'No, you speedrunners are taking the word out of the context of its actual definition, twisting its meaning and assigning it a gerrymandered one which you shove down a hundred thousand viewers' throats bi-annually. I don't think the meaning you assign to it is negative per se, I just think it is incorrect. '
are you serious dude. Oh man, we're using words that don't entirely fit with the context of what we're saying! I should get really triggered about this and make 500 essays on the subject!
Or, you know, move on because nobody in their right minds is going to listen to your complaints seriously.
Going back to the term for "playing a game purely for fun without any type of challenge in mind":
I don't want to use words like "normal" or "standard" for this. As opposed to "casual", those do actually come off as judgmental to me. As if there was only one "acceptable" way of playing and everything else is "weird". Funny enough, that would actually be insulting to the speedrunners.
But you can call it "leisurely" or "laid back" if you want, those are basically the same to me as "casual".
This entire thing started about GDQ, right?
I think that speedrunners on a GDQ dont refer to other people as 'casuals' and doing so is kind of bad, i agree. As if you suddenly get a different status when you post a run, which might not even be good.
However when explaining a glitch or something it is very normal to use a 'casual' playthrough of the game as reference.
eg: "Normally you wouldn't have these characters here in a casual playthrough, but because we did X we have them here and can use them to set up other glitches"
or the like.
This is a perfectly normal way to talk about 'casual'.
Casual is less out of context than Normal, "Standardly" or Traditionally. There is no normal, "traditional" or "standard" way to play games. Yes, there is:
What one defines as 'Normal' is also totally subjective, so its funny you criticize people for apparent misuse of a term, when it seems you think speedrunning a game isn't "normal"? I agree that's true in general, but if you look at gaming in aggregate - undoubtedly, most gamers play most games most of the time with no particular non-standard goal or restriction in mind. This is the most common, default type of run; this is the norm. And this is what you guys refer to as 'casual', is it not?
By the opposite side of the same coin, by the way, speedrunning may indeed be viewed as abnormal. And that's not in any way a negative thing, obviously. I think of speedrunning as a type of 'specialist' or 'enthusiast' run, personally - along with all other types of non-standard, abnormal runs.
Another way of looking at it is this: anything that exists inside a game was obviously put there by developers, for a reason; any goal that is attainable - collecting Stars in Mario 64, for example - must necessarily have some (at least one) specific way that developers intended players to achieve it; completing short, medium and long-term (beating the game) goals in a game in more or less the same way as developers intended, also constitutes normal - and what speedrunners define as casual.
You start a game and play until the end. That's the normal way of playing a game, that's the only way of playing a game. What if you start and don't finish, ever? Who knows how many times in history human beings have walked away from video games without completing them; it's impossible to say how common or uncommon - normal or abnormal - that is. There's also nothing self-evidently true about this notion of the importance of completion to the classification of types of playing; playing and completing are two different things. You're essentially saying, "you can't play without completing", which is clearly false. I think it's truer that "you can't complete without playing".
And if you're gonna sit here and tell me being knowledgeable of a game and skillful at a game isn't normal, then you're just a dumbass. Well, of course it is, but only to a certain extent. It's a blurry line, I don't know where it is exactly, but eventually there comes a point where knowledge and skill of players who're only interested in playing normally ends, and where the extra-curricular knowledge and skills I spoke of earlier - the kind known only to true enthusiasts, like speedrunners - begins.
Also, language is ever changing and ever evolving Yes, so speedrunners, please politely change and evolve your language accordingly. Just because a word can be used in unorthodox ways doesn't necessarily mean it should, especially when it's such a poor fit and there are so many better alternatives as is the case with 'casual'. The only reason you know 'fly' means 'cool' is because it attained mainstream acceptance some time in the past; that's okay, that's a natural evolution of language. However, speedrunning is not the mainstream, it is a niche community nested inside gaming, which is relatively mainstream by comparison; therefore, for all intents and purposes, 'casual' is just a meme that anyone outside your little clique likely won't understand. I'm not saying it didn't evolve organically within speedrunning - I'm not even saying it's wrong that it did - but it is wrong to recklessly throw it around during marathons where the mainstream is watching, and expect them to somehow decipher such jargon, and to refuse to adapt the definition the community's become accustomed to for emerging new phenomena like massive speedrunning marathons.
I can not believe this is still going on. It's such a petty issue. Can a mod just come in here and lock this thread? it's going to go nowhere.
I'm gonna need some fries with all this salt.
Oh hey what's going on h... Uhh... Seriously now, are you for real?
Casual in this case comes from the word "casually" which has numerous definitions supporting our use of the word.
Everyone who plays a game because it's fun, and doesn't have a particular goal or commitment in mind, plays a game casually. There is nothing wrong with playing a game casually, most people who play games play casually, even speedrunners play games casually.
Completionist, minimalist, pacifist, score and similar are not casual playthroughs as you've set a goal for yourself in order to get.
Hey look, another thread that I forgot existed whose last reply was 10 months ago. Man I sure do love seeing these brought back up!
I wonder why he even tried to make people stop saying "casual", not like we will do what he says lel.