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Nintendo and the Decline of Hardcore Gaming
angry tapir writes "Chris Jager from GoodGearGuide argues that the rise of casual gaming means near-certain death for hardcore gaming. The sales of casual 'party-friendly' games are massively outstripping the sales of classic hardcore games, and the makers of other consoles are taking note of Nintendo's success in attracting non-traditional gamers to the Wii and DS. There is evidence that Sony and Microsoft are both trying to tap into the casual market, and it's only a matter of time before hardcore gaming goes the way of the Nintendo PowerGlove."
Of course, the trend toward casual doesn't just involve Nintendo — World of Warcraft's success (and the huge effect it's had on the MMO genre) is often credited to its focus on casual gamers. While it's not unreasonable for game studios to want all players to see all of the game's content, perhaps there's a better way of catering to the more hardcore players than tacking on difficulty modes and "do it the hard way" achievements.
The best part about every article like this where some sniveling five hundred pound fuckwit tries to make a case for or against casual or hardcore gaming is the part where they consistently and completely fail to frame the debate. We've been arguing casuals versus hardcores since the term entered our gaming vernacular sometime in 2005 or 2006, and to this day we still don't know what the fuck either word means, just like in politics where two white middle aged working class blowhards throw loaded terms like liberalism and conservatism back and forth while having a tenuous grasp of any political matters of fact preceding the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Which brings to light exactly what these classifications are: They're loaded, stuffed to overfull with assumptions and the vitriol of socially inept video gaming diehards to the point where any and all usefulness that they could have in describing trends in video gaming is lost; and it's the ash heap of history where you can find any relevance this debate ever had once upon a time, because it sure as fuck doesn't mean anything now.
So before we embarrass ourselves by throwing rhetorical lard around like a bunch of schoolchildren let's take a step back and ask ourselves if we can find any analogues in entertainment media that actually matter. Being that the common descriptive thread woven into both terms has to do with the duration that the game is played and the quality of its content, I think the best comparison would be to television and film, where the casual games are FOX Prime Time pigshit sitcoms and the hardcore games are Hollywood's latest stillborn action flicks and the occasional quirky and well intentioned but unforgettably terrible feature like Delgo. It doesn't change the fact that the overwhelming majority of them are trash and industries will always trend toward economies of scale when quality proves to be a less reliable source of revenue, which means the hardcore games only have a slightly lower tendency to be terrible than the casual ones while the casual game producers get another opportunity to heave animal dung at the wall to see what sticks every fall. (And by the way, not to go off on a tangent, but did anyone else notice the scene in the promotional for the new X-Men Origins game that blatantly imitates the re-entry sequences from MDK? I was appalled.)
None the less, it also goes without saying that the corporate culture surrounding the video game industry is powerfully unhealthy, just like the corporate culture surrounding network television. Creative voices are stifled, drowned, smothered, and clubbed like baby seals by marketing wizards and glorified bean counters that ultimately contribute nothing of value to the operation of the business but make twenty times more than the inhabitant of the firm's most valuable cubicle. There's a reason that television didn't kill Hollywood, and if Hollywood ran like the modern video game industry does today there wouldn't be a Hollywood, because each new film's reels would fall apart every fifth showing and entire scenes would be unwatchable because instead of polishing the film the studio fired half the crew and shipped the first draft of the film to save cash and time. For all its failures, Hollywood does one thing well that the video game industry can't copy no matter how hard it tries to imitate it, and that's the maintenance of healthy relationships with its bread and butter, the content producers. Now I'm sure nobody is thankful for the executive cushiness that allowed George Lucas to make the Prequel Trilogy or Steven Spielburg to defecate all over War of the Worlds and Indiana Jones, but when a complete nobody like Chris Hecker can ignore all common courtesy and protocol and hijack a half-decade long project from Will Motherfucking Wright, who was so mortified by his experience of working with Spore and corporate outhouse and shameless ruiner of all things good Electronic Arts that he actually left the industry presumably for good, there's a fucking problem. When executive pinheads that haven