Everyone defines it differently, and every generation has a different definition.  What is hardcore to you?

BACK IN MY DAY, a first person shooter was casual. Real time strategies were casual.  In the early 90's when these games began to appear, older gamers complained that PC gaming was being overrun by brainless teens who didn't care about depth and logic in games, but only simplistic shooting and dodging.

Hardcore was playing MS flight simulator in real time and doing the 6 hour trip from LA to New York in a 747. 

Or playing those old submarine sims where you just stare at a CGA sonar plot for 3 hours waiting for something to show up, and when it does it's just an interference pattern you have to look up in the manual to see what the hell it actually is.

Really hardcore was playing the text based Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and dying near the end because you didn't type in "Remove cheese sandwich from dog's mouth" at the start of the game, allowing the dog to swallow the entire race of evil beings due to an unfortunate sense of scale.

wanting to play that last level at 2 in the morning on a school night b/c my princess was in another castle


or finding that one more pokemon b/c i already had 247

or clicking on wall panels for 4 hours straight to find the trap door to get the one more secret room

@edit---grinding fr day s at every rpg ever played just so teh last boss is a cake walk and you feel better  about always getting your butt handed to you in teh begining

*what is not*

playing gta b/c it has hookers you can slap

playing another generic fps b/c it makes my eyes smile with candy presents despite the fact i broke another controller b/c the controls are trash

playing any game only b/c its the "cool" game on the internetz

t baging....you suck at life pointing that fact out by not doing this to a real live woman in the bedroom only adds to that fact

Hardcore is taking time to register an account on an Internet message board so you can tell complete strangers that their console sux, their favorite game sux, and the TV they bought sux too.

Casuals don't do that.

^ and the world is both a better and sadder place for that

Think about this: Say you like drinking. Normal stuff, almost everybody drinks once in a while. No one judges. But say you like to drink a little bit more than everybody else you know. It would be kind of akward for you to be drinking all the time without your friends who don't drink as much as you saying something about it. So which friends are not going to be judging you? The friends who DO drink as much as you. So you hang out with them. And all of you happily die of cirrhosis. And to hell with everybody else.
Hardcore gamers are the alcoholic. Casual gamers are the people who drink once in a while. They still drink, but you can't help but feel like an alcoholic when they just want to get home and you want to keep going, so you attack them by being a jerk to them.

hardcome gaming is playing any game with one eye closed j.k but seriously hardcore gamers i find are the ones killing everyone in the game, how they do it, i don't know.

I like drinking.

Sorry, I didn't read anything past that.

This. Because they don't even know what a video game is.

Hardcore is when someone doesn't deal good with the Wii being nº1 this gen...
People never spoke about such a thing in the past, nowadays everything is hardcore or casual...

Casual is being upset when they get beat in a game by people with more experience than them.