Hey, this old account still works.
For me, there's only two forms of gamer: casual and hardcore.
Hardcore gamers can be identified by how much their gaming ideals / ideal games are accepted in mainstream gaming. You know you're dealing with a hardcore gamer if all they praise is
System Shock 2,
Planescape: Torment, or any other game that sold about 5 copies. You'll also see them badmouthing any game that tends to get a lot of people playing it. From
Sims to
Quake 4, if lots of people like it, a hardcore gamer'll hate it.
Casual, on the other hand... well, they do the opposite. They like Sims, Quake 4, and make it known by buying those sorts of games. Developers listen to these people. Whenever a hardcore gamer is whining about something in gaming, its usually because of the casual gamers.
In that list, I'm a casual gamer in most respects, but I write on the internet, so I've got that bit of hardcoreness. Although, a tenent of hardcoreness is that you actually
believe people listen to 'em, which I don't have
