The “hardcore” gamer. What even defines a gamer as “hardcore” nowadays? Is it a gamer that plays M-rated games? One who goes out and buys the latest and “greatest” first-person shooter? Or is it the gamer that is at every midnight release and buys every collector’s edition, every gimmick that is thrown at him or her? The answer? None of those.

 Before I go on with defining who I believe is a hardcore gamer, let me tell you, the reader, of my first experience with online gaming. The year is 2004 and young, cocky me has just gotten his hands on a brand new copy of Halo 2. My friends and I were so excited to play it that we immediately set up a LAN party the next weekend. We played for hours on end, multiplayer game after multiplayer game. People won, lost, cried and laughed, but it all ended with me on top as the winner, the best player out of all of my friends. I simply couldn’t believe how easy it was to beat them. So I found new friends, played them and came out victorious again, and this happened again, again, and again. Fast forward four or five months or so and Halo is starting to bore me. That is when I found out about Xbox LIVE.

Xbox LIVE had interested me not because of the DLC that it offered for Knights of the Old Republic or any other things like that, but really because I desperately needed some new people to play with. I needed a challenge. All this time I had been conquering my friends convinced me that I was one of, if not the best Halo player of all time. I couldn’t have been even more wrong. My very first game of Halo 2 on LIVE was one of the most agonizing and humiliating experiences of my life. I don’t want to go into that much detail, but let’s just say that I died – a lot. But for some reason beyond my knowledge, I decided I would keep playing and keep dying. What I didn’t realize at the time was that with my constant deaths I was learning how my enemy killed me and what I could do to counter their attack and maybe eventually kill them. Well, that worked. After months of dying I soon began to be able to stand on my own two feet and get a decent amount of kills.

So, you may be asking yourselves, what does that have to do with being a “hardcore” gamer? Well, the answer is quite simple. A hardcore gamer is someone who plays a game not for reaching that certain killstreak and killing everything on the map, or for getting that latest and greatest trophy, but rather it is someone who plays a game simply to have fun and to improve at that game.

That is why the hardcore gamer is dying. The majority of people (from my experience) don’t necessarily play games to have fun anymore. They play to get to the top rank in multiplayer to get whatever incredibly overpowered toy the developer threw into the game, or to get the greatest killstreak in the game, which kills everything on the map, or if not that, then it’s to get all the achievements or trophies.

The sad part about this isn’t that the players themselves are doing this, it’s that the big game developers (you know who you are) are catering to these casual gamers. One example would be Modern Warfare 2 in which you are awarded deathstreaks for dying a certain number of times. How is that supposed to make that player any better at the game when all it does is give them a temporary but extremely significant advantage over the other people in that game? It doesn’t at all. If a game is to call itself “hardcore” and wishes to appeal to that audience, then it must truly be a hardcore game! So this is why I ask you readers, from one gamer to another to put an end to this nonsense! Next time you are on the fence about buying that next, convoluted over-hyped *insert generic shooter title here*, simply do not buy it! This unfortunately is the only way to go about letting our friendly and hard working developers know that their game maybe isn’t the greatest game in the world. That is because they unfortunately either cannot hear your complaints, or really just do not care about them. What they do care about is the money and once that stops flowing in, the casual games stop flowing out.

While the hardcore gamer is dying, we can still resurrect it! We must show developers that the hardcore gamer is still alive and strong, and with each casual, boring, repetitive shooter we grow angrier!

VIVA LA HARDCORE GAMING!