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What Men and Women Consider Hardcore Gaming Are Not The Same

59 points by OberstKrueger 8y ago

shubb 8y ago
The choice of graph here is really bad. Basically the graph is trying to show two things at once - the difference between the categories and the difference between each category and normal. For multiple variables. By showing a lot of information on one graph, it becomes hard to see any particular pieceof information. If you are trying to show a comparison between two categories, it's better to normalise those two categories. If you want to show that being far from the centre of the bell curve is more significant (which doesn't come accross on this graph at all by the way), then factor that in when you normalise. Two clear graphs are better than one bad one.
- CiPHPerCoder 8y ago
  Also, the y-axis is totally off. I zoomed in and drew black lines from the top of each of these bars (60%, 61%, 62%, 63%): https://imgur.com/a/wzbI7mC https://imgur.com/a/wzbI7mC
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  I honestly don't understand what they are plotting: > So for example, the 74th-%tile in Competition among Hardcore gamers means that the average Hardcore gamer scores higher on Competition than 74% of the gamers in the full data set. But together casual and core make up 78 % of the sample, so that the some hardcore gamers must have scores lower than the "hardcore average". Those hardcore gamers only make up 4% of the total sample, which means that 0.04/0.21 = 0.19 -> 19 % of hardcore gamers score lower than the hardcore average! That's so skewed an arithmetic average is clearly of little use, but at the same time they talk about percentiles, so I don't know what's happening here, did they take the sample average and pretended it's the median?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - ekiru 8y ago
    Aren't you assuming (probably incorrectly) that all hardcore gamers rated Competition more highly than all core/casual gamers? I'm not sure how much less weird allowing for that makes things, but your reasoning for concluding that hardcore gamers with lower Competition scores than the hardcore average make up only 4% of the sample isn't valid. For example, if half of the hardcore gamers (around 10.5% of the sample) are above the hardcore average and half below, that would put about 81% of the nonhardcore gamers (about 63.5% of the full sample) below the hardcore average and the rest above (about 19% of the full sample).
- sophistication 8y ago
  Agreed. It's relatively useless information without normalizing the differences by the variances (Cohen's d) or at least providing confidence intervals.
droopyEyelids 8y ago
I’d like to se this broken down by age, too. They refer to what terms mean to “men” when i often wondered if they were talking to “boys”
- emddudley 8y ago
  They do offer an "Age Report" which costs $2499: https://quanticfoundry.com/age-report/ https://quanticfoundry.com/age-report/ Here's a sample chart showing how "Competition" ranks by age: https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Competition-Regression-Chart.png https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Compet...
  - Timpy 8y ago
    I honestly thought you were joking. Their data presentation wasn't good, who would pay this???
    - ben509 8y ago
      MBAs.
    - jdietrich 8y ago
      >who would pay this??? Enough people to keep them in business. If you're planning a major product launch, $2500 for a market research report is pocket change.
rayiner 8y ago
Warning: lies with bars that don’t start at 0.
- mpweiher 8y ago
  Considering "0" in this case is the 50% mark and the graphs show equal distances from that 50% mark this looks legit to me.
  - sophistication 8y ago
    The graphs start/end at the 20th/~85th percentiles rather than 0th/100th, which makes the differences seem larger than they are.
    - marcosdumay 8y ago
      The graph starts at 50% where there is a thick line. It grows up and down until it contains the entire variation. The extreme values are not relevant. It is a pretty standard format, and this "warning the graph does not start at 0" kneejerk is tiring. (What would you expect a graph with both positive and negative values should look like?)
      - sophistication 8y ago
        If there would be no data point below/above 20/85, then it might be warranted to truncate it, but that's clearly not the case, in fact, by definition, there is 20% and 15% of the data respectively. The bars starting from the median (50th percentile) are also a pretty meaningless visual indicator. E.g. the bars for competition visually indicate that men would be twice as competitive, but in the graph without the bar and including the 0th/100th percentile the difference is much less pronounced: https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/hardcore_comparison-650x326.png https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/hardco... https://i.imgur.com/P9M7AnR.png https://i.imgur.com/P9M7AnR.png I find that especially damning as lots of these gamers are probably not familiar with statistics, so they might indeed draw extreme conclusions from these graphs merely due to the way it is represented.
cstrat 8y ago
