A gamer is always a hardcore gamer otherwise you aren't a gamer. If you play casually you aren't a gamer , simple , you don't have skill in the games .
And this folks, is why using those terms is bad. It inevitably leads to silly elitism. You know what's going to happen if you focus solely on the ZOMGhardcore? Gaming will never expand and will ultimately become niche.
Who are you to deny gaming to people that aren't deeply involved in it?
Casual gamers are the main reason that the only title that was good and solid was Starcraft 2 : Wings of Liberty in the last 2 years, I don't remember any other great multiplayer video game that got released within 2 years that owned.
Opinion. That's all that is.
Also, New Super Mario Bros Wii. That game is seriously fun with 4 people, no matter the "skill level" (that's actually why the game is so awesome).
WoW : Casualism expansion , fcking same **** all over again , Rated battlegrounds where you can't even lose rating points in and get all the epic pro gear !
You mean the expansion that completely changed the old landscape? Riiiiight nothing new at all. From what I could tell, it sparked new interest in the game for those that stopped playing it, because it changed everything about the land.
Battlefield 3 : Exclusive bonus to people who pre-order because EA says quantity > quality and only care about the money.
A trend not exclusive to EA but the AAA industry as a whole.
Money = the casual crowd and that is ruining games . You always have challenge in older games , you see any challenge in newer games ? No I don't
I hope you realise that argument extends to your so-called "hardcore games" (in both the "challenge" and "money" departements, because franchises like Halo are clearly being milked for all their worth)
But if you want to argue what is "ruining games", there's a few much more convincing arguments:
- Pointless seperation into groups
You know what the main problem with "hardcore" and "casual" is? A large part of the industry looks down on the "causual" just because they don't spend a lot of time playing games. Need some proof? Look at all the Wii shovelware made by such companies as EA and Ubisoft, who wrongly assumed people are stupid and will buy anything that has the word "
arty" in the title as has Wiimote waggling. If you go the extra mile to seperate people, you also go the extra mile of making gaming less accessable to the masses.
There should only be two groups. Either you play games.....or you don't.
-Lack of risk-taking by AAA studios
By that I mean the -constant- recycling of game concepts (and before anyone puts words into my mouth, I don't just mean FPS). No big publisher will actually take a risk in making a new IP, mainly because production costs have increased exponentially.
-The lack of any "middle ground"
This is somewhat related to the previous point. Nowadays, you either make an Indie game (which is on the low end of production) or an AAA game (which is on the high end). You'll notice that less and less games are made that strike this middle ground of having an "average" budget, meaning they don't participate in the ridiculous race for the best graphics. Even if such games exist, they are rarely reported on.
Now the reason for this is obvious. Most of these games are instantly panned by "critics" upon release which in the long run could be damaging to sales, so why WOULDN'T you go for the AAA approach? But the problem is that it also means that it's much harder for a moderately sized dev. team to be successful.
-The Industry's Hype Engine
Nowadays, this industry is built on amazing amounts of hype surrounding games. Because of this, the role of the "critic" has increased to very high levels (and wrongfully so in my opinion). A lot of modern games only ever sale in their first few weeks of release and then completely fall of the charts, which clearly suggests that the market completely loses interest in those games after the hype phase is over.
But buying because of publisher hype ultimately leads to less effort being put into the games themselves and more effort being put into hyping.
This is one of a few shining examples of why Hype is a bad thing.
-Ridiculous anti-consumer business models
By this I mean the atrocious amounts of DRM(mostly on PC games), DLC (for pretty much ANYTHING, the worst being on-disc DLC that you just unlock) and other things like
this to kill any attempts of a used-game market. How can you possibly make gaming attractive to a non-gamer if they see business practices like this?
The main problem is that nowdays the developers make games for losers !
Nope, I'd say it's because they make crappy games to appease the "hardcore".
You may not be as great at gaming as some of the other peers out there, but skill should never matter in a game. Passion matters. If you have a passion, a liking for, video games, then you should by all means be considered a gamer.
Actually I'd go even further and say you don't even need passion, just as long as you have fun playing games. I mean one can like movies without being passionate about them, right?
WoW can be argued as pioneering Edward Jenner's theories with Conditioning.
Can you elaborate? All I could find on Jenner is related to vaccination and not conditioning (unless of course you meant someone entirely different
).
Look harder. No, really, look harder. Over-generalizations of modern gaming leads to many contradictions about how modern gaming is, one of them being difficulty. Oh yes, there's definitely difficulty abound. You just have to look for it. Don't look for the popular, hyped, over-rated video games; they don't mean squat diddly poo around here.
Actually they do, since they influence the industries direction at large. Whether one agrees or disagrees with that direction is a different matter obviously. And it's very obvious that overall difficulty of games has declined over all and I can explain why: Nowadays, it is expected that a player plays through the game from start to finish. Contrast that to some of those games that define "retro-hard". Back then, it wasn't expected of you to finish a game (although doing so obviously gave bragging rights ;P) and a lot of what gives old games this sense of replayability is that they are designed to be tackled several times and eventually replayed.
Of course, making said difficulty fair and not frustrating is a whole different thing entirely, so I'll try not to derail this thread.
i think that being a "gamer" is a great honor! i believe that gaming is a form of skill, not just entertainment. its a way of life in my opinion. people choose to take up gaming, people don't choose to take up watching movies, hence not just entertainment.
Because gaming, unlike movies, is an interactive medium. However that doesn't mean it's anything other than an entertainment medium (which is its main purpose after all). It simply means the two are different.
