What does “casual gaming” mean to me?
It’s a broad term which means different things to different people. In general, though, it’s most easily defined as “not hardcore gaming” – i.e., that, in one way or another, you’re not playing in the most demanding way which is possible. Which is almost everyone, depending on your perspective.
There are plenty of reasons for this. The traditional reason is that we’re all a bit rubbish at games (which may or may not be true) and need to get good (which isn’t). This presumes that the objective of playing games is to become a hardcore gamer, which is false. Games are games; the objective is to enjoy them.
Perhaps you don’t enjoy difficult games. Perhaps you like to play something easy to relax in the evening after a stressful day, or to pass the time on the train or whenever. Did you enjoy it? Great – objective achieved.
For me, I’m someone who’s been gaming since the 1980s, but who has less time nowadays to dedicate to it. I’m sure that my reflexes have been going the wrong way since then, too.
This is somewhere for me to talk about the games I like to play from a perspective of a casual gamer. What I’ll cover depends on what I’m playing at the moment, which (for the moment) means quite a bit of Magic: the Gathering and PC games, but I’ll probably divert into talking about other games, past and present, along the way.