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 .
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.
You are definitley misconstruing "casual" and "hardcore".
Casual doesn't mean you want the easy way through, it means you probably don't take games all that seriously in any way (except stuff like vanity / acheivements) and they're there for your free time / entertainment.
Hardcore is actually a larger span than casual, you can be a guy who loves a single genre, or you can be a professional on a single game - personally I find those who invest the time to be the best at a game is hardcore but those who try a large variety are equally hardcore because of their attempt at seeing everything it has to offer.
Would you like some games?
League of Legends? Competitive Scene.
HoN? Pretty sure it has an even bigger competitive scene.
And you just said one with an amazing multiplayer, truthfully I agree for the most part with you but please be a little more elaborate with "casual" and "hardcore" - maybe your definitions are different to me, but that's one of the problems with these words.
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 !
Wrath's only good side was the questing, everything went to a fast slope into hell.
They're not going to just say "Alright *insert people who can't do things on the skill-level required*, you had your expansion, go away now, we're going back to Vanilla". As much as I'd like it if they could, it makes sense to just slowly climb back up...
Maybe it was a business plan to get more "casual" gamers into the MMO - they're pretty difficult to get into at first, you know, after you put over 20 Gigabytes of info into your drive, make an account, pay for the game and three expansions, etc.
Battlefield 3 : Exclusive bonus to people who pre-order because EA says quantity > quality and only care about the money.
Whole-heartedly agree, it's why I took away the preorder on BF3 and don't plan on getting it.
The main problem is that nowdays the developers make games for losers !
It's obvious you watch Athene, it seems. :>
That reminds me, thanks for reminding me to check
his channel :>
Him, and Totalbiscuit have for the most part the same views from what I've seen from both of them.
i think that being a "gamer" is a great honor! i believe that gaming is a form of skill, not just entertainment.
Games aren't necessarily a form of skill, but take it.
It's a form of art, if you ask me.
I've been gaming since i was four. i started out with simple Mario or Sonic. then at about age 6, i took up fps. i played violent games very early, and, in my opinion, made me a better person by learning to understand whats right and whats wrong.
That happened to me when I was playing Fable I, haha
Not necessarily the "violence" part, but the morals, the choices and the consequences I saw.
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.
In that case, I'm a fairly small gamer in comparison to philosophy, martial arts and etc - I'm nowhere near the best at martial arts but I respect it more than games in terms of usefulness.
@Freakenstein - sadly the players do make a difference. On a business standpoint, you want to cater to as many as possible, the philosophy of being a great game designer doesn't mean so much to a lot of people, and sadly they take the easy road.
Technological advances aren't to blame - it's how we bloody use them. Because there's an obvious ability to abuse peoples lack of morality / care for the game industry of the franchise itself the developers / publishers will do what they can to siphon as much money as possible.
Gaming as an Art form?Err... Care to elaborate?
The same movies / drawings are. Games are a much better way of expression through these means though - you interact, you have THE CHOICES, you have the audio, you have the genres the atmosphere the immersion the inability to look away the possibility to keep going forever.
Lack of punctuation so that it looks like I'm rumbling on about all the possibilities.
The competitive scene in Starcraft II
The immersion present in Amnesia: The Dark Descent
The laughter in Magicka
The adrenline-rushing action of Crysis 2
The finesse and calmness in Battlefield: Bad Company 2
The rage when that Troll guy in the Troll Starting Zone dies.
The sadness when the Chieftan's wife is killed and a school is blown up.
The ability to work out so many things from simple numbers, making something great (in terms of games) come out of it.
The possibility of being endlessly creative (Minecraft).
The amount of combinations through these different things you can have!
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.
Plus the raiding / instance difficulty was a large step up from Wrath, something constantly asked for by self-claimed "veterans" of WoW.
How can you possibly make gaming attractive to a non-gamer if they see business practices like this?
Rhetorical question, obviously, but I have to say that yeah - it seemed before games were a labour of love, now a great deal of it is being twisted into money schemes etc.
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?
Umm. Define "
assion", I have a passion for games for what they could be as a whole, I have a passion for movies for what they can be used for, I have a passion for computers for everything they can do - my definition and reasons are very different to that of other people I'd imagine.
But people, that are playing since everyone does, are not gamers!
So the kids that play football with their friends are not footballers on any level?
A friend of mine said, when we met the first time, that he's a gamer, too. LOL!!! I've finished my first game before he was born. And his first console was the PS 3.
This is one of the things that I hate - people who may or may not represent the same points I would like to make but with horrendously dull arguments.
If the Wii came out when you was 32 and you started playing Super Mario Galaxy with your 8 year old daughter and 11 year old son, occassionally with your wife, you still are a gamer.
Either you play games, or you don't. Any other distinction just feels like pointless elitism.
In the case of this thread, 100% true.
How you play the game, what intention you have, etc do matter though, not for determining "casual" or "hardcore" but simply for seeing how much you care for the game. I look at builds in Starcraft II, I do tiny bits of theorycraft and overall I rarely play it - I'm stupid like that but I enjoy the game when I play!
I'm not a guy who likes to be inefficient in games unless of course I have every need to be or just would like to be dumb (Hi Magicka). I don't make every effort ever to be the best but I certainly do the more "sophisticated" methods.
- H
