Within 2o2p lately, there has been a discussion revolving about the understanding that separates the hard-core gamer from the casual gamer. Personally, I'm of the mindset that the discussion is moot to a degree, since basically we're all in it for the games.
Way back when the latest and the baddest could only be played in the arcades and you had to wait at least six months to see some badly done clone on your (Timex) Sinclair 48K or Commodore64, spending your entire weekend in the arcade debating strategies in the soda-corner and putting your quarter where your mouth was; that was the hard-core. For instance, I had a paper-route that payed me weekly on Fridays so I had the cash on hand for the weekend. I had my mother buy me a few cans of soda and bag of potato-chips I would take with me so I wouldn't be forced to spend my gaming money on the soda-corner. In keeping with the culture as it was, I wrote the name of my current favorite game with a water-proof marker on a white T-shirt. There was the Pac-Man crowd, the Chase-HQ crowd, the whatever crowd. Each cabinet had it's own crowd. We had fights on the beach against the Pac-Man sissies.
We were "teh hard-core".
Whatever the hard-core of today means, it's lost on me. It seems to have shifted to sitting at home playing one game exclusively, peeing in a bottle so not to be AFK, and swearing and cussing the other one out from behind the safety of a firewall.
What happened to the gamer who rushes home from school or work to play "A GAME"? The gamer that misses dinner to finish a level? The gamer who succumbs to unstoppable sobbing because he reached the last level managing to stay alive with three lives, only to lose it all in three blows from the end-game boss without even putting so much as a dent in the it? What happened to the kid that was considered the most hard-core by completing Commando in the arcades, witnessed by other kids who would demand utter silence from everybody else because someone was in the zone?
Why are the nerds in the MLG considered hard-core gamers? Because they show off themselves displaying an uncanny-knack for manipulating a console-controller? If you can explain this excess to me, you're invited to do so, but I only see a bunch of weirdo-nerds playing a game. The Network behind the MLG has struck gold. The MLG is one step up from the snuff-tapes of Bum-wars. Only this time it's legal.
If the reader would factor in the fact that games no longer restrict a gamer to three lives only, but instead provides checkpoints and save games so anyone with patience and the will to sit a game through the end will eventually finish any game, then it should be an obvious realization that hard-core gaming is no more.
Your grandma can be a hard-core gamer with the current design-insights in gaming. Dying in a game is merely a speed-bump in this day and age, it isn't the severe penalty of losing all your progress and having to start over from scratch anymore. Even I find myself going "Oh, I died..." instead of getting ready to smash my controller to bits...
So what are we really? Casual hard-core, or hard-core casual? Since we all have jobs, families and grown-up responsibilities, I'd say we united in 2o2p are the casual hard-core. We game when the situation allows for it, but we still try to be the masters of our current game of choice. Then who is the hard-core casual? Indeed, it's the stay-at-home mom and the retired who play their Wii's and who frequent Pogo and Zylom. Especially those on Pogo and Zylom playing the flash and java-games that are remarkably retro in nature. No savegames, no checkpoints and limited lives.., they are the ones who've returned to the cradle of life for the games.
I don't see them ducking it out on the beach though, deciding which game rules... Funky-Kitchen or Zuma...
Still, decades since my battles on the beach just outside the arcade in Scheveningen, I'm welcoming the vanishing distinction between hard-core and casual gamers. We all play games. The rest, my friends, is nerd-rage.
