Casual vs Hardcore Gaming
Posted by bencooper | Filed under News
I’ve pretty much always been a gamer. For my seventh birthday my parents bought me a NES, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles package and the rest, as they say, is history.
I’ve owned every Nintendo console to date. I’m a big fanboy who, despite owning and enjoying many other consoles by Sega, Sony and Microsoft and gaming on PC, truly believes Nintendo offer the best gaming experiences known to man and I’ll strip to my scrawny torso and go man-to-man with anyone who says otherwise! But that’s a whole other post…
I have always considered myself to be a hardcore gamer in most respects, but a discerning one. I’m not quite sure what the definition of hardcore gamer is, but seeing as I’ve just started playing World of Warcraft I’ll go with theirs: If you play more than 20 hours a week, you cease becoming a casual gamer.
In my youth I’ve played more than 20 hours in a day no problem.
One of my earliest all nighters was playing SimCity 2000 at the tender age of 12. I remember playing the game (after fucking around with config.sys and autoexec.bat files to make it run on my PC, those were the days!) straight through from 3pm until my mum went to work the next day at 8:30, turning, bleary eyed and fuelled by coffee and marmite on toast, to peer through my bedroom door in my underpants and confirm that, yes I had been up all night.
SimCity 2000!
But being hardcore isn’t just about time alone. It’s dedication. Think of any a 9-5 job you’ve had where you turn up, physically occupy a space then go home, and each month/week you get paid. That’s casual gaming. The hardcore gamer pours his life and soul into the game – these are the entrepreneurs of the gaming world, whose every waking second not filled by necessities such as school/work/eating/sleeping/defecating are dedicated to their enterprise: gaming!
A hardcore gamer is a completist – he/she has to get every achievement and if that means playing the game 5 times over taking slightly different choices then so be it. It isn’t supposed to be fun!
As I’ve aged (I’m not that old I know) I’ve noticed my hardcore gaming nature softening. Now I rarely play a game for more than a couple of hours in a go and sometimes I won’t game for most of a week, just grabbing a snatch here and there. The last game that really grabbed me was Fallout3 on the XBox-360, one of the most engrossing and amazing games I’ve played. It appeals to my love of apocalyptic anything but is just a simply amazing game with an enormous immersive world with great characters and plot-lines. It’s probably the only game I’ve played outside of the Zelda series (my all time favourite!) that I felt genuinely sad to leave behind.
Fallout 3. Look at those gibblets!
I’ve also noticed a tendency in myself to enjoy genuine casual games that I download to my iPod touch or games that I can just dip into and not dedicate my life to, like this little gem Rat on The Run which has that one more play element but can be dropped whenever without a feeling of guilt:
I wonder if this change is just part of ageing or just not finding the right games, or is it simply that my life has got a bit more going on it now…nah! I know it’s still there inside me but just needs unlocking.
I’ve recently started playing WoW with Kate, and I’m enjoying it but I haven’t yet found it as addictive as the people who’ve actually killed themselves by playing it for days on end! Now that’s hardcore.
I do miss those epic sessions where a whole Sunday would disappear in a haze of pixels, but until another game like Fallout3 comes along I’m happy being a semi-casual. After all I’m hardcore at heart!
4 Responses to “Casual vs Hardcore Gaming”
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Darren Says:
December 2nd, 2009 at 3:59 amWhat a great post, fellow Geek! You know, almost everytime you post something I notice how much we have in common! I am completely the same, memories of playing super mario kart’s battle mode for days on end, endless Zelda games (collecting & finishing every little side quest/mini-game), finding every little secret EVERY game had in store. But nowadays i’m much more content with the odd blast on an iPhone game, or dropping into a Wii game for an hour or so. The last game that really enthralled me was Zelda: Twilight Princess, and the big games that drag you in are seemingly fewer and farther between. But again maybe its me, getting ‘old’ or not focusing so much upon gaming as much as in my youth with other more ‘responsible work’ tasks at hand they seem to take a back seat. Although i’ve definitely not lost that obsessive nature with entertainment, (Battlestar Galactica took over my life, and left a HUGE empty hole when it finished, one that i’m hoping ‘V’ will fill), and i’m sure that when something grabs my attention like a new Zelda game would, it’ll draw me back in again. But until then, like you, i’ll be contented with my dipping into iPhone mini games ect…
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bencooper Says:
December 2nd, 2009 at 7:37 amDon’t even get me started on BSG, or Lost!
Like you say, I still have that compulsive nature with other entertainment – 8 episodes back to back and so on, on a Sunday
I find I’m much more selective about things these days, and not having a hooked-up TV helps. I don’t get caught up in the “you must watch this” thing and come to things often a bit late but with an independent persepctive.
I’m also really enjoying the kind of independent content I’m coming across in the internet these days like The Guild etc. It’s refreshing to see artists of all type taking control and doing their own thing, long may the digital revolution continue! Although it does mean a lot of shit gets out there, but at least it doesn’t get rammed in your face unlike the shit on TV/Radio, most of the time you have to hunt things out so you rarely end up watching or listening to much crap. Unlike regular TV.
Down with the media “gate keepers”!!!
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Leigh Barlow Says:
December 16th, 2009 at 12:58 amI have never been a hard-core gamer, even when I was young, and I’ve always put this down to personality. Over the years, however, I started to realise that I was actually hard-core in other things, mainly reading, but various sports and activities and as I got older, clubbing and drinking.
I think the reason I don’t spend eighteen hours solid reading a book now is because I have so many other things getting in the way. When I was in my early teens there was little that needed doing, now not only are there hundreds of things I have to do, but so many more I want to do.
I’ve also noticed the same thing with TV shows. I watched the first three seasons of Quantum Leap without fail, whereas now days I struggle to make it through the first five episodes of anything.
Hopefully, when I retire, I’ll get all this free time back. It’s a long time to wait though.
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bencooper Says:
December 16th, 2009 at 3:43 amAhhh, Quantum Leap! What a show!
Agreed Leigh, it’s all the other things in life and those obsessive pusuits just get pushed to the background.
when you retiring then
