What should be the definition of a (hard)core game

[Plaupius]

Zizzla_Rachet said:

Plaupius said:
IMO, a real hardcore game is one that is not played because it is entertainment. An example: WW II Online, before patching: players in many cases had to hop on a military truck and be transported to the combat zone, which could take for example twenty minutes. Only then would you get to the combat action, and if you're killed, there are no respawn points to get you back on the action. You play to aid your team, your side, and you're sacrificing a lot of time to get an "authentic" war experience.

Another hardcore game: Harpoon. No fancy graphics, just naval military symbols and plain maps. To most people, it is incredibly boring, but some are hardcore enough to get in the game and learn naval strategy.

IMO, coming from a youth spent in PC gaming, consoles themselves are casual gaming machines. And there's nothing wrong with that, like there is nothing wrong with casual games. Heck, I like to enjoy my games.

 

Your turning Genre distiction into something else and using it to define Console game as casual....

No, I'm not. I merely gave two examples to illustrate my point, but seems I did a poor job. So let me further illustrate what I think hardcore means in the context of games.

A hardcore game is a game that is not (primarily) meant to be fun and entertaining. It can be fun and entertaining to a degree, but then the entertainment comes from the player's self realization. A hardcore game can never be fun and entertaining when you pick it up and play, that defeats the "harcoreness" of it. If there is entertainment in a hardcore game, it needs to be found by the player, and it is found within the confines of the game. Take Go as an example. Is playing Go fun? Hardly, but it can be. Is it rewarding? Yes, once you understand the rules, the ways to play, once you get in the game to see what is going on.

Also, I didn't define console games as casual, I said consoles are casual (gaming machines). Where I'm coming from, playing a game often required trying different configurations, tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys files (hurray for the boot menu and different settings!), reading a manual to know how to play etc. The plug-and-play nature of consoles IS casual compared to that. That was and still is one of the big selling points of consoles versus PCs.