What Hardcore Is - by malstrom in "Washing the Hardcore away"
But if one scrutinizes social phenomena in detail and the attitudes of gamers as they have been modified by generations, one soon sees how gamers have come to confuse obstacles with sophistication and obstacles with cause.
‘Hardcore’ is, today, said to be those who enjoy epic, long games encased in a digital graphical and musical orchestrations of delight. But this was not who ‘hardcore’ gamers were fifteen years ago who enjoyed shorter, harder, arcade style gaming while the new gamers enjoyed easier, story based, epics. And this was not the case twenty two years ago when gamers preferred the keyboard input and massive scope of computer games over the harder, shorter burst style of the new consoles coming out. It would appear that the definition of ‘hardcore’ changes with the times.
But there is a definition of hardcore that is universal: gamers who prefer the obstacles to remain. This definition would include current ‘hardcore’ gamers as well as Space War! fans distressed at seeing the game escape the universities.
Malstrom you fail to understand what the true meaning of "hardcore" is. The definition "hardcore" is applied to many fields of recreation including sports, television watching, movie watching, gaming. It denotes a devotion to a particular endeaver above and beyond a typical person in intensity and time/money outlay. If a driver is a normal person, someone who races his car every 2nd week at the local track is hardcore.
Your failure to properly identify what a "hardcore" gamer is leads your thinking astray. People are identified as hardcore by how they do things, not by what they do. This is the reason why your ideas about which games your version of the hardcore are irrelevant.
Tease.
