Jimquisition: Hardcore Hypocrisy

[Merlark]

I like Infinity blade, I think it is infact a game and a good one. is it a great game? Nope.

My opinion of course, but hey lets not really ignore whats happening here. We are on the horizon of an entire new generation of gamers. of all ages and demographics, gaming has penatrated allot of mediums. games are just not a hobby on computers or even for exclusive hardware, games are every where. They are in our phones, our blue ray players, our watches and yes even in some of our urinals. (see japan)

So your a game designer, you have a whole new generation of gamers that have limited exsposure to video games. they have a fist full of cash and not enough games to play. what do you do? go back to basics!

here is where the rift occurs and the flaw of your argument begins.

Hardcore gamers recognize the birth of video games, we were there. we played pack-man and punch out. the problem is, we are playing them again. its almost like after a couple of decades of creativity, engineering and evolution game developers have halted and said, "Look, PONG! but you move the paddle with your hands with kinect!"

uh? so what?

Just because you CAN put tetris on a TI-83 calculator does not make it better. you are limited by the technology and input to have a greater game experince. This is where Infinity blade gets thrown under the bus. yes its a good game, but because of its media it MUST be simple.

Why?

Thats the million dollar question isn't it? an ipad is 500 friggen dollars folks, it is state of the art. behind it is almost 30 years of gaming knowledge, 30 years of tried and true trail and error. yet here we are, designing a game around our limits instead of the limitless of our imagination.

Hardcare gamers, despite there poor social skills recognize this. yes okay there is not anything wrong with liking infinity blade. but to look at it and say, this is the future! no, that my friend is the past. We have already walked there. this is like Apollo 14, no one cares. we have been to the moon. it's still neat and cool but it's time we set our sights higher.

Where did the rule come from that something can't be simple to understand but have the 'depth' of deep gameplay and interface?

No where. the problem is that because most new gamers of this generation don't know, they buy it anyways. its new to them! and since that is where the money is that is what company's do. it's capitalism folks. sometimes it bites us in the ass.

So game on Jim, your fat and your idiot but your entertaining.

 

[ElPatron]

4: The whole "It's taking resources away from hardcore games" argument is BS. Look at the endless shooter flood we're still stuck in. The only difference between that and what was supposed to be the great "casual apocalypse" is that the shooters are supposed to be the games for us (the "hardcore" gamer) as opposed to trying to get a different market entirely.

Uncharted 3
MW3
GoW3

All casual games. You will be done with them in a few hours and the multiplayer is way overrated.
Only lasting appeal to 12 year olds and "dudebros".

And guys shouting "DUUUUDE", "BROOOO" to their frathouse mates over XBL are not hardcore gamers.

So making a game that can be used on more than one console is dumbing it down, or is it simply making easier to control?

Who talked about controls? I do believe we were talking about the "We sell for console - MILLIONS OF SALES!!!; We sell for PC - 95% will pirate it" mentality that keeps shoving games into the market which are generic and "grey" to say the least.

Consoles sell well. Of course the business practise catches on and BAM - the most selling games are used as a blueprint for PC games too.

No offense but it's people like you who make me feel like giving a middle finger to PC gaming as a whole. Just because something has easier controls doesn't make it better, in fact it can do be an improvment. Because here's the thing the only big difference between the console and PC version of a game is normaally the controls,

Crysis - developed for PC
Crysis 2 - developed for consoles in mind: suit modes sandwiched, even worse stealth mechanics, focused the maps on a specific number of paths which could be justified by improvements in certain areas, but no...

(...) sometimes the graphics as well.

Graphics don't matter at all, but I'll take the bait - the CryENGINE 3 is weaker than the CryENGINE 2 in terms of physics, textures, etc...[/b]

I should be doing other stuff so of course Crysis is the only thing I can think off.

Okay, Brink could have been more optimized for PC so that it didn't have the whole console feel and allowed for more movement freedom. That's another example.

 

[Tharwen]

Does anyone actually consider themselves a hardcore, or casual gamer?
Seems a bit two dimensional and restrictive...

Actually, I'm a Norwegian-rhythm-games-from-the-early-90's-but-no-later gamer, though I admit I occasionally indulge in a bit of Fruit Ninja.

 

[hooksashands]

When people bandy about the Hardcore and Casual labels, it's usually to support their bullshit superiority arguments. Ergo:

"You're not a hardcore gamer if you haven't beaten the last stage in Battletoads."
"You're a casual gamer if you don't game on PC."

And so on. It's a never-ending cycle of I'm Better Than You and the snottier, younger brother My Game Platform Is Better Than Yours.

Because they keep getting dumbed down for the console crowd.

^A perfect example of the aforementioned superiority complex.