Came here to whinge about the choice of graphs, not disappointed that others beat me to it.
firekvz 8y ago
This is wrong, even their entire concept of casual/mid/hardcore gamer is terrible, you can't just define it like that.
- beat 8y ago
  Why not? It needs a definition, just for the context. You don't have to like it, but it can certainly be defined that way.
- arendtio 8y ago
  I agree. Much better questions would be about measurable things (e.g 'how many hours do you spend playing per week' or 'how often have you taken part in an organized tournament over the last year'). That different people use the same words for slightly different things is as new as the stone on the ground.
  - watwut 8y ago
    "how often have you taken part in an organized tournament over the last year" would measure whether you like competition. It does not even measure how much you play nor how much you are invested. I think it is more useful to keep competitive and hardcore as two different words.
    - arendtio 8y ago
      Indeed, it doesn't measure the same. The examples were meant more as an example how to ask questions that different people answer the same way (given the same situation).
- Lazare 8y ago
  > In our talk at GDC 2018, we explored what gamer motivations would look like if we defined “casual/core/hardcore” gamers using different assumptions—e.g., by self-identification with labels vs. by gaming frequency vs. by specific game titles they play. In this blog post, we’ll focus on the slice by self-identification with labels, but we’re hoping to cover at least one additional slice in a future post. In other words, they're looking at a few different ways of defining "casual" and "hardcore", and one of the ways they're looking at is self-identification, which is an obvious and useful way of looking at these types of things in sociology. And as a bonus, we then get to do some interesting comparisons of how the different ways of categorising people overlap and differ (which they touched on briefly near the end when they noted that female EverQuest 2 players averages more hours per week). > This is wrong, even their entire concept of casual/mid/hardcore gamer is terrible, you can't just define it like that. That's quite a bold assertion. Do you have some sort of argument for why this is somehow uniquely an area where self-identification is an unusable way of classifying people, or are you just offended by their results? Because it sure looks to me like you totally can use self-identification here. :)
beat 8y ago
Makes me think of my home... my son is a "hardcore gamer", by anyone's definition. He doesn't recognize his mother as a gamer at all, despite her spending 10-20 hours/week gaming. She's mostly doing puzzle games on her iPad, so that's not "real gaming". So there's a fair bit of gender and cultural bias in the very idea of "gamer". I don't play video games, myself, for the same reason I don't shoot heroin directly into my eyeballs. I know I have a problem, so I avoid the problem.
- emaginniss 8y ago
  "I don't shoot heroin directly into my eyeballs" casual...
  - beat 8y ago
    A few years ago, I had a medical problem (retinal vein occlusion) that had to be treated for a while with monthly injections directly into my eye. The drug used (Avastin) was originally developed for colon cancer treatment - it prevents the regrowth of tiny veins, which leads to a lot of very interesting uses. So the day of my first injection, I went to a Rolling Stones concert with my spouse. And I don't care what sort of hardcore Keith Richards is, I'm pretty sure he wasn't shooting chemotherapy drugs directly into his eyeball before the concert!
- watwut 8y ago
  I think that you will find that many women who play a lot of those puzzle games would dislike to be called "gamer" too. There is a lot baggage contained in that word and while young boy may see at as positive identification, older women is unlikely so.
- Nadya 8y ago
  >despite her spending 10-20 hours/week gaming Pardon the wall of text here... I typically spend 40+ hours/week gaming. Literally a 2nd job. However, I don't even consider the time spent gaming in my definition of "hardcore" gamer. There are people who play 80+ hours/week that I would consider "casual" gamers by definition of how they play. They see games mostly as a way to kill time and might identify the activity with being a hobby, but not one they take "seriously" to any extent. The thing that makes me "hardcore" is the amount of time I don't spend gaming - but learning about the game on a deep level. I typically have 99% of a games' wikipedia memorized. I can tell you nearly anything about any of the games I play off the top of my head. I'll know every mechanic, every bug, why the bugs exist, a summary of the lore. Depending on the genre, I'll know the best places to level at any particular level range, where every single enemy spawns (or whether their spawn is random), the damage output of every weapon in comparison to one another, how certain items scale, the frame data of certain attacks (eg: first hit frame, ending lag, if it has invincible frames, the number of end frames). Casuals don't care to put in all this extra effort to know the game on a deep, often very mechanical, level. "Intermediate" players will read about it but still