The Gulf Between Casual and Hardcore Gamers.
Just read a nice article on Wired about The Mythical 40-hour Gamer (via Slashdot). This article talks about the frustrations that a casual gamer goes through when trying to play games that are usually designed with the hardcore gamer in mind. It’s a really good article, I recommend reading it. He claims that hardcore gamers, meaning, gamers who play games in large blocks of time over short periods of time, can blow through a long game in a relatively short period of time because they are able to concentrate fully on that game and learn it in and out much more quickly.
In contrast, folks like me — “soft-core” gamers? — also crave to play these richly narrative, long-lasting titles. But we can only play in dribs and drabs — an hour here, an hour there. The unspoken truth of gaming is that this creates a vastly different, and vastly inferior, mental space for game playing. If you’re continually loading the game into your mental RAM, only to dump it out again an hour later, you can never concentrate as fully on grokking its internal mechanics.
This is the problem that developers are facing - their core audience, the hardcore gamer crowd, is far more advanced and can finish games in a fraction of the time that the mass market casual gamers can. So you end up with a supposed 40 hour game that a hardcore gamer can complete in 20 hours or less, but that takes a casual gamer 50 or 60 hours. Those are vastly different, and people who can do the former obviously get a much more focused and entertaining experience than the latter.
Is there any solution to this? Well, obviously one thing that can help a great deal is for developers to build in different levels of difficulty ratings into the game. I have long since gotten over having to select “Easy” from the difficulty settings list. I almost always pick Easy to start with now. Why? Because I have a limited amount of time that I can devote to games, and so for me Easy means I can get through the game pretty quickly and not spend month after month on it. If I find that a game is actually too easy (rarely), I can always bump the difficulty up. But not every game has difficulty settings, or doesn’t implement them properly.
I find myself enjoying shorter and shorter games more, and not feeling “ripped off” because it only took me 15 hours to finish it. GUN, for example, was a short game, but I really liked it because it was focused enough that I was able to complete it and enjoy the epic narrative without spending weeks and months on it in spurts so that I never did understand the story. Maybe what game publishers need to do is market to casual gamers and hardcore gamers specifically. They could rate the game as to which group it caters to the most. This way casual gamers wouldn’t have to get frustrated with too hard and too long games, and hardcore gamers wouldn’t get “ripped off” by finishing a game in 10 or less hours.
Are you more of a casual gamer or hardcore gamer? Do you prefer longer or shorter games? Easy mode or hard mode?