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As one of the few female CEOs in gaming I tend to get consulted when a reporter is writing on women and games, and I got this question a few months back. When I tried to answer I got stuck because I felt like there were a ton of assumptions baked in that I wasnt sure I agreed with.

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Definition from the Casual Games Association website/Jessica Tams

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This is the top 7 most played games on Kongregate in the last month. Two are pretty clearly casual (though idle games are not a genre mentioned) but most are in genres that are not considered casual: FPS, MMO, CCG

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And our demographics fit the core gamer stereotype: overwhelmingly male, high weekly time spent on games, play console games

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This is part of the reason why I dont like the concepts of core and casual. Kongregate is a site dominated by classic core gamers and the 5th most played game in the history of the site, Learn to Fly 2, is a cute launch game involving penguins that anybody could pick up and play.

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But more than the muddiness of their meaning the reason I hate core and casual is because every time we use those terms we are implicitly devaluing certain types of game experiences, usually that of females and older adults. By calling any type of gaming core were automatically calling the rest peripheral.

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The definition of casual suggests that it something people do occasionally at best

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But my friend Lida, who exactly fits the classic stereotype of a casual gamer female in her mid 40s is a great example of why that is a very bad assumption if we assume they play irregularly. We were chatting about games recently and she mentioned that shed never considered herself a gamer but was shocked when she realized quite how much she was playing solitaire when she examined her stats.

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I asked her to send me screenshots of her stats and because shes a Chemistry PhD she did a thorough analysis. Shes played 300 hours of solitaire since she got her iPhone 6, so shes playing about 15 hours a week its her go-to downtime hobby. Lida prefers the games that are difficult, and tracks her her win rate to see if she is making progress and improving her skills. Whats casual about this? Essentially it comes down to: non-violent game familiar from previous play

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Heres another woman whose experience breaks the labels we use: my grandmother, an upper middle class lady from Waco, Texas who died 25 years ago and probably never touched a computer in her life.

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She loved to play bridge and mahjong, belonged to clubs to play both. She was both very good and very competitive at it so much so that the familys first clue that she was going senile was when my mom saw her misplay a bridge trick. Now in video games we would call bridge and mahjong casual games, but if you think about the gameplay that doesnt really make sense. Theyre deep, high-skill co-op mulitplayer games

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I dont think theres any significant difference between the source of my grandmothers enjoyment of games in her lifetime and that of someone playing League of Legends today: skill, achievement, social connection, competitive drive.

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Games seem to be one of the most universal aspects of culture. Every ancient culture has its own board games with the oldest specimens dating back 5000 years, likely played mostly by elites

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Games spread culture to culture as fast or faster than other types of knowledge. Playing cards were first invented in China in the 9th century. They reached Egypt around three hundred years later where they developed the 4 suit/52 card pack structure were familiar with before arriving in Europe in around 1300.

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By 19th century card and board games were dominant social activities for those with leisure, which was increasing with the modern economy. Since these games were inherently social they spread virally through groups, adopted by families and communities rather than individuals. Everybody played, game rules were taught by family or friends, and as such had strong social endorsement.

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But video games, when they arrived in the 1970s, spread differently. Crowding around screens, keyboards, and joysticks the games were necessarily played more individually. Arcade games were destinations, PCs and consoles were special purchases, so games were bought and played by the adventurous, the novelty-seeking, and the early tech adopters ! and those were overwhelmingly young males

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The early game systems were marketed to families but the industry quickly doubled down on the tastes of young men. First person shooters became one of the most popular genres and improved graphics allow for more realistic gore and less realistic female breasts. The density of gamers within the young males increased to the point where playing video games became automatic. It wasnt a geeky subculture (though it was that, too, within that), it was what everyone did. The social endorsement, the passing of knowledge, though restricted by demographic, was more like the way games used to pass through communities, pulling in males who might not have searched out games on their own.

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But even though women and older generations werent willing to go out and buy dedicated hardware to play unfamiliar games didnt mean they werent playing video games. Microsoft bundled solitaire with windows and in the 90s it was hard to walk into an accounting department without seeing someone quickly hide it on their screen. Familiar card and board games quickly became some of the most popular free content on browser portals like Yahoo!, AOL, and MSN, and the portal owners were surprised to find the audience was middle-aged and majority female the opposite of what they were expecting. PopCap proved you could get these gamers to play and pay for new genre if they could try the game first and the price was reasonable.