don't invest much time to it. "Hardcore" players know a game inside, inside-out, upside-down, mirrored, and can probably run through some levels blindfolded going off their memorization of the game alone. A casual player can play SSBM for 30 hours a week without ever learning how to wavedash, L-cancel, chaingrab, wobble, (S)DI, amsa tech, moonwalk, shffl, platform cancel, slide cancel, soft B-reverse, or ledge stall. There is also a good chance they think I made up half of those words or just said some random things. They also don't tend to keep up with any metagaming - or if they do - they're never on the forefront of innovation for the metagame, but only ever (poorly) copying what they see pro players do without understanding why the professional player made their decisions. The casual player's mechanical knowledge about the game is lacking too much to effectively innovate because they don't really understand how the game interacts with itself. My casual League of Legends coworkers' are all ranked Bronze/Silver because ranking in that game is almost entirely a measure of knowledge and only a very small part of it is skill - they all play the game far more than I do but I understand the game better than them and ranked among the top 1% of players (Plat1/Diamond5 range) when I played. They never cared to learn about the game itself - so never improved as players. Even after months and months of playing with them they never got any better at the game, even as their general "skill level" (ability to execute) was increasing over time. Certain games also lack depth - and are the games I consider targeted towards casual players. Most of those are mobile games like Angry Bird, puzzle games (eg: 2048, Candy Crush), or arcade-like games like Pacman, Asteroids. So while I don't consider playing puzzle games on an iPad "not real gaming" it is also very much a sign of "casual gaming" - it's a time killing activity. Without knowing your wife, I have my doubts that she spends a significant time metagaming her puzzle games or researching the best way to solve the puzzles. This is partly because that would be counter-productive to a good puzzle and partly because there often isn't enough depth to a puzzle game to research about it.
wgerard 8y ago
Ignoring the graphs, curious how much of this is just a response to community. Anecdotes abound, beware. Even as an older (for gaming, anyway) white male, the community in some competitive games is just really unappealing - it basically reminds me of middle school, and I guess I'm not really into that anymore. Lots of things said just to get a reaction (e.g. racial slurs), lots of weird discussions about women, lots of puffed chests the second there's an opportunity to, etc. I don't really have the time to be competitively good at any of these games, and the community kinda sucks unless you are competitively good, so it's kinda like what's the point? At least with rec sports the community is generally nice even if you're terrible (probably because you're in-person). Sure, you can just mute people usually. But if you're muting everyone all the time, you might as well just be playing a single-player game. You can just play with friends, but that requires you to have friends who haven't also gotten sick of these communities. Conversely, the community in games more oriented towards completion/design are usually great - because your success doesn't detract from someone else's, and they're not usually depending on you for their own success. Feels much more like a community. Anyway, my point being that I wouldn't be shocked to learn that women (and likely people of color) feel the same way - once you're not really part of that core group of young white men, competitive games start feeling really unappealing unless you're just really into the game itself.
- paidleaf 8y ago
  > I don't really have the time to be competitively good at any of these games, and the community kinda sucks unless you are competitively good so it's kinda like what's the point? You could play with people on your own level? > At least with rec sports the community is generally nice even if you're terrible (probably because you're in-person). Really? Try playing pick-up basketball games if you are terrible. Even with rec sports, people play at their own level. > Anyway, my point being that I wouldn't be shocked to learn that women (and likely people of color) feel the same way - once you're not really part of that core group of young white men Young white men? Why are you being racist and sexist by targeting one group? People don't play online games or recreational sports for "community". Seems like you are lonely and trying to make friends in the wrong places. I play sports because it's fun and good exercise. I play video games because it's fun and mentally challenging. I don't play sports or video games for community. > competitive games start feeling really unappealing unless you're just really into the game itself. Then don't play it. Go play something else? Why are you complaining about it? Maybe women on average don't like competitive games for the same reason women don't like other competitive sports like basketball, baseball, etc? Maybe, men and women are on average different and have different interests. Maybe that's why advertisers go about targeting men and women different? Maybe that's why movies, music, etc are differently geared towards men and women? Or, maybe you could push your racist and sexist rhetoric and blame young white men?
