Nintendo Tries to Unify Gamers

Nintendo of Europe's managing director of marketing and PR Laurent Fischer has been on-message with an exciting new meme that we expect to see being picked up by all Nintendo executives forthwith. The message is: "There ain't no such thing as a casual gamer we are all core gamers".

Fischer told journalists at a Nintendo event in Germany, "I don’t like the word casual. There’s a lot of meaning and interpretation of the word. One interpretation he doesn't like is that casual is equated with easy, "The casual word I don’t like so much because people tend to consider that something which is casual needs to be easy. If you’re good at any game you can play it on a high difficulty level."

We never knew 'casual' meant 'easy'. We thought it meant, 'plays occasionally' or 'not the main focus of your entertainment and your entertainment spend'. Sort of like a 'casual cook' as opposed to a chef; or a casual guitar player rather than 'Joe Satriani'; or 'casual drug user' as opposed to famous white female soul singer?

'Casual' is confusing but 'core' is straightforward? Apparently so, "For me you’re either a gamer or a non-gamer. You can spend time playing ten or twenty hours playing a Wii game or Flash game on the ‘net. The people who play all these games are core gamers.

A 50 year-old woman who only plays Brain Training? She’s still a gamer – because she’s playing like a core gamer.”

So, we're all the same whether we play Mario Kart Wii for an hour at the weekend with our friends or we play Burnout Paradise for four hours a night every night in between playing Halo 3?

But then Laurent went and confused us, "Really, you get different kinds of gamer." Eh?

Is this "We want to airbrush the word 'casual' out of history" theme signalling the fact that Nintendo is aware that software attach rates of games to Wii could be better and wants to do something about it? Could it be that 'casual gamers' who are ironically the core of Nintendo's admittedly brilliantly captured Wii audience don't want to be seen as 'core' gamers (e.g. nerds like us) by buying too many games?

Or is it simply mirroring Trip Hawkin's statement that, "Everyone Is A Gamer"?

Answers to the Forum please.

^{Source: Casual Gamer}