wasn't a hardcore D&D fan.
Some gamers can enjoy damn near every genre, these I would classify as "true hardcore" as opposed to someone that just sticks to certain genre's of games. I identify as "true hardcore" in the sense that my gaming judgement is in the top %1 I can break down the psychology of why a game is fun to different people and what it is that "Grabs" a person about a game, a skill I've developed from my passionate interest in games. I can pick which games will fail when they are announced before they launch with serious accuracy.
I would break gamers down into two basic types:
-Action gamer
-Explorer/puzzle gamer
Action gamer hates not having a lot of things to do and hates having too few options available, for instance I am primarily an action gamer, I detest slow ploddingness in games that pretend to be action games or present themselves as such... for instance when I tried to play neverwinter nights I had a love hate relationship with it because A) the entire focus was on a single character and b) everything outside of navigation was automatic. I couldn't manually swing my sword ala diablo, so I didn't feel involved in the game at all, and the pace at which your avatar moved and attacked was mindnumbingly slow which got boring really fast. NWN would have been a better as videogame if it had went more the diablo route and sped up the game some, I would love to remake NWN with better more action oriented game mechanics, they had some really cool idea's but they were bound by bad game design decisions to make it playable for the absolute lowest common deminoator idiot... we see this trend in MMO's as well, where everything is automated and all the person has to do is move his character around.
Some games are just paced way too slow to be interesting so you end up wasting time and that's what the gamer feels. The original Neverwinter felt like a big cosmic gaming abortion of epic proportions and people who ATE it up and liked how slow and mindless it was are not real gamers in my eyes, because their gaming judgement and taste is so off not having played a huge backlog of games.
I think the best thing to do is take a game from a genre that has gone out of favor (like adventure games, or schmups like Gradius, R-type, etc. And then break down the psychology of the kinds of persons that like those games and why. while comparing against other games with the same or different themes and identifying why they weren't as successful or appealing to other gamers from another genre (i.e. First person shooter, vs shmup like Graidus V, R-Type, Ikaruga).
Say... Group A like's Gradius and R-Type like machines, robots, planes, etc, they like experiencing an experience of controlling a machine and blowing other machines to kingdom come, they also like high-tech sci-fi futuristic stuff. While Group B likes Ace combat 5, H.A.W.X. and the like are more into the real world military aspect of it (i.e. dream of being a fighter pilot, etc).
Game's are really about what people dream about or think would be cool to experience, it's about that person identifying with "hey yeah that would really cool to experience!"
The problem with games like Gradius and R-Type for trying to appeal to FPS (Call of duty, etc) players is that it puts psychological distance between the player and the machine.
Games like Ace combat 5 and Tom clancy's H.A.W.X's put the player in a first person/almost first person view (third person is right behind the plane).
If you try to compare Ace combat 5 and Gradius 5, you notice that both use the theme of plane machines kicking other machine's asses, but one sold WAY MORE copies then the other (ace combat obviously).
F-16's, F-22's are closer to home and appeal to the soldier/army man in boy's everywhere, where Gradius doesn't. This is a lesson in identification of other people's fantasies. As in, will your audience identify with the experience you are giving them, is that what they dreamed about experiencing as a kid or thought would be cool to do but didn't want to join the army and possibly die, etc?
With respect to the content of your post, I wonder: can't challenge be enjoyed by both Casual and Hardcore gamers? A Casual gamer might not want to invest in a game too deeply or play it for very long, but they might still like a hard challenge when they do play. (Tetris might be a good example of this.) To put it another way, consider Hardcore gamers -- couldn't some of these folks enjoy a long-lasting hard challenge while others enjoy low-stress entertainment (but plenty of it)?
What if Challenge and Entertainment were actually just different ways of thinking about "structured play" and "free play" respectively, while Hardcore and Casual cut across both the Challenge and Entertainment preferences?
I wonder if Bob dillan might have a useful insight here. If the "action gamers" correspond to the combination of Nicole Lazarro's hard fun and serious fun (see http://www.xeodesign.com/whyweplaygames.html for more on this playstyles model), and "explorer/puzzle gamers" are another way of seeing the combination of Lazarro's easy fun and people fun, then those two categories (action/sensation-play and thinking/feeling-play) line up neatly with the primary Jungian type dichotomy of "Sensing" (focused on tangible things and action in the outer world) and "Intuition" (focused on internals and understanding abstract concepts).
If so, then I think that would mean they also line up with the "Hardcore" and "Casual" preferences described by Chris Bateman, which appear to correspond to Intuitive types and Sensing types respectively. Action gamers (Lazarro's hard fun and serious fun playstyles) who naturally prefer the concrete, externals-oriented Sensing approach to what's important would be Casual gamers -- they won't invest in the world of a game; they're only there for the sensation (serious fun) or the competitive/accumulationist challenge (hard fun). For them, "it's just a game" that they can turn off any time -- doesn't that sound pretty casual?
Exploration/puzzle/roleplaying gamers, on the other hand (Lazarro's easy fun and people fun playstyles), as internals-focused, Intuition-driven gamers would line up with Bateman's Hardcore players. They invest deeply in the settings and characters of a gameworld; they're "hardcore" because they've discovered and memorized all the geeky nuances, and because they talk as though the gameworld was a real (and explorable) place in which real people have real stories to tell.
Note: It might sound odd to think of "easy fun" as the intersection of the Hardcore and Challenge play preferences. But note that the Lazarro model of playstyles defines easy fun as being about curiosity. That reminds me of the Explorer interest in beating the intellectual challenge of puzzling out how the gameworld works. Seen in this light, the "easy fun" gamer can be seen as willing to apply a low level of effort for long stretches in order to attempt the larger challenge of perceiving patterns in the gameplay from which general rules can be induced.
I don't think, however, that I'd say that people who enjoy deep RPGs like Neverwinter Nights aren't real gamers. One person's "slow" is another person's "thoughtful." Anyone who claims that thoughtful play based on perception and creativity can't be fun for anyone had better get ready for a fight. :)