madshiva 8y ago
The BIAS here is to let people choose if they are hardcore or not, like the gender is wrong. There's an definition about hardcore, and people can't argue the definiton and what they define hardcore. BTW, there's only 2 gender.
bovermyer 8y ago
Why should I care?
kitsy 8y ago
I was rather unimpressed with the test as well as the graphs. I scored myself low in every category because I find it hard to rate any one aspect high. I'm paraphrasing: How important are explosions? How important is competition? How important is exploring? I can't rate any of these things high, in and of themselves. It requires a well balanced mix of things to make a great game. Breaking everything down to individual components makes it seem I am much less engaged in games than I am.
mabbo 8y ago
Setting aside the graph issues, the data is very interesting. Much of game development for the triple-A space seems aimed at the hardcore male gamer demographic, whether intentional or not. Could a studio instead build a game that focuses on entirely different categories and as a result attract a bigger market that isn't being addressed? Make a game that's fun, but focus on design, discovery, completion, fantasy. Don't discourage male players, but make a game that ticks all the boxes for most female players. Market it subtly for both genders, trying to hook female gamers. I hope someone is trying to do this.
- belorn 8y ago
  Game studios are already focusing on different target demographics, it just that people tend to not see it because when a product change target demographic it also tailors (in a market competition way) all other aspect of putting a product to market and successfully earning profit on it. Those changes also effect how game studios compete against each other, and major developers for one type might be a minor actor in the other. Triple-A games and block buster action movies has very many similarities. A lot of focus is on first day sales with flashy and short term advertisement that get concentrated to compete against the competition that tries to do the same thing. For some reason the young male with disposable income is a core demographic for this kind of product. In contrast Candy crush, Facebook games, romantic comedy and drama movies share a different target demographic of middle age women. If I remember right then production for that demographic has surpassed that of triple-A, with mobile games being a massive industry. Why does marketing when targeting for men or women differ? Why does the purchasing pattern differ. I don't know and there are movie and game studios that do try to target all gender and all age demographics with the same product, using a singe marketing style and single platform. Maybe that works but lets not forget that game studios that targeting other demographics than young male with disposable income really do exist. They just don't call themselves triple-A, just like how a romantic comedy don't usually get described as a block buster. If I make a guess I would say it has something to do with marketing.
erikb 8y ago
The female logic I can follow here: Once you play hardcore, i.e. more intense, just having a story will get boring soon. So they add other competencies. It's a little confusing for me, why just playing skill competition shouldn't get boring for men as well. Adding story based components for a more indepth experience would also sound reasonable for me. So I wonder if self-assessment is really a good way to analyse the behaviour here. It might be that men don't mention that they care about community/story as much, while actually they do as well when they heavily invest time and energy into a single game.
ajross 8y ago
New candidate for Most Confusing Chart of 2018 right here folks: https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/overall_casual_hardcore.png https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/overal... Even the explanation doesn't help: > In this chart below, the y-axis is showing the percentile rank of each motivation. That 50th-%tile line represents the average among the 350,000+ gamers who have completed the Gamer Motivation Profile. So for example, the 74th-%tile in Competition among Hardcore gamers means that the average Hardcore gamer scores higher on Competition than 74% of the gamers in the full data set. I genuinely don't think there's anything useful that can be said here at all without knowing what fraction of gamers make up the different catagories. Beyond that, all we can say for sure is that "hardcore" gamers like gaming more. Ugh.
bytematic 8y ago
I've played almost every competitive pc game in the last decade and I've never came across one where when a female voice gets on the mic, the atmosphere of the game doesn't change. Not every individual match of course but dam, I would NOT want to be a female online gamer. Seperate note: I've been to LANs and the mood is quite different, it is unfortunate to see the gender divide and most competitive (semi-pro at least) guys really want to see that scene improve.

