Original Comment by: Nathaniel Givens
Awesome article! I guess in some ways I'm also a hardcore casual gamer. The difference is that I never had that year off to go nuts. Ever since I was in high school I loved games - but I could never afford a gaming PC or even a modern console. I managed to get my hands on a PS (original) about the time the xbox and PS2 were coming out, but I only had a handful of games to play it on.
The one thing that really stands in the way of my enjoying games, however, is the hardcore gamers. There are two ways I think they do this.
1. To be honest - they kick my butt. I used to love playing Tekken 3, but while I always had at least 1 part time job and sometimes as many as 3 while I was going through high school and college my brother and his friends took the opposite approach - never working when possibly avoidable. The result? When we all started playing Tekken 3 I owned them. I mean, it was a fair contest, but I was one of the best. Within a few months, however, they got not only better than me, but better to the point where I couldn't even win one game out of 100. They would all spend literally hours practicing, honing their skills, and gradually learning advanced combo's by musicle-memory. The same thing happened with Halo, and then with Halo 2. I love both games, and enjoyed playing them single-player (where I could play for 45 minutes or an hour a day and then save and get back to work). But the best was multi-player. Until my brother got xbox live (he was living with my parents, I was renting a house, he was 21 and barely graduated high school, I was 23 and finishing a mathematics major). Since he had virtually no responsibilities whatsoever and access to internet connection he spent probably 5-6 hours a day on xbox live. Pretty soon there was no point in my playing him either. I figured out the plasma pistol/battle rifle combo on my own, but after I taught him about it he spend 100's of hours practicing on line until it got the point where I was lucky to get 1 or 2 kills in a 25-kill death match.
Eventually he got hooked on WoW instead - and once he didn't play Xbox Live huge amounts of time anymore, I was able to hold my own in Halo2 again. So it's just not fun for people with real lives (married, full-time job, own a house, work a part time job, also starting my own company) who love games to play with gamers who have no competing priorities.
The other way gamers ruin things for non-hard core gamers is just their buying habits. They spend way more money per capita on games and thus we end up games like Final Fantasy that are epic storylines with awesome charaacters forever out of reach to casual gamers. I know the plots of most Final Fantasy games, and I've seen a good deal of the cut-scenes and story and I consider myself a fan of the series. I have a few banners up in my office, and several of the soundtracks on my computer. Yet I've never played a game to completion. When you have as much going on as someone with a real life does than by the fourth or fifth "random encounter" while you're trying to get from point A to point B you just realize you don't have timem for this. By the time you get back to the game - you literally can't remember where you are or what your supposed to be doing. So you sigh, eject the disk, and give it back to whomever you borrowed it from. But hardcore gamers thrive on the grind - I think it's a variant of OCD where they just can't rest until every stat is maxed.
And the sad thing is that contrary to what Bishop wrote gaming is NOT inherently casual. You're already starting to see pro-gamers. In a way I think this is a great development. It would suck to play a pick-up game of football if there was a chance that you'd be playing against players from the Colts or something. I mean, it sounds cool for a second, and then you realize what it actually means. But since we have pro-teams the players who dedicate their lives to the game rise to a highest level where the rest of us don't compete - we watch.
I preorded my xbox360 in July (still don't have it). It was going to be my first new console purchase. But I recently decided that there's no way I can justify spending $400 on a console and another couple hundred on games. So if I do get it before Christmas, it will be up on Ebay. My only hope now is the Nintendo Revolution. My favorite games are Unreal Tournament, Halo, WarcraftII, MarioKart, and StarFox. So I'm not looking for a pretty box that will play bejewelled, zuma, and collapse (although I do actually love zuma). I play real games - I just actually play them casually.
Props to the hardcore gamers for one thing, though. They are always pushing the envelope. I recently got a copy of Half Life 2, and the game is just beautiful. For that I can thank the same people willing to plop down more cash on a pair of video cards than I'm willing to spend on entire system. They may be crazy, but in a way the casual gamers depend on them as the trailblazers.
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