Casual or Hardcore?

If you’ve been reading up on your gaming recently you may have found yourself asking this very question. It was once enough for gamers to have a friendly rivalry between Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft console owners. Recently though, a new divide has sprung up between so-called “casual” and “hardcore” gamers. I don't like to make any distinction between gamers, so why should others?

In times gone by, the mere mention of video games would have conjured an image of a spotty four-eyed geek lurking in the shadows of their bedroom with the curtains pulled. Of course, that wasn’t entirely true but it wasn’t until the Wii came along that people started to recognise that playing games could be fun for everyone. Your folks can train their brains in minutes a day and your annoying little sister can be silenced on long car journeys with Nintendogs. So isn’t it a good thing that more people are discovering how much fun you can have with an extra box under your telly?

Some people clearly don’t think so. I noticed a bigger problem after this year’s E3 conference when a lot of magazines slated Nintendo for not providing for their hardcore gamers. To me, that’s just fuelled this new-found elitism among some gamers. Some games require 300+ hours of your life for 100% completion and other games are a collection of minigames, designed for short bursts of play. How either style of game is ‘elite’ is beyond me.

When I’m lucky enough to get a ticket to the footie, I don’t have season ticket holders looking down their nose at me – we’re all cheering on the same team. So when anyone asks me whether I’m casual or hardcore, I always have the same answer: I’m a gamer.