Recently, I’ve been playing Dwarf Fortress. If you’re not familiar, it’s a wildly inaccessible and “hardcore” game, in alpha stage for the PC. You take control of seven dwarves, who are dropped somewhere on a very detailed, randomly-generated planet, and must fend for themselves with the meager supplies with which they start. Oh, and the graphics are ASCII– so, really, they look more like floating hpapy faces than they do like dwarves.

The thing is, this game is intense. The game’s unofficial catchphrase is “losing is fun!” There’s no mouse input, so it relies entirely on a cryptic keyboard input system. It’s geared to kick your ass over and over, and appeals to the most hardcore of roguelike-loving, masochistic super-simulation geeks.

And yet, I play it. Casually.

It may not make sense, but allow me to paint a picture for you of my typical playthough. It starts with generating a world, a massive processor-buster that takes ten minutes and procedurally generates a geography, a thousand years of culture, and the constantly shifting borders of good and evil. Once done, you can begin a new game, and set up your seven dwarves with skills, items, and a location. Picking a location is important. You want water, at the very least; however, you also want a mountain to dig into from the start (you don’t have to, but it makes things a bit easier on you). You want nice types of stone, to sell or make into things, and you want to avoid aquifers, which make your structures leak. Unless you play hardcore, anyway. Which I do not.

Once you’ve picked a location and setup, your little dudes hit the great wild and need to make a home. Here’s where I get casual about it: I turn it into a game of The Sims. I make little bedrooms for my dudes, make sure they have food, make them do jobs (like making doors out of stone and chairs out of wood), make their living space good… and, by the time the first year is over, and they have a nice little place, I start losing interest. I don’t particularly care about fighting badguys or trade routes or traps or weapons. To paraphrase something I’m sure I’ve already paraphrased this year, in this blog, I just want four walls and limestone slabs for my dwarves.

But, really, this is yet another reason the “hardcore/casual” indicators are sloppy, particularly for games. There are many “hardcore” games that are, for lack of a better term, played in a “casual” manner. I picked up Halo 3, a holy grail of hardcoredom, and played a match here or there online and appreciated it. I thought it was fun to be able to jump really high. I hardly touched it after the first few weeks. I might pick it up again if some friends decide to have a round, but I require little more. I play a bit of Rock Band when drunk, but only on medium, and I don’t really care about challenge so much as I do pushing buttons and making lights blink. Starcraft? I dig the colors, but you lose me once you talk about build trees or click speeds. I like to pick up Street Fighter every once in a while, but I still don’t know what a link or chain or focus or cancel are. I just like tossing hadokens. My Dwarf Fortress games are just that: the equivalent of doing a few hadokens, enjoying myself, and turning it off.

It’s not to say I’m simply a casual gamer, however. There are casual games I play in a hardcore manner. I’ll tell you a bit more about that in my next post called “Casual, played Hardcore: My Experience With Brickbreaker.” Yeah, Brickbreaker. As in, the free mobile game that ships on Blackberries.