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Zarathustran Analytics in Video Games, Part 8: The Factions of Gaming

L.B. Jeffries offers an analysis of the various constituencies of gamers, and how the attitudes of those groups can reflect the Zarathustran Analytics approach.

I once attended an art lecture that took on the very unpopular topic of criticizing a well-liked work of art. The pieces consisted of a series of photographs, all taken from a medical journal depicting slaves that had just arrived in America. Lines of poetry were inscribed in each photo as the artist decried the anonymity and inhuman appearance depicted by the journal’s photography. The criticism that the lecturer was offering was that historically the poetry was all utter fiction. The journal hadn’t made these people anonymous at all. Their names, tribes, and even the history of those tribes were listed and often seriously conflicted with the poems themselves. Needless to say, people tended to get pretty pissed at this lecture. Why criticize a work of art because of history? It’s beautiful and evocative, why criticize it for something like accuracy? What was the point of looking at art with a historical mindset?

That kind of discussion is relevant these days in video games because people are becoming very conscious of the demographics and factions within the medium. The casual audience, hardcore gamers, and ex-core players are all becoming distinct opinions that get thrown around video game forums. Yet not everyone is happy about these labels. Jim Sterling at Destructoid posted an interesting column that bemoaned the artificial labels of ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore’. He points out that people certainly play both kinds of games and it does a huge disservice to label a game as meant for one particular audience or another. And he’s right, it’s dumb to call these things audience labels because they aren’t. We all play a huge variety of games and those games often borrow liberally from countless others. What the terms casual or hardcore really signify isn’t an identity, they’re a philosophy. They are ways of thinking about the purpose of video games and what we expect from them.

How, then, do we define these philosophies if not by their consumers?

Well, by identifying their chief values. Casualism (I was going to call it Hedonism but I don’t think that would fly with the soccer moms) is the belief that a game is first and foremost about fun. Probably the most famous proponent of this mindset is The Escapist’s critic Yahtzee. He makes the point in several reviews that when a game decides game design or plot should be more important than the player having fun, it is wrong for doing so. Games shouldn’t become chores, they should be pleasant breaks from the constant toil of the day. They shouldn’t take a long time to learn or bore the player either. The difficulty arises when we try to identify what fun is in a game. Losing isn’t particularly fun, so should games always be simple and easy to start playing? Where does that leave online play, since you’re bound to lose eventually? Casualism is essentially a reviewer’s philosophy, founded on the logic of gauging how much the average person is going to enjoy a game. As a consequence, games based in this area never seem to move beyond providing strictly fun experiences.

The hardcore philosophy is best represented by the team at Destructoid. They are, without a doubt, the most honest and brutal gaming people on the web. Their review policy can best be summarized as an individualized gauge of game play engagement and innovation. Their infamous 4.5 review of Twilight Princess was founded on the fact that the game was essentially just more of the same. What makes that a hardcore view is that you’re gauging a game’s quality by how it engages you rather than solely on how fun it is. The depth and polish of the game design is what’s important to the hardcore values. A game that’s fun but not entertaining over a long period of time suffers in this view along with anything doesn’t induce massive replay. The confinement of this philosophy is that not all great games need to be played over and over. Where does this leave You Have to Burn the Rope or exploration-based games like Metroid? Countless interactive fictions or Third-Person experiences suffer from a similar lack of replay value or ease of use, yet they still contain great stories. Are we really going to start saying these are bad games just because you don’t feel the compulsion to play them constantly?

A third philosophy is one that’s just coming into existence but is the only term that best describes my own policy on video games: the ex-core. As some gamers get older they are finding that a lot of these game design innovations tend to be superficial. I’m as impressed with the Forge features of Halo 3 as any hardcore enthusiast, but game veterans have already seen user-created maps long ago and the new depth added is a thin one. Once you play video games long enough you tend to quit expecting novelty constantly because genuinely new game designs are few and far between. Yet the blinking lights of casualism’s “fun, fun, fun” attitude don’t exactly do it either. I still expect to be engaged and actually enjoy the game experience. Thus, playing games that offer a good experience by whatever means necessary is the gauge of the ex-core. It doesn’t matter if you do this by fun or competition, innovation or replayability. And the enormous flaw of this is that it’s judged on a game-by-game basis. What works in one game may completely flop in another for totally different reasons. There’s no scale, no set of requirements, just your capacity for explaining why the experience does or does not work.

