Nowadays, most people equate hardcore games to games with stuff that blows up, racers....etc ie... the traditional audience. However, I refute that claim. This is the age of console gaming and by that association, you are all casual gamers.

Why do I say so? The simplification of gaming controls to adapt to the simplicity of the console controller. Legacy games that used the old qwerty keyboards used to have access to hundreds of combinations of keys (alt, shift, ctrl, alt-shift-ctrl....etc) and each and everyone of them served some purpose (useful or useless either way). Old rpg's with huge character charts and game menus, space sims (divert power to shields!), flight sims (Jane's ATF), RTS, MECHWARRIOR...etc. For example, flight sims, old style hardcore people would be the crowd who plays the flight simulator series that comes out from microsoft which aims to map control for control for flying a plane and try to emulate real world enviroments to totally kill you. Juxtapose that with something like Ace Combat? its become a point and shoot game with more emphasis on blowing stuff up as a plane rather than try to make you feel like an Ace pilot.

You are gamers that are probably frustrated by trying to get stuff to work on the PC and just prefer stick to a pop&play games that you can just pick up and murder some dudes and with that, rather skip stuff like customization and game changing source changes. Another example, a friend of mine(a ps3 owner) just bought Prince of Persia,  infamous and prototype and finished it all in ONE WEEK and is already complaining about the lack of stuff to play (fuck him). Have traditional gamers been turned into consumerist woodchip machines that keep requiring new games that totally play like the old one but with just a different graphics engine to placate them? YOU SHOT HIM IN THE FACE MAN, MAN? WORD!. The hardcore crowd are the people need their inch-thick manuals that you must read or you will fucking die.

So for gamers who just want to game, I believe they are the casual group, it's just that you have different purchasing tastes as compared to the other 'casuals' ie...wii shovelware group( The Super casuals?).

However, I still think games that require an individual to hone their skills down to a knife's edge on the multiplayer level like fighters or maybe even shooters (only for the most hardcore shooter fans ie the CS crowd) can still be considered hardcore because their the fucking crazy guys you see with 50 kills to 1 lost.

I'm probably gonna get flamed for 'not getting it' but this is what I staunchly believe. All console gaming is casual and its killing old control-heavy genres to fit the game into 8 buttons and four directions. All that differientiates you are purchasing habits.