59 points by OberstKrueger 8y ago

The choice of graph here is really bad. Basically the graph is trying to show two things at once - the difference between the categories and the difference between each category and normal. For multiple variables. By showing a lot of information on one graph, it becomes hard to see any particular pieceof information. If you are trying to show a comparison between two categories, it's better to normalise those two categories. If you want to show that being far from the centre of the bell curve is more significant (which doesn't come accross on this graph at all by the way), then factor that in when you normalise. Two clear graphs are better than one bad one.

CiPHPerCoder 8y ago
Also, the y-axis is totally off. I zoomed in and drew black lines from the top of each of these bars (60%, 61%, 62%, 63%): https://imgur.com/a/wzbI7mC https://imgur.com/a/wzbI7mC
SiempreViernes 8y ago
I honestly don't understand what they are plotting: > So for example, the 74th-%tile in Competition among Hardcore gamers means that the average Hardcore gamer scores higher on Competition than 74% of the gamers in the full data set. But together casual and core make up 78 % of the sample, so that the some hardcore gamers must have scores lower than the "hardcore average". Those hardcore gamers only make up 4% of the total sample, which means that 0.04/0.21 = 0.19 -> 19 % of hardcore gamers score lower than the hardcore average! That's so skewed an arithmetic average is clearly of little use, but at the same time they talk about percentiles, so I don't know what's happening here, did they take the sample average and pretended it's the median?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ekiru 8y ago
  Aren't you assuming (probably incorrectly) that all hardcore gamers rated Competition more highly than all core/casual gamers? I'm not sure how much less weird allowing for that makes things, but your reasoning for concluding that hardcore gamers with lower Competition scores than the hardcore average make up only 4% of the sample isn't valid. For example, if half of the hardcore gamers (around 10.5% of the sample) are above the hardcore average and half below, that would put about 81% of the nonhardcore gamers (about 63.5% of the full sample) below the hardcore average and the rest above (about 19% of the full sample).
sophistication 8y ago
Agreed. It's relatively useless information without normalizing the differences by the variances (Cohen's d) or at least providing confidence intervals.

droopyEyelids 8y ago

I’d like to se this broken down by age, too. They refer to what terms mean to “men” when i often wondered if they were talking to “boys”

emddudley 8y ago
They do offer an "Age Report" which costs $2499: https://quanticfoundry.com/age-report/ https://quanticfoundry.com/age-report/ Here's a sample chart showing how "Competition" ranks by age: https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Competition-Regression-Chart.png https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Compet...
- Timpy 8y ago
  I honestly thought you were joking. Their data presentation wasn't good, who would pay this???
  - ben509 8y ago
    MBAs.
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    >who would pay this??? Enough people to keep them in business. If you're planning a major product launch, $2500 for a market research report is pocket change.

rayiner 8y ago

Warning: lies with bars that don’t start at 0.

mpweiher 8y ago
Considering "0" in this case is the 50% mark and the graphs show equal distances from that 50% mark this looks legit to me.
- sophistication 8y ago
  The graphs start/end at the 20th/~85th percentiles rather than 0th/100th, which makes the differences seem larger than they are.
  - marcosdumay 8y ago
    The graph starts at 50% where there is a thick line. It grows up and down until it contains the entire variation. The extreme values are not relevant. It is a pretty standard format, and this "warning the graph does not start at 0" kneejerk is tiring. (What would you expect a graph with both positive and negative values should look like?)
    - sophistication 8y ago
      If there would be no data point below/above 20/85, then it might be warranted to truncate it, but that's clearly not the case, in fact, by definition, there is 20% and 15% of the data respectively. The bars starting from the median (50th percentile) are also a pretty meaningless visual indicator. E.g. the bars for competition visually indicate that men would be twice as competitive, but in the graph without the bar and including the 0th/100th percentile the difference is much less pronounced: https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/hardcore_comparison-650x326.png https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/hardco... https://i.imgur.com/P9M7AnR.png https://i.imgur.com/P9M7AnR.png I find that especially damning as lots of these gamers are probably not familiar with statistics, so they might indeed draw extreme conclusions from these graphs merely due to the way it is represented.

