If you count Candy Crush then sure
If the same number was cited for beer drinking, I’d be saying “sure, if you count anyone who’s ever had a Budweiser”, and it would be a valid criticism.
Though with videogames, it's still a meaningful statistic to include "casuals" considering it used to be taboo to play videogames at all as an adult.
There's a difference between a casual Candy Crush player and a casual Overwatch player though.
I wouldn't class the Candy Crush player as even a casual gamer.
"Over three billion people are now drinkers"
"If you count having a glass of wine once a week then sure"
On the subway, it's not uncommon to see people playing games like candy crush on their commute to and from work. The average subway commute is an hour long each way. Playing two hours a day is a decent chunk of time. Engaging in any other hobby for even 30 minutes a day would put you squarely in at least the "enthusiast" category by most definitions.
Even excluding commutes, it's quite common for me to see people playing mobile games during e.g. their lunch break.
So, I think a better analogy would be more like:
"Over three billion people are now drinkers"
> "If you count drinking a budweiser every day then sure"
Which, yeah, I would.
It may have to do with the difference in "I will play this game instead of staring into the void" vs "I will buy that game and set aside time to play it". Would people on the subway play candy crush if they didn't have to commute? There's a fine line, I believe.
And then there's another fine line with regards to what counts as "video game". Is computer chess a video game because it's played on a computer, or is it simply chess? How many people would say "I'm going to play on the computer" vs "I'm going to play some chess" when they're going to play chess on their computer? "Video games" aren't the same as "mobile games" in my opinion, though there are video games on mobile devices, but e.g. Solitaire isn't a video game.
And last but not least: I'm pretty sure most people who play Minesweeper on their commute but aren't otherwise into computer games would self-identify as "gamers".
That seems like a weird distinction to draw, given the numerous other activities you could be doing with that time (reading a book, for example). Clearly, they downloaded candy crush with the intention of playing it. The time they set aside is their commute.
If I purchase a Switch solely to play e.g. Octopath on the subway, am I no longer a "gamer" simply because I'm just using it as an alternative to staring out into the void?
FWIW: IIRC Candy Crush's most popular "day of the week" is Sunday, meaning people ARE setting aside time to play.
> And then there's another fine line with regards to what counts as "video game". Is computer chess a video game because it's played on a computer, or is it simply chess?
Yes, that's true. I think that leads to interesting questions about what qualifies as a video game. Do all the e.g. sim games (bus sim, flight sim, etc.) count as video games? What about Madden/etc?
However, I don't think any of that's relevant here: There's no real-world counterpart to Candy Crush.
> "Video games" aren't the same as "mobile games" in my opinion, though there are video games on mobile devices, but e.g. Solitaire isn't a video game.
I think that's a pretty reductionist view of mobile games, especially given the roots of video games. Candy Crush isn't any more simplistic than say, Ice Climber or Tetris (or substitute that with most other early NES-era games).
I don't think you want to put arbitrary complexity requirements on games to be considered "true games", otherwise we'll have to re-evaluate a lot of titles: E.g. are Telltale games "video games", or are they just choose-your-own-adventures on a computer? What about Tetris?
And that's to say nothing of the other point you mentioned, which is that increasingly "modern" games are available on mobile devices. One of the top sellers on the iOS app store is Minecraft, which I think everyone would consider qualifies as a video game. Epic is currently going through a massive battle with Apple over them kicking Fortnite off the app store.
> And last but not least: I'm pretty sure most people who play Minesweeper on their commute but aren't otherwise into computer games would self-identify as "gamers".
I will posit that is largely because of the stigma around being a "gamer", partially warranted (gaming communities can be notoriously toxic) and partially not.
This is somewhat self-reinforcing because many adults who should identify as "gamers" don't want to be associated with that term (I count myself in that group, which is partially why I'm so passionate about this topic). Viewpoints like "mobile games don't count as real games" don't help either, by excluding everyone but the most diehard.
Again, I think with any other hobby it would be hard for you not to qualify as at least an enthusiast if you spent an appreciable amount of time engaging in it. If I read novels for 2 hours a day, it would be quite appropriate for someone to label me as a "reader".
I believe it's similar to the difference between running because you're late and need to catch the bus and going for a run because you want to run. One is the end ("I want to play a game"), the other is a means ("I want to kill time on the train and a book is too complicated").
Tetris isn't a video game in my opinion, but it's a computer game. A video game involves video of some kind of world to move in, be that a football field you're running on, a race track you drive on, or a wasteland you crawl through. Maybe you could make the immersion a distinction, but I'm not sure about it.
