299: A New Breed of Player

[KungFuMaster]

I don't know how "new" this breed of gamer can really be called...growing up poor and still being about as rich as an ice salesman in Alaska, I have to choose my games very carefully as I don't have much money or time to invest every other new game that drops, honestly, I've been a member of this "new" breed since the mid 80's...nice to know somebody's noticing, though.

 

[Zom-B]

Castlevania, Contra, Ghosts and Goblins, and Super Mario Brothers could probably have all been put into arcade machines, and nobody really would have batted an eye. Does that make them casual games then? Pay a coin to get X lives, and try not to get killed too much.

I've actually played Super Mario Bros. in an arcade cabinet. It was really, really hard, compared to the NES version. The levels were essentially the same, but there were small differences here and there that made jumps tougher, put enemies in different spots, made wider gaps, etc. I thought I was going to be really good at it, since I'd finished the game on my NES many times. Boy, was I wrong. A humbling experience.

 

[Nerdfury]

It's odd that you're editorialising on something as if it's a new frontier when, in fact, this has been the case for a hell of a long time. What makes you think there's always been 'hardcore' or 'casual' and no 'in between'?

For as long as I remember, myself and a number of friends have been in this category, and to give you a scope of age, I'm 27. We'd all enjoy PC and console games in fits and bursts, never getting games (except the occasional rarity) on release and usually avoiding certain types of games considered 'hardcore' like shooters.

Now I'm older, and have he funds to buy games, I'm still only getting the occasional one on release, and usually find myself sinking hours into Dragon Age (and other RPGs), Assassin's Creed, God of War, and scattered independent or franchised games here and there... but all at a rate of a couple of hours every couple of days, and perhaps spend half of my weekend playing as well, one game at a time.

Casual hardcore is no new thing. Honestly. And trying to report that it is just stinks of bad journalism.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

I think this is me already since I have the attention span of a kitten that's had too much catnip and wandered into a factory of 'Bells and assorted sparkly things'

On a normal day I can play frontierville, Fallout Vegas, Build a house on the sims 3, play Mass Effect 2 or Dead Space, go raiding on wow with my guild that I run and then finish the day playing L4D with some very male friends. Maybe playing Dwarf Fortress waiting for them to get together. I'm not sure what I am. Does that make me a casual gamer, a hardcore one or just sadly addicted. :<

 

[brinvixen]

Books are allowed to have time-consuming, deep narratives aren't they? Movies are allowed to express deep thoughts right? And if you love reading, and you're reading something good, you don't even realize the time has gone by. Films are at least ninety minutes or more, but with a good film, you barely notice the time fly. Playing games is the same way. If I'm playing a game I love, hours will pass, and I won't even notice. If it just so happens to have an interesting or well-rounded story as well, then that's just a bonus.

And say for example you are reading that book, or watching that film, but then you realize you have something else that takes priority to do. You put a bookmark in the book. You stop the movie. You come back to it later. Games aren't so different. Isn't that why games have checkpoints and game-save opportunities? Maybe games like Dragon Age and God of War can take hours upon hours to complete, but I doubt game developers think there are people playing the game straight for those hours and hours, with no breaks. Or else, why would the save function be available throughout?

While I'm not against the idea of whatever a "hybrid" game would be (a challenging game, without a time constraint), I just don't think that that's what important. I don't think when an author pens a novel, they think "I wonder how long it will take my audience to read this?" They just pen the novel as best as they can and leave the readers to allocate their own time accordingly. And isn't the gaming industry trying to get up on the same playing field as novels and the such? Game developers should think the same way: focus on making their games good, rather than worry about how much time the player has to play them. That's for the player to decide.

 

[Polarity27]

As for your ways of expressing "cinematic" nonsense, you forget that it depends on the player on how they take games. The player can be fully obsessed with Call of Duty: Black Ops for hours on end by it's storyline rather then multiplayer online, but that player cherishes what the game is getting at.

I'm one of that sort of player and also of the "have very little money or time for games, only buy a few and play them to death" set, it's good to see it acknowledged.

I consider myself a Halo fan. I have the games and the novels and love it for its storyline. I've played all the campaigns over and over again, both solo and co-op with my husband. But I just can't get into the multiplayer because it's not fun if all you do is die. I'd give anything for the ability to play multiplayer games against people at my level of (lack of) skill-- my husband and I are pretty evenly matched and I enjoy PVP against him, but just wish there were a bunch more similarly-skilled people on the map to play with. I tried the basic training in Halo 3, but it seemed like most of the players were experienced players moving quickly through to qualify.

