I am starting to read more of Seth Hearthstone who takes the initiative to counter almost every Sean Malstrom blog post. Here is my favorite where Seth Hearthstone outs Sean Malstrom as just another hardcore gamer who wants to be a "lapsed gamer:"
SOURCE: http://sethhearthstone.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/malstrom-revealed/
Malstrom Revealed
The prolonged death throes continue over on Sean Malstrom’s blog. If he was really quitting, I suspect there would be a lot more “not posting” and a lot less “continuing to post”. But as we wait for rigor mortis to (finally) kick in, let’s take a look back at who this dying blogger once claimed to be.
Sean Malstrom often took time to declare that he was a member of the “expanded market” or “expanded audience”.
“Readers should realize that my gaming habits do not match the hardcore. They do not even match the Nintendo core. I am a member of the Expanded Market. I give reactions to game announcements only because there are no members of the Expanded Market on gaming forums. “
Sensible enough. Enthusiasts are the only ones enthusiastic enough about games to write about them for free, and no paying publication would hire an unenthusiastic writer to write noncommittal articles about games they have no passion for. It’s the same with movie reviews, which are generally written by movie buffs. The “outsider view” is often overlooked, and can provide a unique perspective on the trees that enthusiasts can’t see through the forest.
Above: can you spot the tree in this image?
Certainly the hardcore crowd would stand to gain the most from such an interesting perspective! An outsider journalist would recognize this, and present his views in a manner inviting the traditional gamer to see things from a non-traditional point of view.
“Since I am a member of the Expanded Audience, and I play my multiplayer games with other Expanded Audience members, I will put forth my views in not just how I view [this game] but in how I believe the Expanded Audience will view it. If you happen to be a Hardcore Gamer and are offended that I am leaving you out, too bad. This game is not about you.”
What is this attitude? I thought it was the “Hardcore Gamers” who were exclusionary, shooing others out of their treehouse! Yet Sean persistently mocks self-identified “Hardcore Gamers”. But was he always this way?
“I was a hardcore gamer in the 80s, and I loved my computer games”.
“The best definition for myself would be a classic PC gamer. I respond best to arcade type games and Atari-NES era type games.”
Well this is unexpected! It seems we’ve found some hardcore skeletons in Mr. Casual’s closet! How can a hardcore gamer become a casual gamer? Sean is quick to “expand” the definition of the “expanded audience” to accommodate his predicament.
“The Expanded Audience consists of two types of people: the former gamers and brand new gamers”.
Ah, yes. The “former gamer” label. I would contend that restored gamers are not an expansion of the market per se, but I’ll let it slide. So when did Sean leave gaming? If only he had posted a gigantic list of games he bought, then we could start to get a picture of his gaming history…
“In a conversation I’ve had with a friend, it came to my attention that I was a ‘day-one’ buyer for many of the biggest, or rather, most ‘magical’ games that have come out. I remember buying, day one, games like Civilization [1,2,3 & 4], Populous, Wing Commander [1,2, & 3], Railroad Tycoon, Master of Magic, Master of Orion, Ultima [1,2,3,4,5,6, & 7] … Ultima Online, Ultima Worlds, and the Ultima Underowlrds … Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, Star Control [1 & 2], Paradroid, Command and Conquer, Warcraft II (and the rest of the Blizzard and Westwood games), and on and on. While memories get fuzzy at times, I know that while I didn’t buy day one, I certainly fast bought other greats when it became obvious they were great. Archon, M.U.L.E., Mail-Order-Monsters, Mega Man [2 & 3], Grand Theft Auto (I, II, and III), Raid Over Bungling Bay, Sim City, Unreal”.
My, that’s quite a list! A quick visit to Mobygames reveals that these “day-one” purchases (how hardcore!) are spread rather evenly over quite a few years. Here are the years that Sean bought games on the same day they came out:
- 1981
- 1982
- 1983 (NES is released)
- 1985
- 1986
- 1989
- 1990
- 1991 (SNES is released)
- 1992
- 1993
- 1994
- 1995 (Yoshi’s Island is released)
- 1996 (Nintendo 64 is released)
- 1997
- 1998
- 1999
- 2000
- 2001 (gamecube is released)
- 2004
- 2006 (Nintendo Wii is released)
Exactly when did Malstrom “leave gaming”? Around the turn of the century? (Only to return 4 years later?) There’s really no gaps immediately following the supposedly cataclysmic Yoshi’s Island release. And aren’t there a lot of hardcore PC games on that list? Further weakening Malstrom’s casual gamer facade is his participation in the world of UCG:
“Keep in mind that I am an old school PC gamer. I am a maker of mods and various maps that have appeared from Warcraft 3 to Quake to Unreal Tournament to all the way back to Lode Runner. People ask how someone can not own a PlayStation console. Well, that is how. I was quite busy.”
