Casual gamers have it right. Have we lost our path?(long read/rant)

[ZenfoldorVGI]

When a casual gamer picks up Carnival Games from the local Wal-Mart and plays it, he thinks it's fun and worth the purchase. When someone asks him, "Hey, why do you like that game?" He says, "Oh, it's fun."

When you ask a hardcore gamer about their game, or to be more specific, the "real" hardcore gamers, they will tell you, "Oh, this game got a 98/100 on gamerankings. It's the best game of all time."

I contend that core gamers put far too much faith in these numbers and it, as much as anything, is killing the very spirit of the gaming industry and its core fanbase.

...but more than that, core gamers feel the NEED to justify the games they play, or the systems they are playing them on. It's that mentality that has made us who we are, for better or worse. Justification. Ownage. Getting up on the next guy by being as good as we can possibly be.

Case in point, Ninja Gaiden 2

Since the game is rated 0.3 points lower than the epic "AAA" status on IGN, the game is no longer worth playing, and now can be forgotten about, crossed off our list, and we can move on to the next game, which hopefully will be a "must purchase."

0.3 points. That is life and death to a hardcore gamer. 3 out of 100.

The inspiration for this thread, in fact, was when I heard another poster proclaim, "Well, it got an 87, so maybe at least some of the hardcore fans can get something out of it."

THAT should give you pause. THAT just breaks my heart. To think we've been so wrangled in by such a single-minded belief system is beyond my ability to comprehend or accept.

Sure we could argue it away by saying, "There are so many games to purchase, that I can only buy the AAAs." That, unfortunately for us all, is simply not true. Unless of course, you want your entire hardcore library for your Xbox 360 to consist of 10 or so games. The count is considerably less for the other systems.

What's even worse is that the games, the good games, with marginal flaws, the original games, are the ones who feel our new found scepticism the harshest.


My favorite games this gen:

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney = 81 metacritic average

Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn = 78 metacritic average


Some of my largest dissapointments:

Gears of War = 94 metacritic average

Halo 3 = 94 metacritic average


Do we, as a group of core gamers, really go by these scores and only these scores when we decide which games to purchase, and which games to scoff at? Is this the bar?

Tell me, friends, who has it right? The hardcore gamer who disregards their own judgment of a game for the average judgement of a larger group? Or the casual gamer, who picks a game s/he thinks s/he'll like from factors like trailers, genre, boxart, title, maybe a review or two, brand, or developer?

I know I'm not the only one who sees where we went wrong, somewhere along the way, with our modern-crypic black and white judgment of games, slammed shut by a gavel of elitism?

Is this the envisioned endgame when we were first booting up our NES's with our fresh copies of Zelda? Would it have really been as fun if we couldn't keep the fact out of our heads that Zelda scores a 89 on metacritic instead of a 90?

Is this the true ugliness of our obsessive-compulsive "hardcore" natures? Is this why the XBL community isn't civil? Is this why gamers are looked down upon by society and destined to never go mainstream in our purist form? When we can't even help ourselves, who else can help us?


If a kid came up to you on the street and said, "Hey, I've been playing Dark Sector, it's AWESOME!" Wouldn't the first thing that went through your mind be, "That game sucked, what a n00b," even though we've never even played it. So, are we better than casual gamers? Do we really deserve to have this industry focused on us? I can't answer that anymore. Can you?