HARDCORE TO THE MAX

God, I don't mean to come across as the Nintendo fanboy that I clearly am, but something's been bothering me as of late, and I'm prepared to use a Corporate Ideology as my defense.

Basically, I'm done with the "hardcore vs. casual" delineation in videogaming. Oh, I know, it's nothing new. Super Nintendo was "kiddie" and Sega was "badass." But for some reason, the discourse seems to have turned especially nasty in the last few years.

Nintendo is for soccer grandmas who only play Wii Sports. The XBox is for super burly manly men who like to shoot aliens/zombies/alien zombies right in their mouths, so that blood can go gushing all over the screen. The PS3 is for… well, basically the same thing as the XBox, but with more Japanese stuff. (/sarcasm) Thus, it's set in stone: casual gamers ruin gaming, hardcore gamers are the real gamers.

Bizarrely, this has spun off not only to describe the gamers, but the games they play too. There's "casual" games and "hardcore" games. These definitions are nebulous and can change on a dime. Modern Warfare 2 has been alternately called "hardcore" and for babies. Or you've got a game like Demon's Souls, which is called hardcore for not one, but TWO reasons, being that it's really hard and also really violent. Casual games, though, are seemingly much easier for gamers to define. They're the games they don't like. They're the games that people who don't consider gaming as a major hobby sometimes play. They are, according to these "hardcore" gamers, the entirety of the Wii lineup.

If I was dedicated to these labels, I'd propose that we construct solid definitions for them. This is what a hardcore game is – it can't be both a game that has founts of blood and boobs AND a game that's defined by its difficulty. It can't be both The Saboteur and Mega Man. And a casual game, well, that has to be a game that's easy to pick up and play and has no depth or replay value. The only time a casual game can come out is if you have friends over, and only if those friends aren't HARDCORE like you are.

Obviously, though, I'm not attached to these labels, so we should just bury them ten feet under where they belong. Because too often, hardcore doesn't actually have a definition – it's just an easy device for delineating supremacy in the traditionally represented gamer. Games that don't appeal to the predominantly white, upper middle-class male are then automatically tagged with the doomed "casual" label, and boom – they're never talked about again. Never mind that casual games are connecting with a huge amount of people in a way that games never have before. I mean, sure, there are a shit-ton of really shitty games. I wouldn't be caught dead playing Cocoto Racer, for instance, but that's because it's a shitty game. I'll refer you to my Wii Music defense article to further expand on my thoughts of what makes a good "casual" game (as I've probably played it more hardcoredly than most games I own, actually). I think it would be a grave disservice to discount the critical merits of a lot of what have been considered "casual" games.

The other element of this that gets my goat is the idea that casual games are somehow "ruining" it for real gamers. Well, no one's forcing you to buy these games, and if you're informed enough to head to the internet to whine about it, you're also informed enough to read some reviews. Now, a lot of review sites play into this delineation as well (*cough* IGN *cough*), but if you consider yourself a "hardcore" gamer, you should be able to figure out what's good or not, even if you have really far flung tastes.

This same argument doesn't hold up in any other artistic format, and would make you sound like a humongous douche. "God, bands like The Postal Service are totally fucking up good music. I only listen to hardcore bands, because they play really fast and have all these riffs and they're EXTREME. If a band isn't extreme, they're not worth listening to!" Or, "This performance artist sucks! I only appreciate performance art that involves a naked woman smearing meat all over herself!"

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm frustrated by the ramblings of hormonal teenagers on videogaming forums. Sigh.