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When you first spin up BioShock Infinite later this year don’t expect to see the recently-announced retro-difficult 1999 mode on the main menu. That’s because it’s so tough Ken Levine doesn’t want “the non old-school, hardcore gamer” stumbling into it.
By all standards Minecraft is already pretty hardcore. But now Minecraft creator Markus Persson is in the midst of cranking it up a ‘notch‘ (see what we did there?) by adding a new ‘hardcore’ mode to the game, a mode in which death results in your world being reset.
Microsoft’s Kinect messaging is definitely core-obsessed. First they said they didn’t want core shooters like Halo on it. Then they said it’s got casual approachability but core depth. Now they’re saying hardcore gamers will be first in line for it.
The Wii’s ratio of hardcore games to casual titles is low. SEGA doesn’t see that as a bad thing, but rather, an opportunity.
“I don’t like this divide we are building,” Peter Molyneux tells me. “More and more we are saying these ones here are core games and these one here are casual games. Actually I think that is an incredibly divisive thing and if we’re not careful the amount of attention we put into these core games will get less and less because they are so expensive to make. Less and less people will be able to afford to make them.”
Only a Game has an interesting musing up on who’s winning — or potentially will win — the battle for the ‘hardcore’ market share. Nintendo is rather clearly running away with the so-called ‘casual’ market, but that still leaves room for Sony and Microsoft. Chris Bateman takes the opinion that Sony has managed to squander the biggest market lead in the history of gaming, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy sailing for Microsoft:
Chris Bateman of Only A Game has spent a not insignificant chunk of time talking about the ‘hardcore/casual’ divide — especially in terms of discussing the accuracy of such a distinction. As he points out, more complex models of how people like to play their games are simply too unwieldy to be of use for general conversation; still, a lot of the ideas about what makes a ‘hardcore’ player versus a ‘casual’ player don’t necessarily stand up when looking at certain (admittedly self-reported) studies, like the DGD1 & 2 questionnaires:
Well, it reads like an essay, but this piece by David Hayward is actually a transcript of a talk given at the “Under The Mask, Perspectives on the Gamer” event a few days ago (slides included!). It’s a brilliant and somewhat lengthy piece on culture-with-a-small-c, as it relates to gaming (as, in Hayward’s appraisal, just about everyone is a gamer these days by some definition or another). Games, despite coming off as a niche subculture at times, are worming their way into all aspects of society:
