Title generated by Gemini. Response written by Autumn Gibbs.
As I was reading this excerpt, I kept finding myself viewing the term “casual” gamer as a gendered term. As a woman who enjoys videogames, gender is a more important factor than some would think when it comes to videogames and their target audience. It was very interesting to learn about how companies market different types of games based on their audience, especially towards men or women. Juul’s argument is that casual games are more convenient, flexible, and easier to learn than some “hardcore” games. He explains that casual games are designed to fit into people’s lives instead of requiring them to sit and play for hours. As Mr. Tinney of Large Animal said, in this excerpt, “These are games created for people that weren’t sitting down for hours to play games. They’re taking a break from something they’re doing and play for a few minutes.” (Page 28) This made me wonder, are women considered casual gamers because of gender roles? Do these games cater to certain gendered lifestyles? These games might appeal to women because traditional gender roles often give women less uninterrupted leisure time. Gaming culture is also stereotypically defined by mostly masculine traits, as shown by the example of developers being surprised that women liked Pac-Man when it first came out. But I believe Juul does a good job of redefining these stereotypes by explaining that casual games can be for everyone and that we should reconsider the labels associated with video games. Casual games can help expand the world of video games without being stereotypically associated with one gender or another! Since gendered marketing is still very prevalent in video games, I think that it’s a step in the right direction to market casual games without gendered assumptions, especially because Juul emphasizes that many casual games involve intentional design and don’t require extensive video game knowledge.
Juul, Jesper. A Casual Revolution : Reinventing Video Games and Their Players, MIT Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/byu/detail.action?docID=3339093.
Image source: Marketing Week
3 Comments
What an insightful way to look at this distinction between “casual” and “hardcore” gamers. I agree, gender stereotypes would say that women are the ones who would want to have something quick and easily interruptible. It is interesting to look at figure 2.7 with this lens of gender roles. The word “husband”, “boyfriend”, “hubby”, and even “bf” appear, yet there are no female equivalents. I would be shocked if the graphic is a female skewed data set, which means that there is something going on leading to a gendered difference in play time interruption.
I thought this was an interesting take on the reading that I hadn’t really thought of! I liked that you pointed out the part about Pac Man from Juul’s book. I thought that part was interesting when I read through, particularly because they made another more “girly” version with extra frills to cater specifically towards women—even though they were already enjoying playing the base Pac Man game. I also thought it was interesting how you pointed out that casual gaming might be targeting specific gendered lifestyles. I thought about this in terms of “family games” being more casual while more hardcore games are marketed towards men, particularly by focusing on “manly” subjects like sports or war.
It’s interesting to speculate on the question of casual gamers and gender roles. If casual gamers are those who aren’t flexible toward games, does the fact that women may tend to be casual gamers suggest that their gender roles do not permit them to be flexible? Or is it that they choose not to be flexible because they privilege other things? Is there actually a difference between these two?