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Casual Gaming the New Hardcore
The Guardian Gamesblog has a post up discussing the reality that the realm of the casual gamer now has its own element of the hardcore about it. From the article: "Traditional hardcore gamers need only pop along to [a] Game [store] to get their latest fix. Either that or they can head over to an importer like Lik-Sang and take their fill of Japanese 2D shooters. Casual gamers must trawl the web for reliable shareware sites or friendly communities of like-minded chess fans. There are very few magazines addressing their needs, no one is interested. Now that is hardcore."
I thought the defination of a casual gamer was someone who played games merely for a few hours of enjoyment each week on any genre. A hardcore gamer whose speaciality lies in puzzle and logic games is nevertheless a hardcore gamer. since did one have to play an FPS to qualify as a gamer?
Allow me to use my +2 keyboard of /. posting and my +1 optical mouse here...
..from emails from friends.
or from flash banners.
you do realise that just going into a game store every now and then and picking up a game isn't all that hardcore at all? it's actually the casual way, if you just casually choose whatever game is on sale.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
As a casual gamer myself, I drift from game to game, site to site - it's not about being hard-core anything, it's not about finishing the latest FPS release faster than anybody, it's about passing an hour or two with some distracting entertainment.
Period.
The only thing remotely hard-core about it is a stubborn refusal to commit to anything more than finding a fun game and playing it for only as long as it remains interesting.
A really good (read:attempting to be objective) central reference site to sites/games worthy of trying out would probably be a worthwhile addition to the bookmark list.
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
I don't have the time (anymore) to read up on games or even go out to the store to pick up a copy of something that looks interesting. I don't have the inclination (anymore) to download pirated games. It wouldn't do much good if I did, as I'm most interested in playing games like the original Myst or Warcraft. Some open-source games (The Battle for Wesnoth comes to mind) temporarily satisfy my need.
I'm lucky to have an hour a week to play games, and there are precious few games that seem to interest me anymore. I tend to lurk on Freshmeat, waiting for something nice and new, or (as I did this afternoon), spend far too much time just looking for old demos to download (no luck finding Black & White, which looks interesting; only Myst III---we'll see how that is).
When more of my time is spent looking for a game than actually playing it, I think less of my money will end up going to the gaming companies. My guess, though, is that they don't really care, since one "hardcore" gamer will make up for the loss of about 20 people like me.
Christian Jones
Medicine. Mathematics. Mediocrity.
I cover "casual" Web games from time to time, but, while hordes of people play them, relatively few have any desire to read about them. Once they've found Pogo or Yahoo Games, what do they need a magazine for? Are they going to follow the development of the next version of Bookworm the way MMORPG players followed the development of World of Warcraft? I don't think so. Are they going to read a review of Bookworm, or simply play it for themselves? It's not like it's going to cost them anything or even require a large download. I'm doubtful that a publication which concentrated exclusively on this sort of gaming would be very successful, unless maybe it was supported by a site like Pogo.
Dave
http://internetgames.about.com
The term hardcore seems to be in a phase of shift. Originally, when games weren't quite as popular, it was fairly easy to assume someone who spent lots of time and money playing video games was a "hardcore gamer". Now that the causal gamer market has exploded, this is no longer a valid metric. "Hardcore gamer" now tends to mean people who are conisours of gaming. People who play games because they are fun and of a high quality level rather than the latest marketing fad. The term "harcore gamer" is now more akin to the term "film buff".
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
i had a debate with this one guy about what makes a hardcore player..
i was convinced i was a hardcore gamer because i have a collection that makes EB jealous, and my best friends try to convince me that i should be renting them out...
but this guy, he says, because he only plays.. i forget what mmo it was, but we'll just say 'everquest'.. because he only plays 'everquest' and nothing else and has reached the level cap several times, he claims he was more hardcore than me. and he'd never heard of games like Harvest Moon, or Everblue 2. he'd heard of katamari damacy, and was convinced that since i played that and lots of other games, that I wasn't hardcore, but casual.
its not something i debate with people anymore. i have a love of games. he, well. he had a love ONE game. he is a hardcore everquest player, but I am a hardcore gamer. the fact that he couldn't wrap his mind around the fact that someone who loves ALL TYPES OF GAMES is just as hardcore as someone who eats/sleeps/breaths only one game, well... i don't really know where i'm going with this, but i don't claim the hardcore label for myself anymore, because i don't want to look like as much of an asshole as he did.
Crazy laguage, and it's whole context thing.
This article strikes me as a bit of a post-modern style wank, it's hardcore to not be hard core, you're a hardcore casual, casual to the core.
A hard core gamer is someone who games hard core, if you game casually and do it hard core then you're a hard core gamer. If you game a single game and game it hard core then you're a hard core gamer. If you game all games like they've never been gamed before you're a hard core gamer.
Why do people always assume everything is mutually exclusive. This is a non deterministic world people, there's overlap.
As an aside, this anti script image is getting difficult, I'm having trouble as a human figuring out what letters there are... Perhaps I should write some software to do it for me
It seems to me, these hardcore people just don't get the casual gamer (just like us casual gamers mostly don't get the hardcore people).
The writer of the article actually seems to believe casual gamers go scour the internet for new casual games, this is in fact completely opposite of the truth. An average casual gamers does not have the same need for new games that a hardcore gamer has.
A casual gamer will just play a particular game until in bores him, if in the meantime he hasn't stumbled upon new games by accident, he just goes to do something non-game instead.
The average casual gamer does not go looking for the latest game thrill, simply because the concept of "the latest game thrill" holds no value to him.
Luckily enough, most succesful casual game developers know this, so they publish freely playable webgames making it possible for friends to mail/msn each other "hey, let's play this game I heard about from a friend". Word of mouth is their primary marketing channel, since these casual gamers just don't look at the common gaming marketing channels.
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The best review aggregator that I've run across (for video games, at least): www.metacritic.com