Why Hardcore?

 I like games.

No, wait. I take that back. I LOVE games. Card games, board games, video games, I absolutely adore them all. I've played games nearly every day of my life, and they have helped to shape the person I am today. I've owned a massive game collection spanning more than thirty-five years of titles, and I've kept an ear to the tracks following any and all news I could about the industry for as long as I've had access to the internet.

Am I a hardcore gamer?

I don't think so.

Is that important?

Not in the slightest.

While the phenomenon is certainly nothing new, the classification of gamers into groups based on perceived merit of their tastes or dedication has taken a massive turn for the worst over the last ten to fifteen years. With the rise of social media integration in consoles the face of gaming has moved away from the shared experiences of the past and more toward the very choice of what games you play, and how you play them, being a game in and of itself, and a highly competitive one at that. With many players basing one's value as a "gamer" on such things as Xbox gamer scores or PlayStation trophies, it is my opinion that gaming has lost a large part of what always made the older consoles so fun: cooperative community.

True, competition has always been a key part of the electronic gaming scene. With the old arcade games the only real goal of playing was to achieve the highest score possible with the aim of proving your superiority versus other players on the same cabinet. As gaming advanced, though, these elements steadily lost their place as the focal point of games, usurped by the likes of story, progression, and experience-oriented goals and rewards more akin to tabletop games than the original arcade experiences. Home consoles brought on the competition between competing hardware or franchises as well, leading to some incredibly memorable experiences for those who grew up during the heyday of the Sega/Nintendo debates or, more recently, the Microsoft/Sony competitions, but with the increase in availability of cross-platform releases gaming's competitive focus has seen a shift away from single-games and more toward a focus on the entertainment medium as a whole.

Of course, with that shift in focus many players have developed far more strict ideas of what defines a "gamer." Gone are the days when anyone who played consoles or PC games -- or anyone who could so much as name a game, even -- could be considered a gamer. Now you can be hardcore, or competitive, or casual, or any number of other labels that have creeped into the lexicon over the last couple of decades to define and separate our numbers into smaller bite-sized chunks, each with animosity toward the others in some way shape or form.

Me?

I'm a Gamer, full stop. To me it doesn't matter if a player is a fan of one game or many, Sony, Nintendo, or (grudgingly for the newest generation) Microsoft. What is important is our shared experience with our entertainment medium of choice. As a player I couldn't care less what my friends' kill/death ratios in Call of Duty are, nor do I care about how high their gamerscore is or how many games they've beat. No, what I do care about is the experiences they've had, both good and bad, and the stories they can tell about their adventures.

Games, like film or literature or music, are not something that exists for the sake of defining someone as better or worse than another. They are there to enrich the lives of those who delve to understand and experience them. The high-score competitions of the old days were never about defining winners and losers: it was about challenging yourself to do your best. In the mid- to late 90's, and moving forward into the 00's, gaming almost completely abandoned the likes of scoreboards in favor of cooperative and goal-based gameplay that was intended to inspire users to enjoy the experience, not master it. With the rise of social media and the mass return of scoreboards and a competitive focus to just about everything, many gamers have lost a lot of what gaming has grown into.

It's not about being more hardcore or skilled than other players. It's not about how many hours you've dropped into matches or where you are on the leaderboards or even how many people are on your social media friends lists.

It's about the games.

And if it's about the games, then shouldn't enjoying them, in whatever capacity, be enough?