Casual Games definition (Score 3, Interesting)

In a lot of ways you are right. Casual Games is an extremely hard to define term. We took a shot at it again this year, but the reality is that I don't think we'll ever see a full and complete defition of casual games. Some people like to define them by their player-base (ie Soccer Moms), but that's flawed because there's many other types of people playing casual games. Even if you expand the definition to people that play in short bursts of time it isn't right, because you have some extremely hardcore casual game players who will go for many hours at a time.

On some levels even games like WoW have aspects that are extremely casual. It's very easy to get into, they do a great job of holding your hand, and you can with some success play the game in relatively short play sessions (though you can't get to level 60!)

In the end, the definition we are using I think is the most appropriate one we have, but as we point out in the paper, it's still pretty flawed. Anytime you have this nebulous of a definition there's going to be edge cases, and things that possibly fit, and others that don't. It actually took several years before we even found a name for this aspect of the game industry, and in the end it's one that most people aren't happy with, but don't have a better suggestion.