Any game can be "hardcore".

Many first person games (like Halo 3) can be played, and enjoyed by the general populace. When I took Halo 3 to a 5th quarter, post-football party, we had about 50 kids lined up to play it. Most of these people never played H3, owned a X360, or anything. Maybe 3-4 kids had played it before. Many just "knew" the game was alot of fun, heard about it, and wanted to try.

However, on the opposite end, some Halo-nuts spend hours a day on LAN parties and online multiplayer. They are hardcore.

The most important elements to a game being "hardcore" or not involve the fact if the game..........Has alot of replay value. You can play FPS, RTS, RPG, Sports, or any other game casually (once in a great while), or hours a day. World of Warcraft has 8m+ people. Some play for 5+hrs a day, some play an hour a week, and mainly play to socialize with friends and distant family (I have a 40 year old female co-worker that plays Everquest with multiple family members as a way to stay in touch with them).

IMO, there were alot of N64 games that were great games for both hardcore and casual audiences - like goldeneye, Super Smash Brothers and Star Fox 64, playing hours on end with a few specific people, and once in awhile with casual gamer friends.

I think I am turning in to a Call of Duty fanboy....

Just to knitpick though; I used to play CoD nearly every waking hour that I could. This could end up being as much as 12-14 hours a day of playing(for entire weeks of course). I don't know if that is enough proof to you that a FPS can be hardcore, but if dedication is all that is needed, then I think this can be considered pretty close.

I supose hardcorenesseseses can change from person to person and game to game.

As some more anecdotal evidence, some of my friends were as dedicated to becoming good at Halo 2 as I was in CoD; spending nearly as much time a day playing it. Can Halo 2 still be considered casual if there are probably more people who are willing to spend that much of their time on a game than just my friends.

I agree that FPS are popular, and that many people just play them because they are popular, but to group so many games as all casual just because of those people seems wrong. This is especially so when you choose to use games like Halo and CoD as examples. I think you are choosing a few examples of people going with what is popular and ignoring the other group that is made up of people like myself and my friends who can probably be considered very dedicated to their respective games.

I think mrstickball put it in a better way

 I think you're on to something here, but a lot of games which are considered 'hardcore' are story-driven action titles with very little replay value. Titles like heavenly Sword, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil and Metroid Prime which take 5-20 hours to play through once, and are then often hung up on the shelf for months afterwards.

 Of course, this could simply be another case of "What the hell is hardcore, anyway?" 

I'm personally sick of this crap with branding games "Hardcore" or "Casual". If there's anything thing to learn from all this leaderboard jazz from this generation, it’s that pretty much every game has “hardcore” players. There’s people who play Wii Sports until the game simply won’t increase their score any higher and there’s people who just buy Halo to jump around circles and chuck grenades at one another online.

You can argue which games are catered more to a “casual” crowd and which are aimed at the “core” crowd, but just like how different movies can mean different things to different people, how people play a game also varies person to person. Regardless of how something was made to be played, it might be played in a different way than the developers intended, just as someone might interrupt a film differently than it creators.

You can casually play something like World of Warcraft and just eff around with you friends online, or you can be a “hardcore” WoW player who power grinds a dozen characters and are constantly in and out of raids to finish a loot set for each of them. Or (more likely) something somewhere in between.

Even games that don’t encourage replays or have different modes or track scores usually have their own hardcore nuts taping speed runs. Portal’s freeware predecessor, Narbacular Drop, is incredibly short and straight forward, and yet you have people doing speed runs for no reason other than the Challenge. I played THPS3 hours and hours after finishing every goal just to keep making my own killer replays.

Maybe part of the problem is there’s still no set definition of “hardcore” games or gamer and this is just me pushing my take on it. Generally I feel the term “hardcore” as lost any meaning when used in context with gamers or games now since it’s been so horribly thrown around by so many people in so many fashions, but if prodded I’m inclined to suggest games are as “core” as you want them to be.

I’m a stubborn completionist lunatic with way too much free time, and my sister is a happy social person living a normal life. Yet she kicks my ass at Guitar Hero. Why? Because I just play it every now and then, when I’m in the mood. She plays it all the time on and offline, constantly beating songs on expert mode. I play Guitar Hero “casually” and she can be rather “hardcore” about it. Most games can be a fun time waster or a insane challenge. It usually depends on how you approach them.

I find it's better to give the Hardcore label to people, not games. Depending on how much time they devote to gaming.

cod 2 aint hardcore ??? OMG
WHY???
why
*sigh*
hmmzm

cuz you say so?

HELL YEAH WIN

no Srry they are!!

reallY
why?
cuz i say so

Just another battle of how to define Hardcore. Some that have been brought up to me.

People are hardcore. Do you obsess over your games and get every secret and beat every game you play including My Little Pony Games? You are hardcore

Do you buy many many games a year? You are Hardcore

Do you subscribe to gaming magazines, go on gaming forums, read gaming reviews? You are hardcore

Do you play games online? You are hardcore

Do you pay monthly fees for gaming? You are hardcore

These are just examples I have heard. But for the most part anyone willing to call themselves Hardcore can have the title as far as I am concerned.

The big one I think about is how easy is a game for someone to pick up and play. In this respect I find FPS to be major hardcore. Someone who has never played an FPS before finds the controls very difficult and is very bad at the game. They struggle to make it out of the first challenge in the first stage. No other genre is like this. They have a steep learning curve as a genre. And then when you try to play online against random opponents. Forget about it. At least with MMORPGs you stand a chance without having to practice 20 hours a day.

Casual games is a pretty vague term, but I understand it to mean games that are specifically designed to people who haven't played much games before. FPS is one of the oldest and most established genres in the West, so I wouldn't put it in the category.

Of course it does feel so sometimes, especially from the point of view of someone who plays strategic simulations and Rogue-likes. How dare those guys who only play games with 5 second attention spans call themselves hardcore?!?!

Alas, that's not what the term means, and FPS games aren't all brainless. Stuff like Halo and Call of Duty are definitely mainstream by now, though, and I don't think they're particularly hardcore either.