Behind the Scenes
H.P. Lovecraft, the racist little muppet, has a famous saying that gets trotted out like a prancing pony every time Horror as a genre gets mentioned.
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
Most people, I think, get too wrapped up in this idea, and think that he was explaining his overall thesis statement: but consider, how much of Lovecraft’s horror is about the unknown? Most of his horror, I think, comes from the idea that exploring and discovery is dangerous. It’s an anti-intellectual sentiment, that the more you learn about the world, the more horrifying it becomes. A more accurate thesis statement might be “Ignorance is bliss.”
Now, do I have a long-winded yet articulate dissertation on Hit Points Lovecraft in the hopper for you? No. This is a half-baked idea at best, but it’s a fitting prostige1 to what I want to talk about: Looking Behind the Scenes.
I’ve done a lot of work in Theatre. I know what goes into putting on a production, and how much work it takes. People often talk about the magic of theatre, but whether its my autistic brain or my practical experience, I don’t see magic anymore. I see artifice and performance.
It’s the same thing with performance magic. If you know how the trick is done, you’ll find yourself paying attention to the magician’s other hand.
But I don’t think that’s really news to anyone, is it? I doubt many people are blinking and thinking “hey, that’s right” after reading this. So…what’s my point?
Let’s talk about “Casual” play.
It’s a phrase thrown about pretty liberally in the gaming world, and not always with an opposite. A “filthy casual” is a (usually) tongue-in-cheek reference to someone who doesn’t play the game “the right way,” which is usually the way established by regular players, speedrunners, and “professionals.”
It’s an interesting process to watch. Games like World of Warcraft are called CRPGs, even if as a subgenre, and yet there is an established cannon — a ritual, if you like — to the playing. When you do a raid, you’re not “playing a game,” you’re acting out an established script of behaviors. You can make individual choices, but those choices have to be within an established set of parameters. See here for more on that.
But I’ve talked a lot2 about TTRPGs, and as a genre they’ve largely avoided any distinction between casual and non-casual types of play. What does “Casual” mean in this context?
Ah, another lexicographical discussion on “what does this loaded-with-connotations word mean, I mean really?” It’s like settling into a familiar pair of shoes.
But I’m trying to be a Better Socrates, and not just say something like “hey, if you really think about it, the term doesn’t mean much at all.” I think we’re all familiar enough with the pattern by now: watchers of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight know that whenever he says “tonight we’re going to talk about ‘X’”, X is going to be rife with horrible mishandling and/or abusive practices. If I’m ask “what does ‘Casual’ mean, in the world of gaming,” I’m going to at some point make the case that ‘casual’ can reference professional players who do nothing but game all day, right?
I periodically dip my brain into the Youtube ocean to partake of various different videos, and came across one where a twitch-streamer/youtuber made a comment that they were a “casual player” of Doom/Doom II. I looked at their back catalog and saw that they had spent over 10 years focusing on playing and twitch-streaming Doom/Doom II and their mods, and that got me confused. Obviously they were a professional twitch-streamer and youtuber, but could you play one game almost constantly for over a decade and still be a “casual player?”
Certainly there are “professional players” of games who do it for sport or money — Esports are definitely a thing — but is a “casual player” merely the opposite? Someone who does the video game equivalent of throwing the ball back and forth in the backyard?
A long time ago, “amateur” had a very different connotation than it does now. Remember, people who took part in a profession didn’t always have assembly lines or machine tools. Carpenters had to make chairs and tables by hand, one at a time, piece by piece. It could take half a day to build a table, longer if you cared about sanding the legs and ornamenting the trim. Of course, your tables couldn’t be ugly, exactly, but you had to make as much as you could as fast as you could and hope to sell it all; you couldn’t waste time making each table a piece of art.
Unless, that is, you were doing it for the love of carpentry. If you were a person of means, you didn’t need to sell tables and chairs to survive, so you could spend your time making a beautiful table, with curved legs and ivy carved on the side. Tradesfolk needed to do as little as possible to make money — lowering their losses — while the passionate hobbyist could spend time and energy making art: maximizing their gains.
