Yesterday, in class we had a discussion about the relevancy of kitsch art to videogames and what would be considered the high art version of videogames. While it is easy to see why games like Farmville and Diner Dash are considered kitsch, I think these videogames can also be considered a fine art video game if they are perfected. What I mean is that it is more important how the player plays the game because one can make it Diner Dash into a challenging game. When someone plays a game like Diner Dash, it is easy to finish all the levels with the minimum amount of effort. But others reach for medals or trophies only given to the most elite of waiters. To these players, the game is no longer the normal mass appeal videogame. They have their own forums for discussing upgrades and cheats that make a simple game like Diner Dash into a modern art painting, full of hidden messages and metaphors that the normal patron would not notice. There are moments when you see someone master a normal thing and then even that normal thing becomes a work of art. These people spend many hours to master these skills and that is what makes it appealing rather than the medium that they use.

I also was drawn to the fact that the majority of the posters’ blogs and comments were about music and art within videogames. Although I do find those subjects fascinating, I was particularly intrigued by the chapter on Pranks in “How to do Things with Videogames”. The chapter references the UK version of “The Office” and parodies such as “The Colbert Report”. Pranks are an integral part of our culture, for example, the upcoming “April Fool’s Day”. Within the work place or in casual settings, pranks are played on a daily basis as a sign of affection and seeing how far one can take the joke. To me, pranks and hacks within videogames serve as a sort of tribute to the games and a sign that the creators of the games are human. The “Easter Eggs” discussed are created by the designers of the video games without actually harming the integrity of the game; these people are just finding fun within the more menial part of their jobs. It is meant to find entertainment and maintain interest in something, such as hitting the question boxes in “Mario, that can be monotonousness.

However, the main point I took away the article was how cheats fit into videogames. Every one of them has them. I remember when I was younger and played “The Sims”; “rosebud” and “cha-ching” were the only ways that my Sims actually had a chance of survival. Cheats are a type of prank in a game, but can they be in the same category or deserve their own?

Reading through ekurzik’s post, I can’t help but agree that gamers cannot be divided into two simple classes of ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore,’ by what games they play, and I’d like to expand on this a little.

Whether someone is a casual or hardcore gamer has much more to do with their attitude towards gaming and the way they play than which section of Gamestop they shop in.

At first, with arcade games and the Atari, it seemed like most games would probably have been classified as casual.  Maybe you didn’t know how long you would play, but for the most part, they were light, easy to use, uncomplicated as to story, and had pretty simple graphics.  With the introduction of Mario Brothers and especially Zelda, the landscape of gaming changed.  The stories were more important, the levels were different, the boss battles were hard, and the games were longer.  They took skill and time to master, and I think this is probably when the trend began towards today’s gamer stereotype of a post-grad living off beer and cheetos in their mom’s dark basement.  But then with Myst, Tetris, and Bejeweled, casual games came back, and they have flooded the market.  Video gaming is now so pervasive in our culture and gamers have thousands of games available to play, that our classifications may need to change.

It is possible to imagine a gamer who prefers ‘casual’ online games, but spends hours a day playing them, spends money on the upgrades and extras, and becomes engrossed in and even obsessed with a game… like world of warcraft? or even… farmville?

On the other hand, we can also imagine a gamer who doesn’t have much time or money for games, but still enjoys playing the big-name, big-story games.  this person may sit down for ten minutes at a time, once or twice a week, and work on the game as if it’s a long-term project.

We could call the first person hardcore, and the second casual, despite the reversal in the game types.  But our classification is still complicated by attitudes.  What f the online gamer doesn’t take time to develop skill, but simply pours hours into an imaginary world? what if the casual gamer is really proud of getting better at the battle sequences? what if they’ll go all night on a weekend?

Classifications can be helpful, but that’s all they are: a tool.  They can give us clues, but they are not the end-all destination.

Interruptability has so far been considered, as in Juul’s book and mcovingt’s post as an indicator of a whether a given game or gamer is casual or hardcore, but this may not be entirely accurate. While I agree with mcovingt’s distinction between casual vs. hardcore gamers as opposed to games, there’s another aspect of interruptability that comes into play–namely, the level of interest of the player in the game.

Normally, one would assume that if there was a high level of interruptability in the game (less consequences if you stop in the middle), it would probably be more casual, and vice versa. Mcovingt takes this a step further, arguing the depth of investment of the players defines if the play or player is casual or hardcore.

But what if the player simply doesn’t care about a given game at all? Consequences for losing or quitting in the game are always subjectively experienced and valued, and if the player doesn’t value the game experience high enough, the game virtually has infinite interruptability. For example, suppose a player playing League of Legends suddenly decides that he/she no longer values the game experience and quits in the middle of the game with huge in-game consequences to him/herself and the team. The game, through no act of its own, just became the most interruptible game possible, even though it could be considered as falling into the hardcore category due to it’s lack of built-in interruptability and the player considered hardcore due to previously blocking out other distractions. Thus low interruptability is usually an indicator of the players’ level of interest in the game, but interruptability can be infinite at any moment if the values of the player change.

After reading the blog posts for this week’s reading by Jesper Juul, it is obvious to me that the idea of casual/hardcore games and gamers is really up to everyone’s own interpretation. Nobody agrees on all of the aspects and criteria for the so-called “hardcore” or “casual” games and gamers. Neither do they agree upon what is considered fun or not fun in each of these categories of games. In one of the posts, “Keeping it Casual,” the writer wrote that he/she believed that playing a “hardcore” game caused just as much stress as writing a paper or studying for a big test for a class. I personally cannot even comprehend that concept. It is one of my favorite things to sit down and play a “hardcore” video game for hours straight.

So, perhaps the debate here is not what categorizes “hardcore”/”casual” video games and gamers, but how people themselves view these games and what they look for in a video game versus what they dislike. Each player is a unique video gamer, a mixture of both the “casual” and “hardcore” stereotypes. I grew up playing Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 with my older brothers and their friends. I was always trying to be as good as them. This longing of wanting to fit in and wanting to keep up with my brothers and their friends pushed me toward being a better gamer. I learned the controls and learned to love all the different aspects of video games.

So I turned into a “hardcore” video gamer, but did I? I still play Words With Friends like the rest of the “casual” gamers. I don’t really think that labels are necessary in this aspect of video games. Every player is different with what kind of games they like. I may fit into the category of a “hardcore” gamer, but it doesn’t mean that I like all “hardcore” games. It is really just an area of opinion and preference. Nobody fits into just one category.