Hello,
The word “Hardcore gamer” has gotten demonized along the way to mean bad. But I think in part, this is because it is difficult to cater to a hardcore gamer. It takes more work to satisfy a hardcore gamer much like in music it is hard to appeal to Doors and Beatles fans. It is easier to churn out non-culture with yet another boy band targetting the next generation of young girls with no taste in music. Dr. Dre talked about it this phenomena and while I don’t agree with pushing gangster culture, I do agree about money vs artistic value.
If you make money repackaging cheesy garbage like Electronic Arts does these days, are you really helping the gaming culture? Sure, you’re making money, but does that mean you’re advancing the craft? After all EA is known for buying out and shutting down many gaming studios merely for the fact to destroy competition so they can get away with making money off less effort. I just wanted to draw this point before going into the meat and potatoes: Just because it makes a bunch of money, doesn’t mean you produced something of value.
So I see Master of Orion 2 as around the pinnacle of complexity in video games. Unless you got really really into it, and I mean more than 2,000 hours game play, MOO2 is a mystery in lots of respects of what stuff exactly does. You only could get glimpses of strategies and such (pre internet days).
Since peak complexity (mid-late 90s), the first movement was towards just cleaner UI. I agree, UI needs cleaned up. Even today, Google, Ebay, Windows and even Apple get UI messed up. They’re trending slowly in the right direction, but UI often gets hijacked/sabotaged by the executive/managers because they want to make it look like they did something. Long story short on UI, simplicity and casualfying UI has been a decent success story.
Where the problem lies is the gaming content. Instead of complex gaming mechanics, everything is dumbed down. Instead of Magic the Gathering with diverse rule sets, spells, counter spells, mana, that takes thought in play, we get Hearthstone where basically the game plays itself after you build a deck online. The player’s mind and engagement is almost useless, since you clone a deck online, and it plays itself. The casualifying of the game, makes the games ostensibly worse for game play. There are many many more examples, but don’t want to fortress of text you.
How did we get here? Well, in the mobile arena, and the WOW crowd, we’ve attracted basically non gamers to the culture. They call em casual gamers, but it stretches further than this… These are office workers, executives and people who might not have grown up their first 35 years of their life gaming, but they do have a job and lots of money. Contrast this with 13 year old kids at home on their console who doesn’t have an easily pryable open fat wallet. The target for where the $$ is at has moved from an actual gamer, to people playing things that seem game-like. This target actually stretches what ordinarily would be a pure hardcore gamer game into the land of casual just for money sake. This is part of it, but I get to laziness of game designers in the wake of designing for $$.
We opened this conversation about how the amount of money you make does not directly correlate with the artistic value for the gamer and the gaming community. So what happens is that many game designers get lazy and start trading their art and passion to create for mail it in designs for $$. These game designers realize,”Whether I make a good game or a bad game, as long as I follow some tropes, guidelines and formula, the $$ comes in from the casuals. Why should I cater to the hardcore? After all, hardcore demand a lot of extra work and effort.” No one wants to talk about this. No one wants to look in the mirror and go,”Hey I could be doing better, but who cares as long as checks are coming in. My revenue is the judge of my game design, lets not think about this issue.”
It’s tough to reflect and consider,”Could I be making better games if I tried harder to cater to hardcore?” It’s easier to just bash hardcore gamers with deep culture,”They’ll never be satisfied anyway. They’re rooted in nostalgia. They have too much skill to make something challenging for them and an average player.” The excuses for bashing the true fans of video games goes on and on. I see this in other art forms. Above we talked about how musicians who do boy bands trash Doors fans, Beatles fans and even Metalheads. Boy band regurgitation ain’t having Nsync compete against Offspring or Smashing Pumpkins. Disney has an entire PR wing dedicated to trashing their fans on Facebook,”Why don’t you just enjoy the drivel we slap together nowadays. It’s supposed to be made for kids, and you’re grown adults. Get over it.” In every artistic industry, there’s a group of profiteers, who’s job is to insult die hard fans in order to push re-wrapped garbage for nothing more than stupid cash.
TL:DR Not all casualification of games is good and the put downs on hardcore cultured video gamers should stop too, since these dis tracks often come from game designers not skilled enough to cater to hardcore gamers.
