What Makes Us a Gamer?

Today whilst on the train I was thinking about what I said in my previous entry. Essentially how "casual gaming" is a new phenomena, but after reflection, I would argue that casual gaming has been around for quite some time now, it's just making a bigger appearance, and you could even argue a comeback.

In Britain at least I feel there have been thousands of casual gamers out there. Now for the sake of my point I am going to say that casual gamers play no more than 3 days a week. Now these people will have either owned a PlayStation or/and a Gameboy of some sort. Now this example goes back to the mid 90's. As when you think about it, both series sold in the millions. But in Britain were all these bought by gamers (for this example I will say 4+ days a week). No. Large amounts were purchased by "casual gamers". People who every now and then when they have nothing better to do will play a game for a couple of hours, and then forget about it for sometime. And of course it was this market that was attracted to the movie tie in games.

But what many forget is that Nintendo have attracted the casual market before (excluding the Gameboy's) and by that I'm talking about the NES. The system sold millions, this was a major triumph especially considering the time. However I think what helped the NES was that it had easy to learn but hard to master games, this attracted a much wider audience and accommodated more tastes. But I think what lead to the retreat of the "casual gamer" was the introduction of longer more in depth games that were found with the arrival of the SNES. This seemed to outline were gaming was going and it is only now we are seeing a return. But as you know this is a much debated issue.

However the change with the current "casual" outburst is that the other sex has now taken a bigger interest, as well as the over 60's. Now whilst this may be a great untapped source of money, the kind of trash they through at these demographics is demoralising! Sure they may be having fun, but they have no previous experience of games, so it will be no different to when a dog chases a ball/stick for the first time. As a result certain game developers have cashed on this idea of lazy game creation to make a quick "buck", and this even includes Nintendo...

It's all well and good stereotyping casual gamers, but what about gamers and hardcore gamers? As I mentioned earlier I consider gamers to be those who play games more than 4 days a week, this also includes things like occasionally reading a game related magazine and keeping an eye on new game releases. These are the people who are the happy medium which the game industry thanks, for they buy a good amount of games without moaning over any slight problem in the gaming world, and I think that their ignorance does bring them bliss. Besides these people are more likely to have a "life"...

But now to the hardcore. These are the people who try and play a game every day. They don't just read the magazines, they are looking at game blogs like Kotaku and general game related websites like Games Radar. And they also know who to hate, Jack Thompson, IGN, EA, the Ring Rings of Death and so on. But us hardcore gamers also have a bad trend of thinking that we are better than everyone else who play games, and by this I don't mean in skill (although others may disagree or simply point out their gamer score) I mean in knowledge and this leads to an elitist approach to how we view the industry as a whole.

The question is though, who should developers have in mind when they are making games? The casual or the hardcore? At least Peter Molyneux got the right idea.