Hm…haven’t I made the case that RPGs are a kind of art? Put a pin in that…
Nowadays, amateur means “inexperienced,” or at its most dismissive, “newbie.” It’s a way of saying that a person isn’t good enough at a task to make money off it. At its best, there is a nod to the idea that amateurs can sometimes be interestingly creative or offer fresh insights, but the term is mostly synonymous with unpolished, ill-practiced, and maybe even a little cringe.
Casual play has a lot of connotations, and they all seem to stem from one simple division in the play-space: the games you relax with, and the games you put effort into. Relaxing games are the games that you play to unwind, and usually don’t require much effort. If they do, it’s a simple kind of effort; easy to learn and repeat.
Let’s look at one extreme end of the spectrum: The Campaign For North Africa is an infamous board game that can take years to complete. Depending on how you look at it, it’s either a ridiculously expensive failure, a mind-numbing anti-game, or a brilliant piss-take.
Without going into too much unneccessary detail, the game is too “realistic.” I put the word in quotes because at some point you have to shake your head and say this obsessive level of simulation isn’t realistic in itself; there are rules for the handling of captured prisoners and their guards, tracking individual car/truck breakdowns across your entire army, calculating how much water has evaporated since your last turn, even for giving the Italians extra water to boil their pasta rations, which you better do lest they go A.W.O.L. You are supposed to have eight to ten players for the game, four to five on a side. According to the rulebook, during playtesting3 they came up with five “jobs” for the players, each responsible for a separate aspect of the game.
Now, saying the game is too realistic is a bold-faced lie. Is it “realistic” for the General who is managing the entire North African theatre to know about a single stalled truck in northern Egypt? Is it “realistic” for the person who directs airplane operations to also mathematically work out how much water has evaporated from their supplies? Heck, is it “realistic” to play in turns?
I’m not even sure I can say the game was designed to be a simulation. When looking at the rules and considering its history, the game seems to be designed primarily to be complex. This is not a game you can play “casually;” It’s famous for taking months to get through a single turn. Playing is a massive investment in time and effort, to say nothing of scheduling.
What about Hideous Destructor, a mod for Doom that is largely considered one of the most difficult and complex mods available? Not every FPS mod requires practice before you can even heal properly, and the HD Boot-Camp map is a must-play before you get started. It’s a game that requires constant concentration as you balance your ammunition, utilities, health and armor, and the cost/benefits of pushing forward where any one mistake can be deadly.
Consider the venerable Nethack, one of the most complex roguelikes out there; permadeath means you could spend days on a single run only to be unceremoniously killed by an unseen monster. The culture around Nethack even has a term for it: Yet Another Stupid Death, or YASD. Embodying the concept of strategy through discovery, there are hundreds of tricks and abilities that are hidden until you find them through experimentation, making this random roguelike nearly impossible to finish without both dedication, failure, and a lot of luck.
Are these games impossible to play casually? I think there’s something to the idea that “casual” is less a designation of a player’s mindset going into a game, and more a descriptor of what they get out of a game. If you want to relax, let go of stressors, and let your brain downshift into reflex and instinct, you play a “casually,” while if you want to practice a skill and expend effort, you play “seriously.”
This does some valuable things: it places the onus of casual-vs-serious on the player rather than the game. Yes, you can play Hideous Destructor, Nethack, or even The Campaign For North Africa “casually,” you just need enough practice that you don’t have to spend so much effort in doing so.
That could mean that these complicated math-heavy or complex-procedure games can be casual games, they just need to be played “seriously” first.
Okay, but some people play “seriously” to relax. Does this mean that they’re actually playing casually even if they’re practicing a difficult game? I think there is merit to this idea, or at least the idea that playing casually or seriously is distinct from “relaxing.” Looked at that way, “serious” play is merely a precursor to casual play; the point where you have learned the game so completely that you don’t have to put much effort into playing. “Casual” games are games that are simple enough that it takes little time or effort to transition from serious to casual play.
Perhaps the best metaphor is exercise. “Serious” play is low-rep higher-weight; pushing your body to lift more and increase you upper limit, while “casual” is high-rep lower-weight; maintaining fitness and getting your body used to its limits to reduce strain and physical stress.
This seems to be a fitting metaphor for RPGs, a medium that includes Practice (albeit social/emotional instead of physical) as one of its virtues. Next time, I’d like to continue this discussion and do a bit of pontificating about the other side of “casual.”