> I will posit that is largely because of the stigma around being a "gamer", partially warranted (gaming communities can be notoriously toxic) and partially not.
I don't know. I've never been part of any gaming communities, but there has been a time when I played a lot of games and if asked, I would've said that I'm a gamer. I haven't for years, so I don't consider myself a gamer now.
> Again, I think with any other hobby it would be hard for you not to qualify as at least an enthusiast if you spent an appreciable amount of time engaging in it.
I'm not sure. I've watched a lot of movies but I'd never consider myself a movie buff, I just liked cheap entertainment. I believe it's different with books because there has to be intention, reading isn't the path of least resistance, it requires more intention than candy crush, movies, meme scrolling or listening to music or a pod cast.
Similarly, driving a car to work (or using public transportation) isn't really saying anything about you. Biking to work all year, no matter the weather, is different.
I don't think it's about "gate keeping" as much as wanting clear communication. It's not useful to call everyone a gamer that has ever in their life played a game on an electronic device. It's not useful to call everyone a climber that has ever in their life climbed something, be that a mountain, tree or bunk bed.
And my general opinion: don't worry about identifying yourself as a gamer because of some stigma. People who are worth talking to will usually ask and find out what you're talking about. It may be a good litmus test to quickly sort out those that live by factory made opinions. Don't bother trying to be liked by them.
If you chose to bike to work every day, I would call you a biker. If you watched a movie every single day, I would say watching movies is a hobby of yours. If you went to a rock climbing gym every day, I would call you a climber.
Driving, and some other fields like cooking, are quite different. You're not choosing to engage in that behavior - it's a requirement for your life. Same with cooking food. You need to get to work, you need to eat. You don't need to play Candy Crush on the train - and obviously, many people don't.
> And my general opinion: don't worry about identifying yourself as a gamer because of some stigma.
I don't mean to be a negative ned, but I'm not talking about the "neckbeard loser" stigma. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, that's probably for the best.
Video games have been a large part of my life since I could hold a controller. The sooner I can mention the game I played last night in casual conversation without people assuming I'm a controller-throwing, gamerword-spewing child with no impulse control or social intuition, the better.
The last time I mentioned I played Dark Souls the conversation turned to how horrible the community is, with the implication that I spend my time telling people to "git gud" and invading new players to make them miserable. Never mind that I helped probably 10-12 people beat Capra Demon that night with no ingame reward past "humanity" which I already have more than I need.
"There are 3 billion Spanish speakers worldwide"
But then you learned that only 500 million were really fluent, and the rest ranged from broken Spanish that was enough to get by in a Spanish speaking country to people who were forced to take a Spanish class in highschool and never used it again.
I think this concept of "fluency" in games is probably a more useful metric. The question is, if I dump you in front of a game that you've never played before, but it conforms to the language of video game design, how quickly can you beat it? I would imagine that someone who only played Candy Crush would not understand how to move their camera around in a 3D environment, for example.[1]
You could extend the metaphor further, for example Spanish is spoken in many different ways around the globe, and therefore some people who speak one dialect of Spanish can't understand another dialect of Spanish. The same could be true for games, and we would need to classify and understand these dialects.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax7f3JZJHSw Interesting video talking about what games are like for a non-gamer, shows an example of not understanding how to move the camera and the player at the same time.
Now would someone who only played NES games, or Civilization VI, or Papers Please. Are we defining 'games' as meaning '3D walk-y about-y games', here?
IMO one of the worst aspects of modern "gamer" culture is this insistence on purity tests particularly when they're aimed at games that are extremely popular with women.
Even in terms of market segmentation I don't think the distinction of "overall gaming fluency" is very measurable or meaningful.
You can't have the same conversation between someone who plays only candy crush, and someone who plays a wide variety of games. Its like saying that 8 billion people read books -- but 7.9 billion of that only read harry potter. Suddenly that 8 billion readers is far less notable.
There's a scale to your level of hobbyism -- a lot of people only play games as long as their friends do, because its simply a social tool (replacing the mall). The current flavor just happens to fall under video games, but theres no stickiness -- if the next popular thing is laser tag, they'll shift out and never think about games again.
The notion of trying to define this scale as a problem is also largely unique to gaming -- it exists elsewhere without issue. Painting, movies, programming, literature, music, engineering etc there's no issue saying that someone is dipping their toes into the subject, or has purely commercial interest in it (eg I only watch best selling movies, or only marvel) or has an actual interest in it (a -phile, a hacker, etc)
I think the key difference is the prevailing belief that there is no depth to this subject, so the only difference between a casual entrant and a hobbyist and a professional is an arbitrary checklist.
