Chris Bateman at the Only A Game weblog has parsed through a first pass at the results from their recent DGD survey. The survey sought to isolate game play styles from gamers that identify themselves as either hardcore, casual or unknown. From there a series of questions was asked to attempt to determine if there were fundamental differences between how gamers that identify themselves as hardcore play games and those consider themselves more of a casual gamer. The survey tracked 319 respondents, not a particularly huge sample size, and the survey sample may not have been a really varied cross-section of the gaming public, but the results are interesting nonetheless. The largest finding so far is that “hardcore” gamers did not play games in a significantly different way than the average respondent. However, there were differences in some survey questions that did have a statistically significant variance between “casual” and “hardcore” gamers: essentially, the hardcore gamer will values mastery of a game and completion more than a casual gamer, and will generally be more concerned about a game’s difficulty level.

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