Slashdot Mirror
Becoming A Casual Gamer
GamerDad writes "Part one of the Going Casual article series asks 'What happens when a hardcore gamer ignores E3 news?' A game journalist explores what it's like to get your videogame news ONLY from the Mainstream press. This is part one of a series." From the article: "I'm hoping that this little experiment will give both myself and the readers some insight into just how big or how small gaming is these days. I suspect there will be a lot of info available through mainstream media during E3, but I also think it's going to be very much built on PR. Because of that, I think I'm going to have an interesting view of the show that may exclude a ton of information that gamers will find fascinating or exciting."
Who else has considered creating a fake gaming company to attend E3? One of the stipulations to attending E3 is that you need to be an employee of a gaming company or a news affiliate.
God spoke to me.
I'd say from the utter-treason dept. How dare he turn his back on teh hardcore g4m3z0r!!1
...or something like that. Well I haven't been looking at game news that much either, so I guess I'm lame there too.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
... all these boring game-related propaganda everytime E3 arrives?
/. gives a damn? there are about 5 consecutive postings about games by now and none have been worth of more than a few comments, possibly like this one...
does anyone here at
I don't feel like it...
I consider myself a casual gamer. I only play a couple of times a month but when I am looking for new stuff to play I usually read a lot of out of main stream articles and opinions. I like to hear what others have to say about a game but I usually don't make a purchase decision based off their opinion.
Losers whine about doing their best
Winners go home and f*ck the prom queen!
What I find is that there's a very signficant difference between becoming a casual gamer after being a hardcore gamer and being a casual gamer from the start. So much so that the two don't remotely compare.
What most often happens to hardcore gamers who simply don't have the time anymore for hardcore gaming, or otherwise choose to cut down drastically for whatever reason, I find, is for the most part what happened to me: the full-time fan and critic who was once a hardcore gamer becomes more a critic than a fan when time constraints impose themselves and gaming becomes a casual thing. That is to say, anyone who's very actively and dedicatedly persued gaming as a hobby and not just a distraction is likely going to be interested in developments even years down the line, even if they are unable to spend dozens of hours a week enjoying them. A stock broker who retires from his field is likely to read the listings with interest long after he retires, and likely to do so with some amount of critical insight. Even if his knowledge becomes outdated, he'll read from the standpoint of an informed party, whether that personal stance is justified or not. The same is largely true of gaming, I think. If anything, the hardcore gamer who goes casual is prone to an even greater degree of critical bluster than the hardcore gamer who merely stays with it: the stodgy, nostalgic, those-were-the-days critiques on the present come into play. Once a hardcore gamer, always a hardcore gamer.
Nothing will ever turn a hardcore gaming hobbyist into a naive, know-nothing casual consumer on the games market who falls for the FUD and the hype at every turn and believes the nonsense the major news sources copy from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo press releases verbatim. It can turn one into the gaming world's equivalent of a cantankerous old coot, though.
I thought that there was no such thing as a casual gamer... just power gamers without enough time. Oh yeah, I guess there are you sports gamers... But I ushually forget to include them as games.
What's E3?
I wonder if this guy will allow himself to get news from his friends. I don't consider myself totally hardcore, but I know a few times where I've been talking to my friends and have told them some of the latest news about games I've read and informed them. He shouldn't discredit that as a legitimate form of news distribution from his experiment, either. Granted, he could just ask one of his buddies from the website to fill him in on what he missed, but he might hear too much then. Still, it should be interesting to read his results.
The only thing I hate more than hypocrites are people who hate hypocrites.