Obviously I disagree -- there is depth, and therefore, there is a difference between "gamers", as they fall between the ranks in understanding that depth. Ofc theres no great metric, and you can't define it in detail, but the difference between a candy-crush-only "gamer" and a genre-agnostic "gamer" and a genre-loving "gamer" and a read-the-literature (what little exists) "gamer" in recognizing and communicating about that depth is readily apparent
The problem mostly comes from people who define their hobby as their life. I play games a lot and make them professionally but wouldn’t call myself a gamer. I don’t see my wife playing Match-3 games on her phone as lesser than my wife playing Baldurs Gate. Likewise I can enjoy Sage Solitaire and Escape from Tarkov.
Gaming is mainstream now and people who feel threatened by that need to grow up.
It would be the difference of trying to communicate about movies between someone who has only ever seen marvel films, and someone who watched say the entirety of the criterion collection. Or the difference between technical sales and engineers. It'd be fairly meaningless to give them the same label -- one is clearly capable of a more advanced communication on the subject than the other, if only because they've experience a larger subset of the subject.
Of course, you could also play the living hell out of a single game and be extremely fluent about only that one game -- which is clearly different than someone being fluent about games in general. We wouldn't expect someone who only ever played SC2, even if he had put 2000 hours into it, to have anything notable to say about FPS games and RPGs.
As you've opined, the marker of when you'd be considered a "gamer" vs otherwise is an arbitrary meaningless distinction, a random line drawn in the sand, but that's why "fluency" is trying to be introduced as an alternative.
Also mobile games have deservedly earned a reputation as blatant dopamine pumps and many don't deserve to be considered 'real video games' any more than Facebook or Instagram.
It's like measuring how many people know how to cook and then including people who do microwave dinners. It's technically not incorrect and there's nothing wrong with the people who microwave, it's just not a very useful piece of data.
I know several people that would say exactly that. There are a lot of beer snobs in this world. If it's not Belgian/German/homebrew/etc. it's not beer.
Candy Crush and games like it are closer to https://www.kohls.com/product/prd-2796704/trademark-games-el... than https://store.steampowered.com/app/10/CounterStrike/. I wouldn't call the former a video game by any reasonable standard.
I think Candy Crush qualifies as a video game, if only by the most technically narrow of definitions. But it's a pretty hard sell to put the stereotypical Candy Crush style game player in the same category as someone who owns and regularly utilizes a console. There is overlap, obviously, but that's also clearly not what we're discussing.
At some point the casual application of "video gamer" will make the term meaningless--especially as we move toward almost ubiquitous electronic interfaces and devices for even the most mundane of life's activities.
A golfing or racing game isn't similar to golfing or racing, it's clearly primarily a video game. It gets somewhat blurry when you have a high-end setup with a cockpit that's being shaken while you drive a rally. Is it still a video game, or a simulator? I'd say the latter, but it's an edge case.
Angry Birds is, to me at least, closer to a video game (though I'd say it's a different genre "mobile game"), because there's obviously not a directly transferred real-life version.
We do it in many other areas without such issue, e.g., recreational vs. amateur vs. professional athletics, cooking, artistry, etc. If a report were published that said "250 million adult Americans are cooks" I'd find it objectionable. It's not a meaningful number, either in terms of market segmentation or as a description of the actual activity that is purported to be engaged in.
The problem here is that the breakdown is completely arbitrary based on "how much I feel related to people who play it". It is not based on hours played, someone who plays on console less of time can count. It is not by effort spent, someone who plays repetitive grinding games on console still counts. It is not even per who self-identifies as gamer, that is not question in the thread at all. The thread is all about whether candy crush counts as game or videogame.
"250 million adult Americans cook" is perfectly valid thing to write in a report, even of those people don't do special French receipts.
So really, what it is about is that some self-identified gamers take offense on the idea that games which target different demographics can be talked about as a games. And while there are many cultural/emotional things that make it so, it still seem impossible to come up with reasonable definition that excludes candy crush. Candy crush is an insult to most gamers despite majority of them not knowing next thing about that game, except that it was huge success among people they, frankly, find inferior.
“Casual” video gaming, a term that carries unfortunate dismissive undertones, represents the most common form of video games played. The proliferation of the smart phone has undoubtedly helped here.
Probably more so pre-pandemic. My observation when I lived in Chicago is that many people played these games while commuting via mass transit, I’m sure fewer are doing that now.
