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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."
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 Even if his knowledge becomes outdated, he'll read from the standpoint of an informed party, whether that personal stance is justified or not.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.