Aaron Hoffmann Principal UX Product Designer

something hit me the other day. not physically, but rather like an epiphany: hardcore gaming isn’t what it used to be. in fact it’s not even what it was before that. i see myself for who i am today of course, but also from a hilltop where I can see who i used to be, and after twenty years of evolution, have seen trends come and go. like many other things in life, gaming has its cycles, and it appears as though we’re all poised on the edge of the next age in its history. so what is hardcore 3.0, and what happened to one and two?

as i see it, fundamental shifts in culture have popularised different game genres at different points in time, much like the latin explosion of ‘99-00 in music, or the grunge era of the early to mid 90s. take 2d platformers for example back in the late 80s, or street fighters in the mid 90s, or the ubiquity of FPSs of today. for better or worse, gaming has already hit two milestones; two generations of hardcore gamers, and the third is just around the corner.

when i was a kid (a real kid mind you, not this ‘big kid’ business i try to pass off today), the term ‘hardcore gamer’ had the connotation of someone who either had access to a sizeable fortune and had amassed a library of dozens upon dozens of games and could play each of them for a brief while and was the envy of every kid in the neighbourhood, or someone who with modest gaming expenditures had a few games, but played the hell out of them: early morning, any time during the day, late into the night. even neglecting one’s health, all for achieving the highest score or purely for the love of hoisting their favourite sprite-based character to that out-of-the-reach ledge. it was truly the romantic era of gaming.

the first generation of gaming was all about diversion, and had little to do with replicating real-life experience, and focused on using the limited (by today’s standards, but it was cutting edge at the time) technology to squeeze every ounce of well-thought, straightforward fun out of a system, and into the hands and hearts of anyone who wanted to play. it didn’t exclude or intimidate users with steep learning curves or complicated, arthritis-inducing controllers that even an eight-fingered life form would take issue with. these were games you could pick up and play as easily as you could read a comic strip, and escape into for however long you wished; even shorter games whose beginning-to-end might be a half hour often had great replay value. but then, like any good art, the steeper the limitations given, the better the end product as the creation requires extra time and thought to realise the goal by ingenuity rather than indolence or indulgence.