Phoenix_XIII said:
But a gaming company shouldn't be about money. They should be about the gamers. And about the fun in games!
And you should spend less time spending your money and time on gaming and more of both on charity.
Idealism is great but, in reality, things don't quite work out in an idealistic manner.
Mr. In-between said:
I think the real reason that Nintendo is such a lightning rod for user hate is due to the fact that the majority of people who religiously play all of the Kool Kidz library of games actually don't have very much skill outside of the FPS genre.
Logging on to Escapist just to talk about how "gay" Mario and Zelda are is probably just a roundabout way of saying "I suck ass at anything that isn't FPS"
I don't think it's that. Penny Arcade said it best way back in 2001.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/6/6/
For many gamers, being a gamer had become something that made them special. It was something they "got" and others didn't. Sure, there was talk about making the image of games more acceptable in society but this talk was never accompanied by talk of making gaming more accessible in society.
Then Nintendo decided (much like Sony did with the Playstation 1 when they began marketing gaming as "not just for basement dwellers) to go after the general public. All of a sudden, being a gamer wasn't something that made you part of an elite fraternity anymore. When someone's grandma is gaming, that person no longer had that special thing that he "got" and everyone else around him didn't.
To paraphrase Syndrome: "When everyone is special, then noone is".
And that's what happened with gamers. Now that everyone is a gamer, it is no longer special or unique to be one. They try to throw up qualifications such as Casual-Hardcore (and bear in mind that most of the gamers who are throwing these qualifications up are going through middle/high school.....a time when a lot of people are trying to establish some sense of individuality) in order to preserve the notion that what they do makes them unique but those false boundaries have been shattered.
This, to my mind, is why Nintendo gets a lot of hate. They threw open the clubhouse to everyone.
One last thing:
Phoenix_XIII said:
Hardcore gaming is when you actually work on attaining skill in a game rather than just sitting down and being able to do it.
If that were true, then gaming lost it's hardcore edge as soon as the first JRPG was created.
Noone cared about making such distinctions for games that didn't need skill so much as the willingness to grind. Making the distinction now is false reasoning.
And what is the problem with just being able to sit down and do it? I have unnaturally good aim. Thusly I was great at Time Crisis and other lightgun games from the start. Some people have better reflexes than others. Those people start off better at "twitch" games than the person whose talents are more for tactics and strategy games. Should we make false divisions for them as well?
For that matter, why does gaming need to be something that you NEED to work at in order to fit into this false definition? I'm 39 and I spend 40+ hours a week working as it is. Sometimes a Devil May Cry 3 challenge is good but, sometimes, I just want to kick back and play a Flower.
