I think there’s some acceptance in the industry that the terms “casual” and “hardcore” have been co-opted by historical circumstances and no longer match their functional meaning.  These days most people array casual and hardcore as two ends of an audience spectrum from large (casual) to small (hardcore).   What they’re really talking about is how niche a title is.

This would be merely a semantic debate and beside the point, except that folks in the industry also go on to attribute all kinds of other (arguably more genuine) characteristics to casual and hardcore titles.  For example, casual titles may have short play sessions, simple interfaces and fast learning curves.  Hardcore titles might have deep, complicated rule systems that encourage extended play and long life cycles.  By making the original assertion about audience, however, these characteristics falsely wind up at both ends of a spectrum.

To make something casual is to make it accessible.  There’s not much more to it than that.  Attention friendly, light on commitment, easy to understand, and so forth.  These are product characteristics not audience characteristics.

To make something hardcore is to make it more engaging.  More content to consume, more variety, more personal.

The question isn’t whether you’re making a casual or hardcore game but two separate questions:  does it enable casual play? does it enable hardcore play?  The answer can be yes to both.

Last week I posted about how the acceleration of personal sharing over the past couple decades has created a “culture of try”, where consumers are much more willing to sample new things and aren’t turned off by poor experiences despite a high signal to noise ratio.

While this is significant for indie games, it’s also very important for any kind of game that depends on user generated content.  A willingness to try and fail, repeatedly, is being baked into our culture and expanding the ranks of those willing to create content in any particular product.

There’s a great blog post by Raph Koster from several years ago in which he observes that “everyone is a creator”:

“…the question is ‘of what.’ Everyone has a sphere where they feel comfortable exerting agency — maybe it’s their work, maybe it’s raising their children, maybe it’s collecting stamps. Outside of that sphere, most people are creators only within carefully limited circumstances; most people cannot draw, but anyone can color inside lines, or trace. If the games require serious commitment and challenging creation tasks equivalent to drawing from scratch, they will have smaller audiences.

This is, of course, the argument that some in the comment threads were making against complex ecologies, cool NPC AI, and so on. The logic goes that too much complexity will overwhelm the casual user. We must not forget that casual users aren’t stupid users, they’re just not adept at, or willing to invest in, that particular system. They are likely heavily invested in creativity in some other aspect of their lives.” (1)

A lot of Raph’s article is about the barriers many games (and products in general) leave in the way of consumers who want to experience it on their own terms.  I agree with his reasoning that improving accessibility enables greater creation and consumption on the part of users, but I think this masks the underlying cultural shift going on.  People have been conditioned by the internet to accept false starts, and this is helping them tolerate less accessible products.

Some rules, perhaps, to go along with this:

• Rapid feedback is critical.  Failing is ok, so long as they know immediately.
• Feedback needs to be obvious.  The reason for failure should be explicit so they don’t have to waste time trying to understand why it didn’t work.
• The build-try-fail loop must be very tight.  You can’t expect a user to spend thirty minutes building something before they can try it, only to have to spend that much time again if it fails.
• The act of creating itself should be a fun experience, not a means to an end.  Some of that will be intrinsic to the user’s desire to create that got them to the starting line, and some will simply be via the absence of barriers, but if your product is dependent on users making stuff there is no reason not to make this part engaging as well.

There are huge benefits to getting more users across even the most shallow creation line for a product, but the most obvious one is that “creators are the most voracious consumers” (2).  To extend that further:  more creators means greater consumption per user, and greater consumption per user translates to greater revenue per user.

————-

Footnotes:

(1)  I’d also recommend reading Dave Edery’s post on the benefits of UGC that Raph links to at the beginning.

(2)  That’s Raph again.  He’s going to think I’m stalking him pretty soon.

This short essay was first posted to my original blog on August 1, 2008.

Most of the discussion on casual and hardcore games paints a mutually exclusive picture. But casual and hardcore aren’t two ends of the same spectrum: the opposite of a casual feature is not a hardcore feature.

There are, however, things that interfere or reduce a game’s ability to be played in a casual or hardcore manner. Why define what casual/hardcore aren’t instead of what they are? Because, for example, having simple controls says nothing about a game’s ability to be played casual or hardcore (it’s useful for both), but complex controls make it difficult to be played casually. This is all relative, of course, and heavily dependent on pre-existing knowledge. Driving a manual transmission is a pretty complicated UI affair, but once you know it the experience is largely transparent and becomes a non-factor.

Things that reduce casual play:

• Complex unfamiliar controls
• Multiple channels of audio-visual stimulus
• Steep (but not high) learning curve
• Long start up to start play times
• Long minimum play sessions
• Inability for players of different skill levels to play together or against each other

Things that reduce hardcore play:

• Lack of product depth
• Lack of replayability

There’s probably a few I’m missing; I was surprised I couldn’t come up with more for the hardcore list.

How a game is played over it’s life cycle likely has an impact too. A game with a steep learning curve and complex controls would prevent it from being played casually, but once past that (and assuming no other barriers) you could conceivably play it in a casual manner. That may be particularly valuable if the product no longer has the same hold on the consumer’s attention as it did when they first got it.

This short essay was first posted to my original blog on July 23, 2008.

It’s a truism to say we live in a noisy media environment.

