Though it might sound logically if you only keep the playtime in mind, i think there is a difference in the games as well, any casual game can be played hardcore, but so-called hardcore-games ( EG: COD-series, Q3A, UT-series, Forza-series, GTR-Evolution ) can't really be played casually, most of them will require a skillset that can only be obtained by playing them a LOT...

While anyones grandmother can play Mario Kart Wii and win after a few rounds of practice, I'm pretty damn sure she wouldn't be able to win a game of GTR-E/Forza on the nordschleife without practicing intensly for weeks/months, hell I've been playing GTR-E for months on-and-of and I'm still dead-last in most of the online games I join :p

So I would say there definitively are hardcore-games availble... Any game can be played in a "hardcore"-way but some games just can't be played in a "casual" way. I mean relax for about 2 seconds in GTR-E and you'll end up with a wreck in the guardrail, relax for a few seconds in COD-online and you'll die instantly, play WoW casually and you'll stay low level for months, play L4D casually and you'll die more then be of any help to your team-mates...

So sure if you look at play-time alone, there are no "hardcore"-games, since you can play any game as much as you like, but if you keep playtime and "style-of-play" in mind, I think there are surely a heap of "hardcore-games"...

I tend to disagree with you. I'm not saying you're wrong, mind you. My old girlfriend never played a shooter in her life but she was able to pick up Metroid Prime 3 and enjoy it. Plus, UT series, Quake series, CoD series, etc have difficulty settings for inexperienced players.

And WoW IS THE casual MMO. That's why it's so popular in my opinion. More reward for less effort and time. I played FFXI hardcore for many months and got to lv40. I played WoW for a week and got to lv40 with only a couple hours of playing at a time. But even enough casual effort in a MMO like FFXI can be rewarding.

Unfortunately, the term "hardcore", when applied to games, has no clear definition and varies from person to person. I've found quite a few interesting forum threads throughout gaming forums that enlightened me to this. Some people think only old-school 2D gaming is hardcore. Some people think on violent HD online FPS games are hardcore. Some people think only shmups and western RPGs are hardcore. I think everyone is wrong. =)

Persona? I've played the third one quite a bit. I suppose it would be difficult to only play on occasion and still remember what was going on in those games. I'm not saying some games wouldn't turn off most casual players that generally play Bespelled type games. I'm just saying I could kick your ass at Bespelled after I pump a good 20 hours into it. You beat my high score? I'm coming back for you.

My ex girlfriend probably invested more time in minesweeper than many people do in mmorpgs. She could take out those large maps in less than a minute. That was hardcore and she is generally anything but hardcore.

I sort of agree. Any game can be played casually - the first time I played Uncharted it took me only two sessions start to finish, focusing on getting as many medals as I could and playing on Normal. My second playthrough was an Easy-mode joyride where I didn't play more than a couple chapters at a time and spent the better part of two weeks working on the game. The same could be done with a game like Persona 3 - that one took me six months.

I personally think "hardcore gamer" is kind of a stupid label, and wouldn't really ever wanted to be called that myself. Even the "gamer" label is a little unnecessary- to me, liking games is just one facet of a person. Why do I have to be defined by everything I do?

Too often, "hardcore" and "casual" are used to segregate gamers from one another or to isolate people from others.

And yes, this is really not addressing the actual point of the original blog. :)

I completely agree. Every game can be played "hardcore".

I also agree that some games have to be played hardcore, but is that a good thing? I love a lot of hard games, but for the sake of others, I often wish they weren't quite as hard as they are, or had adjustable difficulty or something.

For instance, if you could play Mega Man 9 with all the instant kill spikes turned off, I'm sure a lot more people would have enjoyed it. Of course, I'd never play it that way, but I'm sure a lot of people would.

Adding a punchline:
With a game mechanic like Onimusha or Devil May Cry, everyone wins. Casuals win because they can actually beat the game, and combos are done with 1 button, rather than being a long learning curve. Hardcores win because the normal setting is still challenging and the combo system is intricate.

Make a game too hard; casuals ignore it, market shifts
Make a game too easy; hardcores ignore it, market shifts

How is this not ideal?

Plus, UT series, Quake series, CoD series, etc have difficulty settings for inexperienced players.

yeah I was more thinking about the online portions of the game to be honest :-)

I played WoW for a week and got to lv40 with only a couple hours of playing at a time.

Yeah but that must almost mean that you were helped by a more "hardcore" player to do some powerleveling ( at least from what I understand from WoW ) unless WoW is crazy easy compared to the other MMO's I've tried :p

Some people think only old-school 2D gaming is hardcore. Some people think on violent HD online FPS games are hardcore. Some people think only shmups and western RPGs are hardcore.
well like I said before, the term "HARDCORE" is not dependant on 1 or even 2 factors, so just being a certain type of game doesn't necessarily make it a hardcore game, except maybe for real sim-games ( NOT like "The Sims", but like Simbingames ) so indeed all those people are wrong :-)

But I stay with my point that there a bunch of true 'hardcore' games out there, "GP Legends" may be the most obvious example in the racing-genre, I've been playing racing sims for years but I still suck at it, and I'm pretty sure most people who would try to play it "casually" would get more frustration then joy from it :-)

Like I said in my previous reply, you can surely play some hardcore games in a casual way, but that doesn't make the games themselves less hardcore, a hardcore game for me is something that basically isn't "pick-up-and-play-and-win" or to put it otherwise, a game in which a so-called "hardcore gamer" needs to play the tutorial, or even read the manual and then needs at least a few hours of practice to become any good at...

Playing "hardcore" games on easier difficulty-settings is most of the time really bad for the "casual" players, a good example is the people who "completed" the carreermode in forza2 with all the aids ( ABS, STM, TCS ) and then wanted to go racing online, where about 90% of the races weren't like that and they ended up either crashing into other racers, and thrashing themselves like crazy when confronted with corners they used to be able to take "with ease"...

I've thrown quite some abuse at people like this while racing, since it is incredibly infuriating if you're finally all set up with 8 people to have a nice 28 lap-race and then in the first lap you get nudged into the rails, resulting in having to complete the race with an engine that was about to blow, what's even more crap is that often the "offender" would quit right after that crash, or maybe 2 corners later after thrashing their car even more...

I think its not beneficial at all for either group to mix them, if you want to race casually, play some GRID or NFS, don't even try any Simbin games... => though this might change soon when their 360-game comes out :p ( Since it'll have to work with that crappy 360-wheel because M$ refuses to allow people to use decent wheels like the G25 )

There are a lot of casual games that can be played in a hardcore way ( lots of examples have been given in this thread, but the clearest example might be Tetris I think ), and their are few hardcore games that can be played casually ( like said on lower difficulty-settings ), but it doesn't actually change the "nature" of the games...

Maybe that should be the division, if a "casual" player can't complete a game on the "normal" or "average" setting, its a hardcore game, if a "hardcore" gamer can complete a game on "hardcore" setting without breaking a sweat its a casual game...

I honestly don't really like the division of the gamers, but their most surely is a division within the games :-)