“I am a long time Blizzard RTS map maker and mod maker. In other words, I know my JASS.”
Funny how Sean wasted all that time on something he couldn’t sell. Hey, did you know Sean once called the HD Twins “Casual PC Games”?
“The games feel and look like PC games. This doesn’t mean they are bad games, many are very good, but they do not feel like CONSOLE games. They feel like PC games. Even to this day, playing a FPS on a console (especially with those dual sticks, ugh) feels as absurd to me today as playing Ultima on the NES. Yes, it is possible. And there is certainly an audience for it. But it feels ‘watered down’. In other words, ‘casualized’”.
Did he just call modern console games “retarded PC games”? So you’re telling me that the Real Casuals are… the console hardcore? That can’t be right. Let’s get things straightened out once and for all. Two questions must be answered: What is a hardcore game, and who is a hardcore gamer?
“A game being hard does not make it ‘hardcore’. Wii Play tanks is hard and Brain Age’s Sodoku can be hard. But they aren’t ‘hardcore’. And a game being easy does not make it ‘casual’. Most ‘hardcore’ games are easy to beat as any old time gamer can testify. What is hard about the hardcore games is that they suck up tons of time to finish.”
That’s more like it. “Hardcore Games” are long-form entertainment, which naturally can only appeal to, or be enjoyed by, demographics with the largest quantity of leisure time. This would be children with few responsibilities, or young adults with few social demands (and often socially maladjusted ones that have even fewer social demands). As logical as this seems, Malstrom has one additional prerequisite for the aspiring hardcore gamer: a condescending mindset.
“Here is how you determine if you are a hardcore or not:
Do you hate motion controls?
Do you hate Wii Sports?
Do you hate Wii Fit?
Do you hate Super Mario Brothers 5?
Do you hate people who play these games?
Do you despise Grandma gamers?
Do you believe that graphics and online are the only worthy elements of gaming?
Do you believe that local multiplayer is obsolete?
Do you believe Nintendo is destroying gaming?
Do you think that epic story is the most important part of games?
What about texture mapping?”
In the style of George Carlin reducing the ten commandments to two, let’s chop this ten-item list down to six:
Do you have a strong preference on gaming input options?
Do you strongly dislike some games?
Do you dislike demographics that you don’t belong to?
Do you have a preference on multiplayer options?
Do you believe that gaming can be destroyed?
Is there a singular aspect of the games you like that you believe is more important that any other?
Are these starting to look familiar?
Sean Malstrom is not a member of the “expanded audience”. He is a Hardcore gamer, and desperately wishes to pretend he is not. “Expanded Audience” members do not have the patience or desire for games that require a large investment of time to learn or complete. Sean Malstrom is a fan of RTS games, which require memorization of complicated development trees and large-scale battle planning and resource management. (He was even a beta tester for such a game!) He is a fan of RPGs, which drip-feed light fantasy stories between endless battles numerically driven by character and weapon statistics, effectiveness strategy diagrams, and usage rulesets. He’s gone on record about playing Gears of War every night for days running, not to mention his love of other hardcore shooters like Unreal Tournament and Quake. These are not the interests of the the expanded audience. These are the interests of a late-80s console gamer; a 90s PC gamer. Certainly not the expanded audience. It would even be a stretch to use the recently-forgotten term of “lapsed gamer” if he only skipped the games of 2002-2005.
Above: The tree we were looking for earlier.
Nothing says hardcore quite like a flowchart!
If we define a hardcore gamer by the games they play and the attitude they express towards people interested in games they don’t fancy (and really, what else is there to them?), Sean is a hardcore gamer through and through.
This revelation is starting to make me question my own self-image. Malstrom and I are polar opposites. How can we both be hardcore gamers? Some very disturbing thoughts keep going through my mind…
