The Casual Gamer

This type of gamer usually gets a buzz by fragging his mates on a Saturday afternoon but can walk away from the experience without a second thought once he turns off his Playstation. To this sort of gamer – the casual gamer – games are just a fun distraction from life, not the main event.

The casual gamer prefers simplicity when playing a game. If you give them a game that requires him to read a manual before you play it you’ve already lost them. Casual gamers generally like to have sliders or button which let the player select the difficulty, story lines and game objectives need to be strongly stated in a very straightforward way, so that if the player misses something out, they’ll still be able to complete the game.

Casuals also differ from hard cores in the level of time they’re willing to spend in the fictional universe of games. Instead of engaging in six-hour marathons of dragon slaying, the typical casual may only play for about 30 minutes or an hour before being pulled back to real-life by other responsibilities.

The HardCore Gamer

If we think of interactive entertainment as a kind of benign drug, it’s clear the hard-core players are incurable addicts. The games they play are as inextricably wound up inside them as they are inside the games.

This kind of player eats, drinks and dreams about the gaming experience. They will spend most of there waking hours either playing, talking about or reading documentations on games. Central to the hard-core players worldview is that a game must present a Herculean challenge that must be overcome through a combination of tenacious attention to detail, serious commitment of time by the player, and a willingness to do whatever is necessary to gain the bragging rights for having mastered a particular game.

Hard cores prefer high level of replayability and titles that require hundreds of hours to complete; they tend to be interested in statistical issues. Of particular importance this player likes to have a high degree of control over the ultimate direction of the game.