I've been thinking about this just because I keep running into it when I look up game reviews. The accepted definitions at the moment seem to boil down to whether or not someone owns six hundred fps titles. Anyone who owns 599 or less fps titles is, by definition, a casual gamer. (This is an ad hominem made just for kicks. :D)
Seriously though, the line between hardcore and casual is pretty ill defined, and the definition seems to change with the person giving it. With that in mind, I thought I'd make my own definitions for hardcore and casual gamers, respectively.
Meet Billy McMario. Billy likes to play Wii Sports... a lot. In fact, Billy likes Wii Sports so much that he obtained the Pro Rating in all of the sports. He also talks about Wii Sports a lot, and he's always looking forward to similar titles in the genre. He got Wii Sports Resort, Super Mario Sluggers, the Mario and Sonic games, and he plays them all extensively.
Meet Johnny Von Deathrape. Johnny sort of likes to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. But he's not that into video games. The experience of going online and causing his teammates to lose in a deathmatch makes him smile a little, but most of the time he'd rather go watch a movie or something.
In my bizarre logic, Billy is a hardcore gamer because of his committment to Wii Sports and similar games. Johnny would be a casual gamer because gaming isn't one of his favorite activities.
Perhaps I'm just a madman with my definitions, here. I guess the issue of casual and hardcore games would be a different matter entirely. But honestly, I don't think that these labels are very useful for the titles themselves. Don't we already have genres for that? For example, Wii Sports is a sports game... a mediocre sports game with few features.
Anyway, take that!
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