Fanboy Rage: Origins

This truly is the age of the core. Or so we thought. With the advent of motion control, the “core” market is beginning to assert that Microsoft and Sony, masters of tergiversation that they are, have abandoned their traditional audience in favor of the lucrative market Nintendo has capitalized on so successfully. What it seems we have forgotten is that video games are a business, and like any business it must expand its audience as much as possible. I think it’s critical to understand where this sense of entitlement comes from, if we are to understand what has changed, and why these changes are ultimately good.

In days of yore, video games were considered nothing more than a hobby, about as lucrative as the model-planes industry. What games were released were built with the intent to test everything from the reflexes to the creative thinking of those who played them. Games like Contra thrived on their ability to frustrate and confound, only to elicit a strong sense of elation when they were finally overcome.
Flash forward ten years, and video games are emerging as one of the premier forms of entertainment. Although still a niche industry, games like Diablo and Grand Theft Auto are expanding the market and garnering increased attention from mainstream media outlets. As the market expands, so too does the scope and variety in games, as more and more people look to video games for entertainment. The punishing grind-fests of the arcades are gone, replaced by the more forgiving play-styles of Isometric Hack-and-Slash and strategy games.

However, it would two years before a wave of change would hit the industry with the release of the Playstation 2. Hot on its heels were the Xbox and the Nintendo GameCube, and with the arrival of this new generation of consoles, coupled with enormous jumps in graphical performance and power, came the more “mainstream” crowd. Video Game developers saw their budgets skyrocket as games became increasingly daedal in structure and function, and as budgets increased, so too did quality.

Despite the success of the sixth-generation of Consoles, and the PS2 in particular, it wasn’t until the next generation of consoles was released that Video Games broke into the mainstream. With the Nintendo Wii leading the charge, video games have become one of the largest industries in entertainment, and Microsoft and Sony have both begun to take notice of Nintendo’s success, each of them announcing their own take on motion control at this year’s E3. This was coupled with the announcement that Nintendo will begin to add “Demo Play” to its titles, which will, distilled to its most basic components, allow players to skip particularly difficult sections of the game so they can return to playing and having fun.

These developments have sent many of the “core” (I use that term very loosely) crowd into an uproar. “What about us?” they shout, angered that their guardians, Microsoft and Sony, seem to be taking a stance similar to Nintendo. What they seem to forget, however, is that there is room in gaming for everyone. We’ve become so used to the fact that video games are a niche market, and developers focusing solely on us, the “core” gamers, that we have begun to feel almost a sense of entitlement.

However, if we want our beloved industry to expand and reach its full potential, it seems to me that what the “Big 3” are doing is exactly what we need. There is no reason that the casual crowd can’t skip particularly difficult sections of the game, while we play through them. There’s no reason that we can’t have games on the 360 where the objective is to simply talk to a young British boy, since developers know that there is still money to be made among the “core” consumer base. This uproar stems from the idea that video games are “our” industry, when in truth they have expanded to become everyone’s industry, and the sooner we realize this, and the sooner we discard the idea that the “core” and “casual” markets are two separate entities, the sooner we’ll be able to move on and enjoy video games for what they are, entertainment.

Tags: Casual Core Hardcore Industry