cstrat 8y ago

Came here to whinge about the choice of graphs, not disappointed that others beat me to it.

firekvz 8y ago

This is wrong, even their entire concept of casual/mid/hardcore gamer is terrible, you can't just define it like that.

beat 8y ago
Why not? It needs a definition, just for the context. You don't have to like it, but it can certainly be defined that way.
arendtio 8y ago
I agree. Much better questions would be about measurable things (e.g 'how many hours do you spend playing per week' or 'how often have you taken part in an organized tournament over the last year'). That different people use the same words for slightly different things is as new as the stone on the ground.
- watwut 8y ago
  "how often have you taken part in an organized tournament over the last year" would measure whether you like competition. It does not even measure how much you play nor how much you are invested. I think it is more useful to keep competitive and hardcore as two different words.
  - arendtio 8y ago
    Indeed, it doesn't measure the same. The examples were meant more as an example how to ask questions that different people answer the same way (given the same situation).
Lazare 8y ago
> In our talk at GDC 2018, we explored what gamer motivations would look like if we defined “casual/core/hardcore” gamers using different assumptions—e.g., by self-identification with labels vs. by gaming frequency vs. by specific game titles they play. In this blog post, we’ll focus on the slice by self-identification with labels, but we’re hoping to cover at least one additional slice in a future post. In other words, they're looking at a few different ways of defining "casual" and "hardcore", and one of the ways they're looking at is self-identification, which is an obvious and useful way of looking at these types of things in sociology. And as a bonus, we then get to do some interesting comparisons of how the different ways of categorising people overlap and differ (which they touched on briefly near the end when they noted that female EverQuest 2 players averages more hours per week). > This is wrong, even their entire concept of casual/mid/hardcore gamer is terrible, you can't just define it like that. That's quite a bold assertion. Do you have some sort of argument for why this is somehow uniquely an area where self-identification is an unusable way of classifying people, or are you just offended by their results? Because it sure looks to me like you totally can use self-identification here. :)

beat 8y ago

Makes me think of my home... my son is a "hardcore gamer", by anyone's definition. He doesn't recognize his mother as a gamer at all, despite her spending 10-20 hours/week gaming. She's mostly doing puzzle games on her iPad, so that's not "real gaming". So there's a fair bit of gender and cultural bias in the very idea of "gamer". I don't play video games, myself, for the same reason I don't shoot heroin directly into my eyeballs. I know I have a problem, so I avoid the problem.