Do see a bit of sudoku. It would be interesting if there are music vs audiobooks metrics on today’s commuters. I get the commute escapism of candy crush but I’ve seen enough of that in homes/work to wonder.
A similar situation:
If I was discussing "board game culture" I think that most people would recognize that I'm referring the culture associated with games like Catan or Pandemic as opposed to people casually playing Tic Tac Toe.
No-one's talking about 'board game culture', though. This is about whether people play video games. If you were talking about the board games people play, Catan would be a barely visible blip; it'd be all about things like Monopoly. Now if you were talking about people who consider playing games part of their identity, I'd be inclined to agree (though there are edge cases; Pokemon Go falls into both 'casual game' and 'game that people get a bit weird about', for instance), but that's not at all what this survey is about.
EDIT: Also, well, media evolves. If you look at the sort of TV that's popular now, a lot of it is dramatically different to how it was in, say, the 80s and 90s. Someone who'd been in a coma since before Seinfeld came out would find modern sitcoms (with their lack of laugh tracks), and high production value dramas with multi-season story arcs (barely existed until this century), and reality shows, extremely weird. But they'd recognise that it was TV. And some 80s-style content still exists; it's just largely not what is popular right now.
From a business perspective, they are unlikely to be the same target market. Gaming related memes and similar cultural artifacts are unlikely to be shared. Etc.
This argument seems popular with people who like Very Serious Video Games, and are affronted by being associated with filthy casuals (the gamers, not the brand).
Similarly "all people eat food" isn't really helpful if you're wondering how large the market for artificial meat is.
If you wish to separate “core” gamers, do it by device or by category, since that is much clearer and carries less of a value judgement.
For example I played Love Letter on Board Game Arena on Tuesday. Clearly if I played the "real" Love Letter that isn't a video game, it's a card game. So maybe playing it on BGA is still a card game, except the cards don't exist and I'm on a web site?
Sometimes on Tuesday I play Through The Ages. TTA was created as a board game, but obviously in the pandemic you can't safely go to somebody's house and sit around playing board games for hours. So there's a version that's a Steam game. Is that a video game? Or is that still just a board game I'm playing via Steam?
Sometimes we play D&D online instead. Is that a video game? Is it a video game if we're doing a 4th edition combat encounter, so that exact positions and movement matter? How about if it's a roleplayed skill check scenario instead?
Is an Infocom text adventure game a video game? How about a point-and-click like Monkey Island?
Is designing courses in Mario Maker 2 a video game?
Is writing Python code for my Compact Claustrophobia (Minecraft modpack) robot to more efficiently construct things for my play a video game?
These are things that require some clear fundamental idea of what video games are to guide principled decisions. Whereas Candy Crush is just obviously a video game.
If Candy Crush isn't a video game then I'm pretty sure arcade Space Invaders wasn't a video game either.
I get the negative reactions to this, I really do. All communities - fan clubs, beer aficionados, gamers, book enthusiasts - have groups of gatekeepers that try to separate the dirty filthy unworthy casual people from the real X.
But don't assume that is always the case. Sentiments like this often comes from a different place: wanting meaningful discussion.
There are two parts to this. "X game" vs "Y game" categorization, and "plays games" vs "played a game". The first one is usually contentious so I'll elaborate:
I play Candy Crush and games like it regularly, and enjoy them. However, I call them "casual games" rather than "video games" in the same way people like to separate "board game" from "party game", "jogging" from "running", "visual novel" from "comic book", and "web design" from "programming" (or "sanwdich" from "hotdog"). The borders frequently get blurry, and people love discussing pedantic philosophy about what is a sandwich, but the grouping still exists and is meaningful. While people who don't have a lot of interest in the field find the distinction weird and pointless, the people who are close to the field find the difference to be night and day. I play and enjoy Terraforming Mars which I classify a board game, Dying Light which I classify a video game, and Super Hexagon which I classify a casual game. Conflating the category of any two of them feels equally wrong. They are different activities, played for different reasons, at different times, with different levels of investment.
Any study and discussion that manages to recognize at least these broad distinctions, will be immensely more interesting and fruitful than one who tries to count hotdogs as sandwiches.
Edit; although this study would probably call me one, because I picked up an Xbox controller one time.
Candy Crush has 250-275 million active users. Do some digging if you want an accurate picture. Saying this game or that game counts shows a willful choice to not engage in the conversation, and perhaps a fundamental lack of understanding as to what constitutes a video game.