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By 2007 video game players were pretty evenly distributed across all demographics, but the distribution and consumption of games was almost totally segregated between young men and everyone else. That reinforced the stereotypical view of who a gamer was with the industry, the media, the culture in general. Even though people were playing games en masse it was a relatively silent phenomenon, where play was mostly isolated and individual, the consumers didnt self-identify as gamers, and often felt guilty about wasting time. Social activity was strong, especially on Pogo, but more likely to be chatting with strangers rather than interacting with friends or family.

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Social games upended that paradigm. First of all you didnt have to search out games, they came to you. And they came to you with both social endorsement and social pressure my crops are dying, cant you help? Even while people complained about spam it made visible what had been hidden, created the density of activity that convinces the hesitant that this is an acceptable way to spend your time, and made it possible for games to be a truly mass phenomenon again. The other major innovation was the adoption of free-to-play as the dominant business model. The industry had always struggled with monetizing gamers who want to play a few games repeatedly rather than moving on. Console games turned to the pseudo subscription of the annual sequel, MMOs to subscriptions, but casual games had limped along with an ad-supported model. But with free-to-play that type of player is desirable as long as the developer can continue to push content and items worth buying, the revenue is uncapped.

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Mobile has pushed things farther not only are smartphones broadly adopted across all demographics, theyre constantly with us, which gives them a lead over any other platform for games. Console gamers and social gamers are discovering games from the same two app stores, pushing games up truly unified charts. And thats having interesting effects. One effect is that it increases the visibility within the industry of successful games targeted to females the Kim Kardashian game has gotten as much attention as Hearthstone, which wouldnt have happened if it had hit the same level of success on Big Fish and Yahoo! Games. But more important than that is that players are being exposed to games and genres that never would have been marketed to them in the past, and finding they like them.

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A great example of that is my friend Megan. She had been playing card and puzzle games on her phone for a while but got bored with Candy Crush and decided to try Clash of Clans because it was the next game on the list, and shed seen a commercial. Shed never played a strategy game before but 6 months later shes an elder in a competitive clan with people shes never met and has been caught playing during parties when a clan war is going on. And that goes in both directions. Ive seen surveys of Gamestops heavy console game buyers and let me tell you, theyre playing a lot of Candy Crush. What that means is that hit games are again truly mass experiences, even to the point where Superbowl ads make sense.

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So why am I ranting about core and casual labels if I think were starting to transcend them anyway? Well, I believe that the stereotypes/shorthand of core and casual gamers have become so deeply embedded in all of us that its interfering with how we design, market, and monetize games. We realize that the labels arent working anymore, so weve started throwing compromise bandaids at it like mid core, but most definitions of mid core I hear are along the lines of core games on accessible platforms with better tutorials. Its broadening the audience some, but still underestimating the universality of the pleasures of games.

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And by understanding consumption patterns separate from genre tastes we can better serve customer needs. Heres another way we could split the audience Familiarity looks different than it did 15-20 years ago. The games of peoples childhoods are no longer necessarily cards. Its just as likely to be tetris or Madden or Doom. IP also helps this type of true casual get into a game. Also by looking at the past it can help you predict the future. Looking forward to VR, for example, the fact that its specialized hardware suggests that its likely to be embraced again by novelty-seekers, mostly young males, and that a paid model is going to be best for a long time. But if there are practical reasons to embrace the hardware then well see it spread much more broadly, but without that we could see it become a big market niche but not a mass market.

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But more than that if we continue to stick with the labels weve used in the past, were serving all gamers poorly. The good news is that we have an industry that is truly a mass audience industry: almost everybody plays video games now, just as almost everybody go the movies, watches TV, or listens to music. But we would never talk about a core moviegoer or music listener. There are genres, and many genres have demographic tilts, and they have both casual and enthusiast fans that are not mutually exclusive. I can be an enthusiast fan of indie rock and a casual fan of hip-hop and opera. Studio execs may chase young male audiences with action movies in the summer, but they make the movies knowing they wont be huge successes unless women and older men like them, too. So lets stop breaking our audience into just two groups and condescending to one of them. Games are more than that, Gamers are more than that, and the industry can be, too.

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Games were likely played mostly by the elites, and spread culture

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