emaginniss 8y ago
"I don't shoot heroin directly into my eyeballs" casual...
- beat 8y ago
  A few years ago, I had a medical problem (retinal vein occlusion) that had to be treated for a while with monthly injections directly into my eye. The drug used (Avastin) was originally developed for colon cancer treatment - it prevents the regrowth of tiny veins, which leads to a lot of very interesting uses. So the day of my first injection, I went to a Rolling Stones concert with my spouse. And I don't care what sort of hardcore Keith Richards is, I'm pretty sure he wasn't shooting chemotherapy drugs directly into his eyeball before the concert!
watwut 8y ago
I think that you will find that many women who play a lot of those puzzle games would dislike to be called "gamer" too. There is a lot baggage contained in that word and while young boy may see at as positive identification, older women is unlikely so.
Nadya 8y ago
>despite her spending 10-20 hours/week gaming Pardon the wall of text here... I typically spend 40+ hours/week gaming. Literally a 2nd job. However, I don't even consider the time spent gaming in my definition of "hardcore" gamer. There are people who play 80+ hours/week that I would consider "casual" gamers by definition of how they play. They see games mostly as a way to kill time and might identify the activity with being a hobby, but not one they take "seriously" to any extent. The thing that makes me "hardcore" is the amount of time I don't spend gaming - but learning about the game on a deep level. I typically have 99% of a games' wikipedia memorized. I can tell you nearly anything about any of the games I play off the top of my head. I'll know every mechanic, every bug, why the bugs exist, a summary of the lore. Depending on the genre, I'll know the best places to level at any particular level range, where every single enemy spawns (or whether their spawn is random), the damage output of every weapon in comparison to one another, how certain items scale, the frame data of certain attacks (eg: first hit frame, ending lag, if it has invincible frames, the number of end frames). Casuals don't care to put in all this extra effort to know the game on a deep, often very mechanical, level. "Intermediate" players will read about it but still don't invest much time to it. "Hardcore" players know a game inside, inside-out, upside-down, mirrored, and can probably run through some levels blindfolded going off their memorization of the game alone. A casual player can play SSBM for 30 hours a week without ever learning how to wavedash, L-cancel, chaingrab, wobble, (S)DI, amsa tech, moonwalk, shffl, platform cancel, slide cancel, soft B-reverse, or ledge stall. There is also a good chance they think I made up half of those words or just said some random things. They also don't tend to keep up with any metagaming - or if they do - they're never on the forefront of innovation for the metagame, but only ever (poorly) copying what they see pro players do without understanding why the professional player made their decisions. The casual player's mechanical knowledge about the game is lacking too much to effectively innovate because they don't really understand how the game interacts with itself. My casual League of Legends coworkers' are all ranked Bronze/Silver because ranking in that game is almost entirely a measure of knowledge and only a very small part of it is skill - they all play the game far more than I do but I understand the game better than them and ranked among the top 1% of players (Plat1/Diamond5 range) when I played. They never cared to learn about the game itself - so never improved as players. Even after months and months of playing with them they never got any better at the game, even as their general "skill level" (ability to execute) was increasing over time. Certain games also lack depth - and are the games I consider targeted towards casual players. Most of those are mobile games like Angry Bird, puzzle games (eg: 2048, Candy Crush), or arcade-like games like Pacman, Asteroids. So while I don't consider playing puzzle games on an iPad "not real gaming" it is also very much a sign of "casual gaming" - it's a time killing activity. Without knowing your wife, I have my doubts that she spends a significant time metagaming her puzzle games or researching the best way to solve the puzzles. This is partly because that would be counter-productive to a good puzzle and partly because there often isn't enough depth to a puzzle game to research about it.

wgerard 8y ago

Ignoring the graphs, curious how much of this is just a response to community. Anecdotes abound, beware. Even as an older (for gaming, anyway) white male, the community in some competitive games is just really unappealing - it basically reminds me of middle school, and I guess I'm not really into that anymore. Lots of things said just to get a reaction (e.g. racial slurs), lots of weird discussions about women, lots of puffed chests the second there's an opportunity to, etc. I don't really have the time to be competitively good at any of these games, and the community kinda sucks unless you are competitively good, so it's kinda like what's the point? At least with rec sports the community is generally nice even if you're terrible (probably because you're in-person). Sure, you can just mute people usually. But if you're muting everyone all the time, you might as well just be playing a single-player game. You can just play with friends, but that requires you to have friends who haven't also gotten sick of these communities. Conversely, the community in games more oriented towards completion/design are usually great - because your success doesn't detract from someone else's, and they're not usually depending on you for their own success. Feels much more like a community. Anyway, my point being that I wouldn't be shocked to learn that women (and likely people of color) feel the same way - once you're not really part of that core group of young white men, competitive games start feeling really unappealing unless you're just really into the game itself.

paidleaf 8y ago
> I don't really have the time to be competitively good at any of these games, and the community kinda sucks unless you are competitively good so it's kinda like what's the point? You could play with people on your own level? > At least with rec sports the community is generally nice even if you're terrible (probably because you're in-person). Really? Try playing pick-up basketball games if you are terrible. Even with rec sports, people play at their own level. > Anyway, my point being that I wouldn't be shocked to learn that women (and likely people of color) feel the same way - once you're not really part of that core group of young white men Young white men? Why are you being racist and sexist by targeting one group? People don't play online games or recreational sports for "community". Seems like you are lonely and trying to make friends in the wrong places. I play sports because it's fun and good exercise. I play video games because it's fun and mentally challenging. I don't play sports or video games for community. > competitive games start feeling really unappealing unless you're just really into the game itself. Then don't play it. Go play something else? Why are you complaining about it? Maybe women on average don't like competitive games for the same reason women don't like other competitive sports like basketball, baseball, etc? Maybe, men and women are on average different and have different interests. Maybe that's why advertisers go about targeting men and women different? Maybe that's why movies, music, etc are differently geared towards men and women? Or, maybe you could push your racist and sexist rhetoric and blame young white men?

