Difficulty Curve? Attention Spans changing?

[Menegrothx]

few hours or less a day.

I guess I'm a casual too then.

Unless those two are spent playing Dwarf Fortress

[TheGregzilla]

Well the few hours or less a day thing wasnt as specific as It should have been I suppose. I mean more or less the people who only play one or two modern games, 2 hours or less a day. I think thats pretty casual with the direction things have taken with gaming. Playing any retro games regularly at least puts you into gaming enthusiast, because its something you had to personally pursue yourself, it wasn't sitting on a shelf in walmart.

[Valkyrie-Favor]

...two hours a day is way more than most people have time for, isn't it? I can only do that because I'm unemployed right now. Might not be for long, though!

[TheGregzilla]

...two hours a day is way more than most people have time for, isn't it? I can only do that because I'm unemployed right now. Might not be for long, though!

Youd be suprised haha. It depends on everyones personal situation. Pretty much every gamer I know that is single plays at least 2 hours a day (on average) Having a g/f or wife cuts into that a bit sometimes. I am unemployed (So I have more time to play) but I am lucky enough that my g/f plays video games with me. We spent a few hours playing ToeJam and Earl on Funkotron just the other night.

[ZenErik]

I'm lucky to sometimes get up to 2 hours of play on the bus/train each day. But sometimes the bus makes me motion sick. And if its a game I am really into, like SMTIV, I try to play at home for 2-3 hours too. But this is a special case. Most games I'll just play 30 min up to 2 hours max per day. Generally with days off too.

[Menegrothx]

How can an unemployed person have so little gaming time? I had enough free time to put 55-65 hours a week into World of Warcraft alone back when I was in school. Now I'm unemployed so I have more time to play games

[oxymoron]

...two hours a day is way more than most people have time for, isn't it? I can only do that because I'm unemployed right now. Might not be for long, though!

Youd be suprised haha. It depends on everyones personal situation. Pretty much every gamer I know that is single plays at least 2 hours a day (on average) Having a g/f or wife cuts into that a bit sometimes. I am unemployed (So I have more time to play) but I am lucky enough that my g/f plays video games with me. We spent a few hours playing ToeJam and Earl on Funkotron just the other night.

Your spot on. A casual is someone who plays games for 1-2 hours every day or other day. These people know who Niko Bellic is but if you ask them their favorite game from Sunsoft they would be dumbfounded.

[ZenErik]

I don't know who that guy is and don't know any games from Sunsoft offhand. Guess I'm not hardcore or casual. Not good enough for a label? *shrug* works for me.

[sonic2041]

OK, so I'm not sure if I'm supposed to comment about the difficulty of video games, or why cod sucks, or about who is a hardcore gamer.

Anyway, I just think it's funny how originally we were complaining why kids give up on games and don't spend time with them, then complain why they only play COD. When it seems the second point has answered the question. Competitive multiplayer has replaced challenging games. People may not like that, but go try to play some of these, if you don't know what you are doing you won't be very good at it. Using COD as an example, people have every part of the maps memorized, just like when you played an NES game for the 5000th time back in the day.

As for the difficulty of single player games, I think that stopped when games were able to save, and when they turned from arcade type games to interactive story books. I think people care more about the story than challenging gameplay these days. But there are still difficult games out there, they are just different types.

[isiolia]

Someone could play an hour or two of a game a day, and it could be a competitive online game, or they could be logging for a raid in an MMO. If they're doing that consistently, week after week, month after month, year after year...that's not exactly casual.