The Games We Play: Hardcore vs. Casual

I understand the ol' puzzle game's been reduced to a phone ap, but what the hell? That's like dissing Chess or Monopoly. You just don't do that, EVER. Tetris is such a legendary, timeless game in the medium/genre, it's untouchable to criticism. Only Super Mario. Bros managed to receive the same level of respect from everybody (and maybe Pac-Man, but that's more debatable). Who are these people, anyway? I'd really love to give these guys a grilling.

On that note, for me, I classify hardcore and casual gamers by their personal knowledge and immersion they have of the medium, and not necessarily from the games they play. Some gamers really do prefer to only play games on their cell phones as time wasters between trips to work or sitting on the john, or palling around on the Wii/PS3 move/Xbox Kinect instead of playing MMORPGs/RTS games/FPS with millions of others on PCs, Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. None of this is a bad thing, and industry developers like David Jaffe (of "God of War" and "Twisted Metal") champion games like "Angry Bird" for reaching such mainstream status, and for being just as immersive as the AAA multi-million dollar games often released during the holiday season. None of this is a bad thing.

If you asked me when the divide started, it was during the PS1/N64 era. Gaming became increasingly complex, and turned off fans of more simplistic gaming during the SNES and Genesis 16-bit era, and began catering to this stereotypically hardcore mindset. That is one thing I can agree with on the G4 article. There was this whole expectation of keeping up with the new trends, and everyone who can't do it gets left behind. That left a toxic expectation to the rest of the market. Nolan Bushnell, one of gaming's forefathers, hated the direction the industry went during this time, because it reduced gaming's demographic to mostly males between 16-24. When online gaming hit in the late '90s/early 2000s, the divide split further, and the social arcade scene all but dying in America didn't help matters either. Nowadays, when people hear the term "hardcore gamer", they envision someone hooked up to a mic playing the latest, flashiest FPS games in their living room with a 40" HDTV. You'd be surprised how many gamers embrace this expectation, which seems ironic, since you'd think they'd be the last group of people wanting to be typecast.

I'm glad casual gaming hit such an apex since this console generation started. IMO, it didn't start with the Wii, but with the Xbox 360's arcade feature. Having the ability to play smaller scale games for a fraction of the cost that bigger games require was a godsend. Even the hardest of hardcore gamers can't avoid the addictive charm of the titles Arcade provided. An Xbox 360 port of Lumines and Street Fighter 2 sold just as well as the $60 titles, and later, Ikaruga, Geometry Wars 2 and marvel vs. Capcom 2. It wasn't perfect initially, thanks to how restrictive Microsoft was for each arcade game (50 MB, I believe), only to cater for people who used the memory units (which, from what I can tell, was nobody). But overtime, it gave independent studios the means to develop games without soul crushing budgets that only big companies could afford. This was something a surprising number of gamers feared, and for good reason: one bad selling game could bankrupt a company. Xbox Arcade, and later PlayStation Store and Wii's Virtual Arcade, prevented this bad outcome.

But of course, there are the self-professed hardcore gamers who hate anything and everything about casual gaming. The most extreme form of this are insular PC gamers, and they annoy the hell out of me. I'm sympathetic that they're losing support from developers who don't cater to them as intensely as they used to, but I can't tolerate their elitism, because they make it feel like it's everyone else's fault that 95% of gamers prefer not playing flight sims that require 100 GB of space and a 4 Gigahertz processor to not crash, and weeks to learn how to even successfully take off an air strip. Instead of finding ways to bring in more people to their world that they love, they use it as a shroud. And don't get me started with how entitled they feel to everything being handed to them. Whenever I'm feeling a little pissed at casual gaming for whatever reason, I look at these guys as an example of not how to act.

I always thought that a hardcore gamer was someone who'd pretty much play anything not nailed down and/or spent hours a day on gaming, and a casual gamer was someone who only played occasionally, or maybe only one specific genre :D. Growing up I didn't really catch on to the gamers = male, since it's my mom who games and introduced us to it, and I was always a much more avid gamer than my brother (until my youngest brother got old enough to really game: you need a level of English for it, not much is localised here). Then later on none of my (female) friends gamed at all, nor did they know the internet existed, and stuff like that. To them gaming and computers were for dads and brothers.

Which is why I've always happily named myself a hardcore gamer.
I've also never really understood the distinction between what is a casual game and what is a 'real' game (what is casual about spending 6 hours a day playing the Sims?). After some time I created the concept for myself that casual=facebook game. Now I see they mean something else by it.

I don't really understand the heated emotions over whether console games or PC games are better (and going as far as liking specific consoles but not others). All I knew was that I couldn't hold on to the controllers for console games, but fortunately almost all of the games I like are on PC anyway, and mostly I am able to play them too.
I'm not sure about difficult or easy. I don't know if I ever even got far enough to really test my gaming skills because I keep running into the wall of physical inaccessibility first. (As in, I'm not sure how well I'd do at tactics, because I always run into the "whoops motor skills can't handle the amount of keys + mouse buttons used and watching what happens on the screen while having to press buttons is pretty much impossible" barrier first. Not that I think I'm very good at tactics at all... Yay for pause-fighting). I guess techincally if my motor skills and coordination and muscle tone are much worse than average, that means I'm... not as good a gamer as other people; I do wonder why that means I shouldn't get to play these games: why not just have a variety of ways to play the game (various input devices), and a variety of difficulty settings and such?