 

[Roxor]

Speaking of hypocrisy, I can't be the only one to notice it in the show's host: the guy's said he's an Atheist, but he ends every episode with the line "Thank God for me!" Uh... what?

 

[Electrogecko]

Wow.....now the hardcore vs casual thing is even more confusing.

So, Jim's definition of the two depends on the amount of functions the player can perform? That would put CoD and Mario Kart at about the same level.

Can anybody name any of the games that were shown starting around 1:15?

 

[Murmillos]

And here I remember the day when "Hardcore Gamer" was somebody who when they played games, they learned every little secret and trick about said games. They also ended up being as knowledgeable, if not more so then the printed strategy guides, and they learned all that info JUST BY PLAYING.

And "Casual Gamer" was somebody who played games -- but didn't have the time/care to learn every little nuance about it -- and thus needed to 'ask' a hardcore gamer for help and hints.


Now Hardcore just means how much of a prick you are by using racial and sexual slurs while teabagging your most recent kills while playing some online shooter.

 

[mooncalf]

I think Jim's getting better at this. Bravo!

 

[vfn4i83]

Jim I really like your column, there are some insight here and there once in a while, but since you had stopped and evade playing The Witcher 2, "because is too hard" excuse, I really dont take into consideration your opinion in game qualities.


For those saing that PC gaming are not that deep Had never ever try: first and second Prince of Persia, Dwarf Fortress, Nethack, many RPGs (most recent released like Eschalon) and heck most old shooters have more complex map design than Skyrim Quests. Wing Commander Series alone bring the house down. Star Rulers for crying out loud... X series, Universal Combat . . .

I like Infinity blade, I think it is infact a game and a good one. is it a great game? Nope.

My opinion of course, but hey lets not really ignore whats happening here. We are on the horizon of an entire new generation of gamers. of all ages and demographics, gaming has penatrated allot of mediums. games are just not a hobby on computers or even for exclusive hardware, games are every where. They are in our phones, our blue ray players, our watches and yes even in some of our urinals. (see japan)

So your a game designer, you have a whole new generation of gamers that have limited exsposure to video games. they have a fist full of cash and not enough games to play. what do you do? go back to basics!

here is where the rift occurs and the flaw of your argument begins.

Hardcore gamers recognize the birth of video games, we were there. we played pack-man and punch out. the problem is, we are playing them again. its almost like after a couple of decades of creativity, engineering and evolution game developers have halted and said, "Look, PONG! but you move the paddle with your hands with kinect!"

uh? so what?

Just because you CAN put tetris on a TI-83 calculator does not make it better. you are limited by the technology and input to have a greater game experince. This is where Infinity blade gets thrown under the bus. yes its a good game, but because of its media it MUST be simple.

Why?

Thats the million dollar question isn't it? an ipad is 500 friggen dollars folks, it is state of the art. behind it is almost 30 years of gaming knowledge, 30 years of tried and true trail and error. yet here we are, designing a game around our limits instead of the limitless of our imagination.

Hardcare gamers, despite there poor social skills recognize this. yes okay there is not anything wrong with liking infinity blade. but to look at it and say, this is the future! no, that my friend is the past. We have already walked there. this is like Apollo 14, no one cares. we have been to the moon. it's still neat and cool but it's time we set our sights higher.

Where did the rule come from that something can't be simple to understand but have the 'depth' of deep gameplay and interface?

No where. the problem is that because most new gamers of this generation don't know, they buy it anyways. its new to them! and since that is where the money is that is what company's do. it's capitalism folks. sometimes it bites us in the ass.

So game on Jim, your fat and your idiot but your entertaining.

Really well said man.

 

[Ashley Blalock]

Wow.....now the hardcore vs casual thing is even more confusing.

So, Jim's definition of the two depends on the amount of functions the player can perform? That would put CoD and Mario Kart at about the same level.

Can anybody name any of the games that were shown starting around 1:15?

It's insanely confusing because you can pretty much make anything you want out to be either casual or hardcore depending on if you like the game or not.

Take World of Warcraft for example.

People who don't like the game will say it's a casual game to dismiss it as a game. Even some of the people who are addicted to the game will jump on that casual bandwagon when the game feels like it's catering to anyone other than them because they feel like they are so superior to people with lesser gear or lower level alts.

Other people will call it hardcore because they don't want to put in the time to get to some of the content in the game. Or once again to dismiss it as a game by saying it's only for hardcore people willing to spend all their free time playing.

In short hardcore or casual is mostly just a way for people to be rude to other gamers and to dismiss the games that other people play.

 

[MisterDyslexo]

It always bugs me when somebody snubs their nose at a game and people who play it because its simple, or its easy, or it doesn't have a whole lot of depth *cough* Call of Duty *cough*. They act like its committing an act of heresy, like somebody spat in the face of their mother.

