Generally speaking I agree to some extent with the person being refuted here. I think the big problem is that it's hard to put a label on the trait that he was trying to quantify which is why it fell apart.
Right now gaming has gone mainstream, and you see a lot of mainstream people who are enjoying gamers wanting to be considered serious gamers by the people who are really involved in it. Rational, right, wrong, or whatever it's true. Due to this division the industry has been trying to pretty much lump everyone into one catagory and saying "your all gamers".
The term "gamer" is of course simply someone who plays games. By a strict definition everyone IS a gamer, but what we see here is getting into subcultural lingo where the word has a changed meaning, when it comes to video gamers it means something very specific. Argueing about the ascribed meaning being pointless because like it or not it exists, and like most other subcultures, disagreeing with it doesn't mean anything.
In general the games industry wants to try and pretend there isn't much division in the audience, but there is one. It's also social within gaming communities as well as simply an abstract label. You have "noobs" (labeled by others), and "elites" and such. The type of game can make things very pronounced, for example hardcore raiders in WoW are considered elitist jerks, and a site called "Elitist Jerks" was launched to cater to that community, pretty much admitting the truth of it and wearing it as a badge of honor.
Overall the conflict arises because increasingly you have people who want to be challenged by, or simply deeply involved in a game. Then you have people who don't really want to embrace gaming as a major part of their lives and pretty much want games to be shallow, easy to understand, and immediatly gratifying. In certain things like MMORPGs where a lot of work can be involved, there are those who believe that those who do that work are entitled to special content and events as a payoff for doing these things, on the other hand you have more casual players who feel that they should be handed all of the same content and rewards just for being there because they pay the membership fees too.
I don't feel any specific feat defines a real gamer as opposed to a gaming member of the mainstream. But types of feats DO, such as defeating some of the hidden uber bosses in RPGs, mastering complicated systems of combos in fighting games, or virtuoso achieements in platforming games. The people who work at those kinds of things are far differant from the mainstream.
I think the problem is also that a lot of hard core gamers are those who seek escapism (or are otherwise doing something very solitary). People who might fail at life (for one reason or another), but are very good at games. I think part of the problem is that you have a lot of people who want to feel like they are good at games, yet don't want to put in the work.
Despite how this all might sound, I actually fall between the extremes. I spent a lot of time gaming, but I'm a bit of wreck and I'm not all that good at a lot of them. I was also in a position where when I was working, I couldn't invest the time in "Serious" gaming (which I recognized) and still keep everything else flowing. I for example didn't do MMORPG raiding at that time period. I admit having been "outside" I can understand the envy factor involved and wishing you could do some of the things other people were doing. Now that I'm on the other side again, and put in that kind of effort I very much understand what people were saying when they expressed their disdain of casuals. I feel it ruins half the point and cheapens the effort if you just let everyone do some things. What's more when world building in an RPG a truely epic monster should be well... epic, and part of that is to make it so that people can't just casually wipe the floor with it. In a lot of respects what casuals seem to want (dealing with RPGs in general) is the equivilent of that old "Dragon Magazine" cartoon of a crate with a slit in it and a sign saying "Contains One Minotaur, insert sword for 675 exps".
That said, I haven't played Farmville to judge that game specifically, it sounded a lot like "Harvest Moon" me, and really I have never been excited by the idea. I game to get away from reality, I can't imagine why anyuone would want to simulate doing chores on a farm.
