Designer's
Notebook: Casual Versus Core
This desire is cleverly catered to in Goldeneye - it's one of
the many reasons why it's such a brilliant game. In Goldeneye
it's possible to replay levels that you've already defeated as much
as you want. Instead of forcing you to go on, it allows you to play
any previous level again to see if you can beat it more quickly. There
are rewards for beating each of the levels within a certain time limit.
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Nintendo
64's Golden Eye 007
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By contrast, the casual gamer plays for the sheer enjoyment of playing
the game. If the game stops being enjoyable or becomes frustrating,
the casual gamer will stop playing. Obviously the casual gamer enjoys
a challenge and wants to win, but the old cliché applies: life
is a journey, not a destination. For the casual gamer, playing games
must be entertaining, whether it's competitive or not.
The casual gamer cares nothing for improving his time in Goldeneye,
and he is free to ignore this feature. Once a casual gamer has defeated
a level, he wants to go on to the next level, to take up the next challenge
and see the next part of the story. A core gamer, on the other hand,
wants to hone her skills and improve her time. From learning to beat
the level consistently, she devises a new challenge: learning to beat
it faster and faster.
Core gamers are often rather contemptuous of casual gamers. Casual gamers
aren't serious, they aren't dedicated, and they aren't capable of beating
core gamers when they play against them. Core gamers like their games
to be long and hard. There's a certain amount of testosterone involved
in being a core gamer, which is why they like long, hard things.
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Screen
shot from Golden Eye 007
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(That doesn't mean that all core gamers are male. Women have testosterone,
too, you know, and too much of it has similar effects on them as it
does on men.)
Casual gamers, on the other hand, think core gamers are a little nutty,
a little nerdy. "It took you two hours and 25 tries to shave 15
seconds off your time in the 'Runway' level of Goldeneye? I'm
sure your life is much fuller now." To which core gamers reply,
"Hey - at least I didn't wimp out and go watch re-runs of The
Love Boat instead."
[I actually did watch The Love Boat - once - to see what it was
about. It turned out to be a two-hour special, which I didn't realize
when it started, but I stuck it out from a sense of duty. When it was
done I felt as if I'd eaten a 55-gallon drum of cotton candy. I also
swore to whatever gods there be that I'd never waste two precious hours
of my life in such an idiotic way again. Just about any computer game,
no matter how mindless, would be an improvement.]
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Watch
The Love Boat or play games?
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What this implies for game design is that if you want to attract the
casual gamer, you can't rely on the old coin-op video game standbys
for challenging the player. A casual gamer is simply not willing to
spend hours and hours learning complex controls, or trying incredibly
difficult jumps over and over, or getting killed again and again until
he finds the one weak point in an otherwise invicible enemy. To design
a game for casual gamers, you have to challenge their minds at least
as much as their motor skills.
And what about me? Well, the truth is that I'm not really a core gamer
or a casual gamer. I told you that dichotomy was a phony one; I've got
some things in common with core gamers and others in common with casual
gamers. Furthermore, I'm a game developer, which changes the rules.
I've made this my career, so I must care a heck of a lot about games
- more even than most core gamers do. On the other hand, I play a lot
of games at work, and when I go home I want to do something I can't
do at work - read or watch TV or go out somewhere. I do play games in
my leisure time, of course, but mostly I play them at work. Game developers
themselves aren't always the best model for understanding our market.
We're atypical, because we are by definition more interested in games
than our customers are.
A lot of level designers, especially if they're young core gamers, think
of designing levels in terms of creating hard, mean, nasty things to
beat. That's partly because those are the kinds of challenges they like
themselves, but it can also be a sort of laziness. It's comparatively
easy to make things difficult. It's much trickier to make things interesting,
to think up puzzles and challenges that require brainwork rather than
sheer perseverance. If we want to reach the casual gamer, we need to
make things not just nasty, mean, and hard to beat, but clever, exciting,
and fun to beat.
Ernest
Adams is an American freelance game designer currently living in England.
He was most recently employed as a lead designer at Bullfrog Productions,
and for several years before that he was the audio/video producer on
the Madden NFL Football product line. In a much earlier life
he was a software engineer. He has developed on-line, computer, and
console games for everything from the IBM 360 mainframe to the Playstation
2. He was a founder of the International
Game Developers Association, and is a frequent lecturer at the Game
Developers Conference and anyplace else that people will listen
to him. Ernest would be happy to receive E-mail about his columns at
ewa@earthling.net, and you may
visit his professional web site at http://members.aol.com/ewadams.
You can read previous Designer's Notebook columns at http://www.gamasutra.com/features/index_designers_notebook.htm.
The views in this column are strictly his own.
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