(Thank god for Firefight, it's perfect for us. Fully tuneable difficulty settings, get in and play for 10 minutes and then go to work.)

What the article mentions with Starcraft sounds ideal, a matchmaking system that actually matches you with people who similarly stink!

 

[ThisNewGuy]

I know there are grammar Nazis out there, so I'm going to ask this question. Shouldn't the first sentence be "bad" instead of "badly"? Because doesn't "badly" mean that the writer is feeling his sister badly? When do you use either? Not hating, I'm genuinely confused.

 

[Sutter Cane]

Ya know what, I like deep complex and involving story lines,and i believe that video games have great potential as a story telling medium, so when someone says that complex stories in games are a negative and insinuates that we need to cut back on those, it really pisses me off. I don't want to see the things that i love about games continue to disappear. I mean often it seems to me that turn based combat (something that I actually enjoy) in many places seemingly are seen as dirty words, how bioware seemed to want to take the RPG out of mass effect and turn it into a straight action game, and how Alpha Protocol received at least some of its criticism because you actually have to have a decent number of points in a stat to be good at it. Now I'm being told that games stories may have to take a hit as well in gaming's future? This does not seem like good news to me. I just feel a bit frustrated sometimes at the direction gaming may be going in.

 

[Popido]

I HATE the terms "casual" and now "hardcore". Its like some new kid stepped in the club and forced a meme into gaming culture.

I belive the term "hardcore" had a little more meaning than "I like to play games, alot".

...
[del]Oh God! Gaming is dead! You just cant see the graves underneath the dancing newbies![/del]Aahh..much better.

 

[Baresark]

They were called "arcade games". Short games that emphasized skill over deep involvment. Pac-man, Donkey Kong. Am I ringing a bell here?

This mythical new kind of game you're talking about was what gaming used to be before challenge and well-design gameplay were thrown out in favor of "RPG elements" and all of this "cinematic" nonsense.

Thank YOU! This is the second article this week I have read that involves concepts killed by the industry, then rehashed as if to say something new. I couldn't have said it better myself.

 

[ItsAPaul]

What a terrible theory. No gamer wants bullcrap Zynga shit in their games, and Farmville players don't want a challenge or interesting gameplay. I'm not saying that maliciously, they really don't want more mechanics in their game.

 

[StBishop]

They were called "arcade games". Short games that emphasized skill over deep involvment. Pac-man, Donkey Kong. Am I ringing a bell here?

This mythical new kind of game you're talking about was what gaming used to be before challenge and well-design gameplay were thrown out in favor of "RPG elements" and all of this "cinematic" nonsense.

I was thinking this. When I was a kid I didn't need a story I needed to win, that's pretty much what's being described in the article. Old games.

 

[Katana314]

I think I'm actually kind of like this. So many recent games I can't stand from the fact that they throw all the game elements at you at once, and the "tutorial" (not always literally marked as such, but the period in which you're still learning) takes absurdly long.

 

[Aisaku]

It's not just old games. It's games that accomodate the need to play in short bursts. If anything the DS was the ideal platform for this, as you can simply suspend your game or close the system for a while and your game is still there. You even get rewards for doing so in games like The World Ends With You.

While I don't really like the word 'Hybrid', I agree this is a definite trend. Hell, even I am in this category most of the time. I love story driven games but I don't have the time and patience to play Mass Effect in the harder difficulty settings. And I steer clear of JRPGS, a genre that a decade ago was my mainstay.

So if we get games that are easy to pick up and play at any time, and story driven games that offer the time-challenged gamers a way to experience them comfortably, I think the videogame medium will benefit as a whole.

 

[aldowyn]

Hmm. I can see what many of the above are saying, that this group has existed, maybe not always, but at least for a long time.

It's just kind of hard for most of us who would be willing to write an article on the subject to see the people who aren't really "hardcore", but aren't the opposite, either. If you think about it, there's ALWAYS a middle ground between two extremes. Most of the time, they're even the majority - as I believe is true in this case. Everything is in degrees, in pretty much everything anywhere.

 

[mrhateful]

The article I feel is incorrect because it uses non-hardcore mainstream games as examples for hardcore games. The reason I can say this is because games that are hardcore are hardcore because they are not able to be enjoyed unless you spend a lot of hour on them such as games like Planescape: Torment.