The reason it’s important to stop using these terms as labels and refer to them as philosophies is because countless games contain elements of all these beliefs. Super Mario Galaxy is a very fun, casually easy game. Yet it offers a lot of challenges that will satisfy the hardcorist’s need for replayability and innovation. At the same time, it provides the accessibility of a fun experience for an ex-core player. A video game doesn’t contain just one type of philosophy, it’s filled with countless layers of ideas and principles. Going back to the example of the art history lecture, the professor had a general response to people who were furious about his attack on the artwork. He said this was just another way of looking at art, and doing so generated questions. Those questions get back to the artist, the audience, and the subject itself. What else is art supposed to do except create that kind of discussion? By having multiple philosophies and not just labeling everything as good or bad, we can generate deeper conversations about video games themselves.

—L.B. Jeffries

12:00 am | Permalink | Comments (10)

But fun isn’t just something a game has or lacks—it happens in the interaction between game and player(s). It’s not that “hardcore” critics don’t like fun; they just find fun in different activities. (And let’s be careful not to collapse “hardcore” into a single category—a hardcore WoW player is not necessarily going to get way into Counter-Strike or Gran Turismo, even though all those games have strong hardcore constituencies.)

I think we can keep the “casual” claim that all games are about having fun, as long as we don’t start blaming this or that game for not BEING fun. Of course it’s fun—just maybe not for you, right now.

Comment by Peter — May 27, 2008 @ 11:13 am

I heartily agree, trying to gauge games by their ‘Fun’ or ‘Wow’ factor is extremely problematic for gamers. It’s just too subjective and it’s why the whole casual philosophy makes me leery.

The big distinction I was aiming for was to isolate these groups by what they claim the purpose of a video game is. The overlap I see between a WoW player and a Gran Turismo player is that they generally think a game should be played a lot to be any good. A bad game, under the hardcore philosophy of replay value and quality design, is one that you only play once or that doesn’t do much that’s new. Which has a lot of flaws, particularly once you start debating the merit of a Third-Person game whose story only merits one or two repeat playings.

I tried to skip around the ‘why’ of what makes a game replayable, because like you say that’s extremely complex. I’m not even sure industry veterans could point to any formula or logic for that. Part of what makes the hardcore so impossible to define is the very fact that we don’t really know what generates their distinct attribute: they play games a lot. I just opted for the shorter end of that logic: hardcore people think the purpose of a game is to be played a lot.

Comment by L.B. Jeffries from The South — May 27, 2008 @ 12:27 pm

Oh, I get it now! That’s a good point. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the assumption that games need to “hook” the player. This claim comes up all the time in reviews, criticism, and scholarship—for example, it’s one of the main pillars of James Paul Gee’s /What Video Games Have to Teach Us/, whose Darwinian metaphor for the game marketplace maps the “survival” of a game to its sales, player interest, or both.

My objection was based on indie games or art games that seem to repel players by putting them in deliberately unfair, illogical worlds. Surely that kind of gameplay doesn’t suck the player in...? But at the same time, some players (myself included) are mildly fascinated by that sort of experience, so maybe it does. And in some ways, this strategy isn’t that different from the way any other game plays hard-to-get by demanding something from the player before giving up its reward.

(This all sounds so obvious and tautological as I type it out, but it seemed subtle while I was thinking about it!)

In summary, I’m really not sure whether this rhetoric of games “hooking” players is actually problematic, or just oversimplified, or dependent on problematic terms, or what. What do you think?

Comment by Peter — May 27, 2008 @ 1:00 pm

Hmm… is there really a difference between hardcore and ex-core, as you’ve defined it? Because if Forge just doesn’t engage me, maybe it’s just because it’s nothing special. Maybe pulling ex-core out of what is essentially the “hardcore” sliver is trying to make it something it isn’t… But I guess you know that because you say it’s a game-by-game basis, and really a person-by-person basis. So really all it does is twist my brain into a pretzel.