I've noticed it here especially on this website. Can't games just be fun anymore? Can't they be just a pick-up-and-play game to play with friends on a day after work?

 

[Jeremy Meadows]

It's not the simple gameplay I have a problem with. It's mostly what system its on. Look at it this way, If they had put infinity blade for any of the motion controlled systems would there be anyone complainig? I don't think so, hell it' would held up as a reason for people to actually buy one of those crappy motion controllers for once. It's just the platform I have a problem with.

And yes " casual" gamers has had far more negitive affects then positive. Just look at the sea of shit games on the wii and the ones being made for kinect and move. It's also the reason business have been fucking us over and making poor choices recnetly. It's because of the "casual" gamers who just shell out their money cuz they fucking don't know any better.

 

[jklinders]

Behind his insufferable smugness he is right.

There is not one point he brought up that I can find any flaw in at all. Still not a fan, but credit where credit is due.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

There are 2 kinds of hardcore these days mindless console-ists who think their brand or series is better than X,Y or Z. And then there are the mechanics nazis like me who want their modern media products to be less shallow and trite.

 

[jboking]

Great episode, but I'm commenting mostly to beg Jim (or anyone) to use his deity-level powers to get Drill Queen to make more music.

 

[Frotality]

While I agree that Jim here does have a few points, I think his argument is rather flawed. Yes, PunchOut was indeed a good game... a very very long time ago, when there were significant limitations to what you -could- do within a gaming scene.

The real reason a lot of us 'hardcore gamers' (I guess I can call myself that, having been a gamer since C64's days of counting pixels for the perfect The Last Ninja jump and so on?) frown at the casual gaming industry is because of it's effect on the rest of the gaming community. A lot of the limitations imposed on casual consoles (including phones and such) by the hardware and interface leads quite naturally to less complex games with less depth. (You can pronounce the word 'depth' funny as much as you want, it's meaning is still just as valid as it's always been.)

This in turn leads to a lot of quite frankly insulting games on more powerful platforms where interface is less restricted and the same goes for the hardware. Games get developed for multiple platforms at once these days, which means the lowest common denominator is what -everyone- gets. This is one of the reasons 'casual' gaming is severely impacting the more 'hardcore' communities in rather negative ways.

We get less games tailored for our tastes, skill levels and lack of interface limitations. Even the games we do get are infested by 'innovations' that exist purely because of the utter crap game design on inferior platforms. Bossfights are replaced by quicktime events. Fights in general get excruciatingly simple because they're balanced for crap interfaces where you're limited by the hardware in your hands rather than your own skill.

Casual gamers are definitely gamers in their own right. I'm never going to look down upon them for their tastes and preferances in gaming. I am, however, not going to pretend they're not affecting my gaming in rather negative ways. It's not something they are doing intentionally or even know they're doing at all in many cases, since it's largely the industry itself that jumps on the popularity bandwagons and leaves the rest of us behind.

It's a very sad thing to contemplate, really. We gamers were a minority and almost shunned throughout the last twentyfive years and now that we've grown up and gaming is both tolerated and even promoted... we're still a minority that's shunned, only this time by the industry itself and the hordes of 'casuals' that popped up as soon as it wasn't social suicide to be a gamer.

There's very little we can do about this, of course. It's rather unimportant in the long run. Complaining, though? Yeah, we'll keep doing that. It's kind of all we've got left after you casual bastards ruined it all for us, heh.

thank you for brilliantly describing our plight... jim, and frankly most of the internet, has again based his argument off of the troll-version of the topic at hand. he didnt address the real issue at all, just told us how trolls are wrong, because we didnt know that already (who the fuck calls mario kart hardcore? thats not hardcore, thats nostalgia at its worst).

i could care less what other people play, but when their tastes are so ridiculously pervasive that barely anything can ever be made for my tastes, i have a problem. i dont care that insane amounts of people play CoD, i care that the whole damn industry tries to emulate it, degrading games and franchises that i used to love into something more generically mediocre and therefore more popular.

lets put it this way; i love mario. i love baldurs gate. if badlurs gate 2 shifted the franchise to try and be more like mario, im supposed to be fine with that? what if it was the other way around? what argument would we be having? im sure jim would then just be talking about the hypocrisy of casual gamers forgetting their roots in rougelikes and D&D based rpgs.

you hipsters can herald how glorious change is making us stodgy old gamers pouty all you want. gas prices getting jacked up was a glorious change too i guess, going by the popular logic that old=bad and new=good.

 

[scikoolaid]

Deviate, Merlark, and Frotality thank you. I agree with these posts.

I do not care what other people play. Its when I repeatedly see games that have no business winning dumb awards and getting tons of media exposure that I believe the industry is getting corrupted towards greed.

