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Evening Reading: Hardcore's Soft Underbelly

by Garnett Lee, Dec 07, 2009 6:40pm PST

The second of four Bonus Round segments I appeared on as a guest went up today. While watching it I kept hearing "hardcore gamers" get thrown about. Now we all probably figure we know what we mean when we use the phrase. But the manner of its definition has led to increasing ambiguity because we tend to think of it in terms of ourselves, people we game with, and the communities we hear about that are really into playing certain games of genres of games.

Following that methodology, the term hardcore gamer has lost a strong sense of meaning as it has adjusted to the growth of diversity in games and the groups of people who play them. That makes it hard to characterize the hardcore gamer. I suppose some remain relatively easy to identify. There's the professional tournament gamer, regular World of Warcraft subscriber, sports gamers who buy their one or two favorite sport games and play them to death, and the tens and hundreds of thousands playing games like Modern Warfare 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 probably get in there.

And as I thought about all the different gamer groups I'd include in this list I was coming up with I stopped and wondered, am I a hardcore gamer? And the answer is, well, I'm not sure. Sure, I play a lot of games. But by virtue of playing a lot of games I don't get to that next level of proficiency in very many and that was a key part of how I was classifying hardcore gamers. I could be considered hardcore for spending so much of my personal time playing games I suppose. But I'm not sure that sticks and as I think more about it I'm not even sure I necessarily want to be tagged as "hardcore". What the hell do I care, though; games are my primary entertainment. Call it what you want.

This you can call today's news:

And sadly, I was out much of the afternoon and only have this post on how to tell when you're boring someone for today. Back tomorrow with more.


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