Comment by Ed Borden from NJ — May 27, 2008 @ 2:12 pm

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Well, let me start this off by saying the main goal of this ZA article was to isolate 3 different mindsets for games and point out why no particular one should have a death grip on what games should do or be. Like the art lecture reference, they hash and reflect a game’s quality precisely by their conflicting goals and ideals.

@ Peter

Sounds like you nailed it. Why should a video game have to hook the player into playing for hours on end? Does that make the experience, particularly one that might be repellent but valid, any less important? The problem it generates is when it puts a lot of demand on a game that is trying to do something else. A great satire like Burn the Rope seems like it would’ve gotten muddled if they’d bothered with making a real game.

@ Borden

It was important for me to emphasize that the ex-core is just as problematic as the other two. It’s really just boiling down the game into “How do these elements resonate into an experience”. The problem being, resonate for who?

You also have a good point about the two core ideas overlapping a great deal. Even the name ex-core just means a former hardcore player before that pesky 9 to 5 business got underway. It makes sense for the two to feed into one another. I hate to think there is an age limit to an ideal though.

I’ll put it like this. A casual take on ‘Bully’ could be approving because it’s funny, easy to play, and there are countless things to do. A hardcore critique would be that the missions are repetitive, the game’s fairly easy, and the class structure is overly confining. An ex-core likes the game because it reminds them of high school and lets them play out the fantasy life they wish they’d led as kids.

All 3 of those observations are worth bringing to the conversation.

Comment by L.B. Jeffries from The South — May 27, 2008 @ 3:07 pm

That ex-core view of Bully has no overlap with hardcore at all, though. I’d say could basically just be a casual viewpoint, because it’s based on the fact that it’s fun because of what you’re doing. IE, I find it’s fun to play football games because it reminds me of football in high school, too… maybe a bad example, but the same line of thinking, I think…

Comment by Ed Borden from NJ — May 27, 2008 @ 3:13 pm

Hmmm...I think my dog has left the fight on this one. We could keep going on about semantics, origins of fun, and so on but I can’t imagine it leading anywhere satisfying.

So long as these ideas of game purpose are put out on the table and questioned a bit, I’m happy.

Comment by L.B. Jeffries from The South — May 27, 2008 @ 3:47 pm

I meant that in a polite, “This will never end” sense, not to be insulting. Sorry about that Ed, been reading work docs all day and my brain is getting fried.

Comment by L.B. Jeffries from The South — May 27, 2008 @ 4:00 pm

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I agree that the ex-core argument is mostly semantics but, if you’re thinking about taking these essays beyond this site, I would suggest finding a different was of describing that philosophy that doesnt come with so many pre-conceived notions. I suggest this not to argue semantics but because I think it would ease the understanding of the point you’re trying to get across. For example, by your description, I am an ex-core gamer and a hardcore gamer; I play games for the reasons an ex-core does but I sometimes judge them as a hardcore does and I sometimes play them non-stop as a hardcore does. I’ve been this way since I was a kid and I dont currently have any 9-5 type commitments. By your definitions I’d think of myself as an ex-core who plays games a whole lot but that title causes unwarranted assumptions to be made about me as a person and how I will view certain games (people who work a 9-5 job usually have a different outlook on games, especially their value, than those that dont). This makes it necessary to explain your definition of the word every time you post or risk misunderstandings and arguments when trying to talk about different gaming philosophies. I’d suggest trying to come up with a term that describes the philosophy rather than those that hold that philosophy. That might be useful for “casual” and “hardcore” as well.

Anyway, just trying to be helpful.

Comment by rpm285sm from CA — June 8, 2008 @ 2:55 am

It’s a good call and I think you’re right, trying to convert industry consumer labels into philosophical ideas about games was probably a stretch. Too much overlap, too many differing views. One of the goals I had with this series was to avoid using other artistic medium’s ideas or concepts as much as possible, so I stuck with whatever I could find and adapt.

I knew these 3 ideas about what games should do were floating around and needed examining, but in retrospect there is still a huge debate behind what we should call those ideas first.

Comment by L.B. Jeffries — June 8, 2008 @ 9:14 am

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27 May 2008

Zarathustran Analytics in Video Games, Part 8: The Factions of Gaming

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