> 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 s

> 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. :)