madshiva 8y ago

The BIAS here is to let people choose if they are hardcore or not, like the gender is wrong. There's an definition about hardcore, and people can't argue the definiton and what they define hardcore. BTW, there's only 2 gender.

bovermyer 8y ago

Why should I care?

kitsy 8y ago

I was rather unimpressed with the test as well as the graphs. I scored myself low in every category because I find it hard to rate any one aspect high. I'm paraphrasing: How important are explosions? How important is competition? How important is exploring? I can't rate any of these things high, in and of themselves. It requires a well balanced mix of things to make a great game. Breaking everything down to individual components makes it seem I am much less engaged in games than I am.

mabbo 8y ago

Setting aside the graph issues, the data is very interesting. Much of game development for the triple-A space seems aimed at the hardcore male gamer demographic, whether intentional or not. Could a studio instead build a game that focuses on entirely different categories and as a result attract a bigger market that isn't being addressed? Make a game that's fun, but focus on design, discovery, completion, fantasy. Don't discourage male players, but make a game that ticks all the boxes for most female players. Market it subtly for both genders, trying to hook female gamers. I hope someone is trying to do this.

belorn 8y ago
Game studios are already focusing on different target demographics, it just that people tend to not see it because when a product change target demographic it also tailors (in a market competition way) all other aspect of putting a product to market and successfully earning profit on it. Those changes also effect how game studios compete against each other, and major developers for one type might be a minor actor in the other. Triple-A games and block buster action movies has very many similarities. A lot of focus is on first day sales with flashy and short term advertisement that get concentrated to compete against the competition that tries to do the same thing. For some reason the young male with disposable income is a core demographic for this kind of product. In contrast Candy crush, Facebook games, romantic comedy and drama movies share a different target demographic of middle age women. If I remember right then production for that demographic has surpassed that of triple-A, with mobile games being a massive industry. Why does marketing when targeting for men or women differ? Why does the purchasing pattern differ. I don't know and there are movie and game studios that do try to target all gender and all age demographics with the same product, using a singe marketing style and single platform. Maybe that works but lets not forget that game studios that targeting other demographics than young male with disposable income really do exist. They just don't call themselves triple-A, just like how a romantic comedy don't usually get described as a block buster. If I make a guess I would say it has something to do with marketing.

erikb 8y ago

The female logic I can follow here: Once you play hardcore, i.e. more intense, just having a story will get boring soon. So they add other competencies. It's a little confusing for me, why just playing skill competition shouldn't get boring for men as well. Adding story based components for a more indepth experience would also sound reasonable for me. So I wonder if self-assessment is really a good way to analyse the behaviour here. It might be that men don't mention that they care about community/story as much, while actually they do as well when they heavily invest time and energy into a single game.

ajross 8y ago

New candidate for Most Confusing Chart of 2018 right here folks: https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/overall_casual_hardcore.png https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/overal... Even the explanation doesn't help: > In this chart below, the y-axis is showing the percentile rank of each motivation. That 50th-%tile line represents the average among the 350,000+ gamers who have completed the Gamer Motivation Profile. So for example, the 74th-%tile in Competition among Hardcore gamers means that the average Hardcore gamer scores higher on Competition than 74% of the gamers in the full data set. I genuinely don't think there's anything useful that can be said here at all without knowing what fraction of gamers make up the different catagories. Beyond that, all we can say for sure is that "hardcore" gamers like gaming more. Ugh.

bytematic 8y ago

I've played almost every competitive pc game in the last decade and I've never came across one where when a female voice gets on the mic, the atmosphere of the game doesn't change. Not every individual match of course but dam, I would NOT want to be a female online gamer. Seperate note: I've been to LANs and the mood is quite different, it is unfortunate to see the gender divide and most competitive (semi-pro at least) guys really want to see that scene improve.