I suppose when any media gains social acceptance in a big way, there will naturally be floods of new companies who just want to capitalize on the markets that present themselves. I get that, and I understand it, thats how it works. But it doesn't mean I agree with seeing developer names I used to respect 'selling out' in a sense.

The making of games is a craft that can be done with such love and pride in making a product that just bleeds with ideas that make for fun and interesting concepts to wrap your head around. But then theres the sort of game that offers 1 thing that could be 1 feature of a full game project being sold off as a game on its own. This is disturbing to me and I worry how many real game loving developers will be left when this really gets out of control.

 

[Zom-B]

It seems to me Jim doesn't really understand this, because he draws comparisons to the retro age with games that simply don't hold up against them. The original Mario is certainly simple, but it is also deceptively deep. Advanced run-throughs of the game take a good long while to figure out, and require not only a mastery of the game, but of its systems and layout. This is where IOS games really fall down, is that they aren't that well designed (in comparison to the genuine classics, not that they are inherently bad) and are simply ... well simple, and can be completed very easily in a single run-through, and where player decision making is virtually non existent.

I will disagree that "advanced run-throughs" of Super Mario Bros. either explore or reveal any sort of depth to the game. SMB is not deep. It's certainly fucking great, but it's not deep. All speed runs, if that's what you mean by advanced run-throughs, require is practice and memorization of where enemies and platforms are. It's simple,/i> rote repetition or, if you're cheeky, using save states.

On the other hand, I would say that Both SMB3 and Super Marioland incorporate much more depth. While SMB did have the warp pipes, the subsequent games, aside from SMB2, took that to a further level, requiring different power ups to reach some of them, or hidden knowledge (I don't even remember how I learned about ducking on the white platform in SMB3 to fall behind the scenery) that not every person will discover.

I don't know, maybe you're seeing something I'm not in SMB. But a game that only has three power ups (big mushroom, fire flower, star) and no actual need to use any of them throughout the course of the game doesn't seem "deep" to me. Again, I don't dispute the fun, great level layouts, or pure platforming bliss of SMB, but by nature I think it's a very simplistic game that succeeds in being difficult, rather than deep.

 

[Zom-B]

snip

thank you for brilliantly describing our plight... jim, and frankly most of the internet, has again based his argument off of the troll-version of the topic at hand. he didnt address the real issue at all, just told us how trolls are wrong, because we didnt know that already (who the fuck calls mario kart hardcore? thats not hardcore, thats nostalgia at its worst).

i could care less what other people play, but when their tastes are so ridiculously pervasive that barely anything can ever be made for my tastes, i have a problem. i dont care that insane amounts of people play CoD, i care that the whole damn industry tries to emulate it, degrading games and franchises that i used to love into something more generically mediocre and therefore more popular.

lets put it this way; i love mario. i love baldurs gate. if badlurs gate 2 shifted the franchise to try and be more like mario, im supposed to be fine with that? what if it was the other way around? what argument would we be having? im sure jim would then just be talking about the hypocrisy of casual gamers forgetting their roots in rougelikes and D&D based rpgs.

you hipsters can herald how glorious change is making us stodgy old gamers pouty all you want. gas prices getting jacked up was a glorious change too i guess, going by the popular logic that old=bad and new=good.

While I feel your pain (not having the games made that you want to play) I also thinks it's a great way to force us to explore more games and possibly be a bit choosier about which games we do play. Doing that, only buying and playing the games we truly like, is the best way we can send a message to game makers. It's true that 8 billion people purchased Angry Birds, so of course we will see more Angry Birds, and Angry Birds rip-offs and there's nothing we can do about that.

However, those of us who don't enjoy Angry Birds can buy games that we do like for our chosen system. And on that note there are still amazing, deep, complex games that can be produced for consoles, even with their control limitations. Games like Yakuza 3/4, Demon's and Dark Souls and even the "streamlined" Skyrim still carries a lot of complexity and depth in what's achievable the game.

I think we just have to be on the lookout for those gems and buy them when they are there. Games like Demon's Souls, which luckily saw subsequent production after it became a sleeper hit (and allowed for Dark Souls!) or Valkyria Chronicles which was criminally under-publicized and under-rated by teh general public. There's probably more that I can't think of right now, but I know that my games library has a bunch of really cool, really good games in it because I don't listen to the hype machine and go out and drop $67.00 (with tax) on the new MW when it drops. I know what I like and I wait for it to show up.

And you know what? If it doesn't show up soon or I know I have a long wait, I have lots of games that I haven't finished and lots of games that I'll happily replay. Aside from that, while I looove playing video games, it sure is nice to take a break from them sometimes and watch a movie, or read a book or comic or play some MtG or something with my friends.

 

[James Crook]

"You hypocritical cunts."
Haha, the ending was bloody great. Do more endings like this Jim!