If you had told me back in 2005, when Nintendo introduced the Wii, or when Harmonix and Red Octane picked up the ball Konami dropped years earlier and first brought out Guitar Hero , that in three short years the whole “paradigm” would be “shifting”, I’d probably think you’re crazy. But you would have been right. The plethora of music and rhythm games that threaten to flood the market like so many basement apartments during heavy rain, the ubiquity of the Wii’s infectious casual nature, and Sony and Microsoft’s mad rush to get a piece of the new market that those two elements are ensnaring, are all signs of what “hardcore” gamers and Dennis Dyack are sure to refer to in the coming years as Ragnarok. Watching these reactionaries standing in mob formation as they watch the future unfurl before them, I can only shake my head in shame–not at what the future may bring for gaming, but at how hypocritical these people are. It’s like a gardener purposely planting a tree in the shade so that it grows crookedly towards the light.

The question being asked by a lot of enthusiasts nowadays is whether or not pandering to these developing neophytes is a good thing. The more time and money the Big Three spend making games for people like them, the less time they’ll have to repeatedly make the same types of games that we differentiate based on the different hues of brown they use. Of course, the flip side of this two-faced coin is that the “hardcore” embraced games like Guitar Hero long before said neophytes even touched a controller, let alone one shaped like a Stratocaster, and that we would all look like giant frakking hypocrites of we started bashing newcomers for simply being newcomers. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that a group of escapists can so easily ignore the elephant in the room.

These "newbs" get branded like cattle with the mark of “casual gamer”–casual being used here as a complete misnomer to refer to people who may consider videogames as more of a hobby, which is totally different from people who play games as an activity or interest pursued for pleasure or relaxation. Sometimes even admitting to liking Wii Sports can make you a pariah around these shimmering defenders of a medium who also obliviously clamour on about how the lack of a Duck Hunt remake offends them.

Frankly, the friction caused by the resistance of the hardcore to accept the casual space as a positive force on the industry is really starting to burn my ass. And let’s not get confused here: I’m in no way defending companies who continue to make money off of both markets while proceeding to outright mock them both. There’s a right way and wrong way of doing things, and while Nintendo started on the right, they’re slowly swinging to the left. We all remember what happened the last time a group started printing money.

But while Nintendo is starting to make serious mistakes, the things they’ve done right have already changed the industry more than some enthusiasts want to admit. The market is much wider than it used to be, and it’s widening still. Let’s forget for a moment that developers want to make games that sell for longer than your average movie, even if they do cost about the same to make. The fact is, we’ve changed the language to lable games that used to be called “arcade” as “casual”. To think that games like Pac-Man or Galaga or Space Invaders were anything but casual is a farce. Sure, people spent enough quarters on them to make a Garth Brooks statue out of melted nickel, but without those simple games, I very much doubt we’d even have a Gears of War. As someone who didn’t really start gaming until those arcade classics began to die out, I sure as fuck wouldn’t be sitting here writing if I hadn’t played Tetris, or Duck Hunt, the kinds of games “non-gamers” play on the Nintendo DS their mothers bought them.

By trying to squash the “casual” uprising, the “hardcore” are doing nothing but destroying the industry’s growth and acceptance from the inside, like some kind of virus. The fact is, the more “casual” people we have now, the more enthusiasts we’re going to have later on. It’s an inevitability, a foregone conclusion that, in three years, has already come too far along to be destroyed by any conventional weaponry found on a forum or blog. But if we embrace this change, nurture it, and help it along, then the future is one with bright, shiny colours–and even different shades of brown, I promise.

PS: Just a note on Dark Knight, since that’s where I started: While the movie may not be quite the liquid jesus that people are making it out to be (not that it wasn't great), Ledger's Joker was phenomenal. Whether or not he had to go a little crazy in order to play a character who is too much for the word itself, the man pulled off a performance I have not witnessed for quite some time. Like Charlize Theron in Monster, the guy transcends acting; from beginning to end he’s just the Joker, and if there’s a single crack in that armour, I can’t find it. I couldn’t be more impressed.

– Persepolian

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