In a world where most media requires our undivided attention for a fixed amount of time, and where the quantity and access to media are at an all time high, we are forced to make some difficult choices about which content we have time to consume. 120 minutes for the latest summer blockbuster? 15 minutes for a chapter in that book? 30 minutes for a quest in World of Warcraft? Choosing between them is hard enough, but it’s compounded by the friends, family, work and other things calling for our attention, potentially interrupting us at any moment.

In this brutal competitive landscape, the response of content creators hasn’t been to adapt. It’s been to scream louder, to flash brighter, to do anything possible to grab our attention and then hold it. Bigger explosions. Brighter colors. Higher recording levels. And we’re penalized if we stray: I need to see every episode of Lost, in order, to know what’s going on.

Rather than fight some attention grabbing arms race with every other piece of content in the universe, I think there may be an opporunity to design products, and games in particular, that adapt and live in this crowded environment. There’s room, and possibly a need, for a more flexible media product that doesn’t ask people to commit, and makes it easier for them to experience it on their own terms.

So what are the characteristics of a flexible media product? It should be:

• Interruptible
  • The rest of the world will intrude at some point, at any point. The consumer knows this in advance and will shy away from products that require a large time commitment they may not be able to give (at least, not if there’s a competing option). Or they’ll choose the product anyway but experience less of it (e.g. watching a movie while taking care of a child).
  • No death penalty (re-entry is painless). The consumer needs to retain minimal historical knowledge to jump back in and re-immerse in the experience.

• Commitment Friendly
  • The consumer doesn’t have to lock up the next 30 minutes of their life or have to remember 50 different rules/characters/plotlines.
  • No strings attached, be they financial (e.g. required fees to play) or technical (complicated install and/or subscription process; interferes or modifies other apps unintentionally; etc)

• Attention Span Agnostic
  • Content can be experienced and enjoyed with a reduced or fluctuating degree of focus and attention to it. People consume media from multiple channels at once: playing solitaire while talking on the phone; watching a football game while making a sandwich and listening to music.

• Always Resident
  • While a consumer’s focus has to be interruptible, the media itself can continue to exist and function until the consumer returns to it. That is, you don’t actually have to hit the pause or save button, you just go do something else and come back to it.
  • Exist in the consumer’s world, not the author’s. I don’t log into a game and play it via some specialized client. The access point is my own blog, facebook page, a Firefox extension, etc.
  • Logging in does not mean logging out of the rest of the world. Consumers are ok leaving it up 24/7 because there’s minimal to no cost in attention or resources or screen real estate to do so.
  • Access is easy and fast, if not invisible.

To be clear: there is tremendous value in complete immersion. It’s not that people won’t make that commitment or won’t devote 100% of their attention to a game/movie/book for hours on end. They will. But they only have so much room in their lives for those kinds of experiences, and a product that dials the immersion level up and down as needed could find broad acceptance.

I think there’s a lot more to be said on this subject, some of which I may touch on in future posts (and may have already been covered by others), including:

• Part of the attraction of games like Solitaire is that they fit this model. What else does? Some of those asynchrnous games on social networking sites? PMOG, Web Wars? What about examples from other media? Sporting events can be tuned in and out fairly easily. Music runs in the background almost everywhere we go. Others?
• If it’s ok to come and go from content at any time, that’s one less barrier for that content’s acceptance. Does that limit the range of content that can be built? Are we talking lightweight facebook apps and simple puzzle games or is there room for something with some depth?
• Who decides how content should be experienced? I’m not just talking about where (home/work/car/etc), on what (tv/pc/handheld/phone) or for how long (minutes/hours/days), but the experience itself. Buying gold in MMOs changes that experience and is an example of the consumer attempting to play the game the way they want to. How far down the path from authorial intent to consumer control should we go? Related to this, why does a modern consumer expect to have that kind of control in the first place, and why should they be granted it?
• There’s a tremendous amount written about the subject of attention — almost 70 years of research on the subject — that I haven’t touched on. When you start poking around the web you naturally run into Linda Stone (“continuous partial attention”) and Herbert Simon (who pretty much nailed it on the head a few decades ago when he said “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”). Most of these folks were concerned with how we manage our attention and general purpose solutions: a work philosophy, a piece of intelligent software and so forth. If we imagine a world with many flexible media products, do they help or exacerbate the attention problem Stone, Simon, et al identified? Are we simply crowding another channel, overflowing the number of things that can sit at the periphery of our awareness?
• Does immersion trump ease of interruption? Or does flexibility translate to a higher likelihood someone will try, and stick with, your content because you’re not asking them choose?
• To what extent are flexible media products part of the overall trend of blurring product boundaries with their environment?
• There was a great post recently about whether we use “on” or “in” to describe where we are. That is, we’re on facebook, on the NYT web site, on IM, on the web. But we’re in WoW, Second Life and other online worlds. How does the way we conceptualize a product as something we’re on vs. in affect our immersion and attention? And where do games like Scrabulous, Bejeweled, or The Sims fit into this paradigm?
• The need to grab attention has led to a focus on spectacle or outrageousness at the expense of substance. That’s nothing new, but is the crowded, access-to-everything media world encouraging it? If so, what does this say about people who enjoy niche, smaller products of lower production values that better serve their particular interest (and likewise about the benefits of spectacle)?