Why I Play On A SNES |Now You're Playing With Super Power!|Forum|SNES HUB

That is academic when you are dealing with a user-base that is almost 90 percent male, most of which are between the ages of 18-32.

I’m not saying that NO women game on consoles, I’m saying that MOST do not, and studies show this (NPD, MediaCrate, Wedbush-Morgan, etc.)

And I am saying that the Hardcore’s manchild tendencies do not help in this regard. Hell, I can’t even stomach them and I AM a Young Adult Male!

When studies like Rushdawg’s come out, I don’t read it as “80 PERCENT OF GAMERS BELIEVE THAT SEXUAL HARASSMENT IS RAMPANT IN THE GAMING COMMUNITY”. To me it should just say that “VIDEO GAMING CARRIES A STIGMA”.

When a senator blasts video games for causing gun violence, what he is really saying is that “VIDEO GAMING CARRIES A STIGMA”.

When footage of Olivia Munn licking a PSP for a crowd of hooting gamers airs on CNN and the story is mocked for 30 seconds before they move on to talking about movies, music, and books for the remainder of the half-hour broadcast, I see that “VIDEO GAMING CARRIES A STIGMA”.

When Roger Ebert says Videogames Will never be art and no one aside from gamers argues this I am reminded that “VIDEO GAMING CARRIES A STIGMA”.

Why does gaming carry a stigma? It didn’t used to. The Arcade games never carried a stigma. The NES never carried a stigma. The SNES and Genesis never carried a stigma aside form Mortal Combat. And the Wii never carried a stigma.

It is then that I realized that the Stigma was not attached to ALL games, just HARDCORE GAMING. The stigma in the NES era was directed at the commodore and ZX spectrum gamers (the “hardcore” that hated the NES). During the SNES era the stigma was directed at the folks who bought any of the plethora of failed SUPERCONSOLES that were intended to crush the SNES and Genesis with their superior graphics and sound. Of course normal people care very little for such things and these consoles were all horrible failures.

In the 32-bit era the Stigma began to be directed at gaming as a whole since games were getting longer, becoming more complicated, and losing a large chunk of the 16-bit audience. Of course the Hardcore were happy since this direction alienated the “wrong” type of gamers (Ask me where I was during this era).

By the time the Wii came out, the gaming community was completely insular, having created “gamer culture” (whatever the fuck that is). This “gamer culture” consisting of Microsoft, Sony, 3rd Party developers, the gaming press, and the deranged people in the photos above literally declared war on the Wii and the “casuals” that played on it. Yet it is at this moment that the stigma against gaming was temporarily broken. The Wii was spoken of outside of gamer culture as a phenomenon that everyone had to own. Wii Fit and Wii Sports grew gaming to unprecedented levels. NSMBWii was single-handedly responsible for a new generation of gamers, and Mario Kart Wii ended up on Fucking billboards!

I don’t know what the future brings, but I can make a pretty good recommendation to the industry. If you want to grow the market just go to  NeoGaf and listen to the Hardcore Gamers.

Then run the other way.

Hardcore gaming has always carried a stigma.

Beginning with board games and progressing to pinball machines, these were always mainstream popular activities. But there is ALWAYS that guy that takes the board game too seriously. And he ruins the fun for everyone.

The dawn of commercial videogames begins with Pong. Nolan Bushnell saw that the hardcore game Computer Space wasn’t selling. So he put out PONG instead. The hardcore gamers didn’t like PONG because it was ‘simple’ unlike the complicated Space War. Meanwhile pong became mainstream, was played by families and women, and was commercially successful. 

In the arcade golden age there was no stigma on Pac-Man.  Hell couples and families braved the smoky arcades to have a game of pac-man or space invaders. Pac-Man was designed for women! Donkey Kong was made for families with children. Where was the stigma? you need only look to the Defender machine sitting in the corner surrounded by hooting drunk 20-somethings while they vied for high-scores.  

Stigma attached to the NES? Not that I remember. The NES was a market-dominating phenomenon that was played by families, adults, and yes, children.  The Hardcore thought the NES was atrocious and stuck with playing Monty Mole. Look where Monty Mole is and look where Mario is today. I remember my family gathered around the NES, playing Duck Hunt and Mario. I also remember reading snooty articles that remember Monty Mole before Mario came in and “Casualized gaming”.

In the 16-bit era I remember games like Mario Kart and Sonic being played endlessly and the elementary playgrounds being a Warzone over the systems. There was also that ONE KID who talked about how awesome his Atari Jaguar was and looked down at the others.  It was easy to identify hardcore gamers; you just had to look for the conversations involving aliens vs. predator…

My sister was in elementary school when the 32-bit era began. She says the ONLY ones talking about videogames that were not sports-related were the “gaming nerds”. The Playstation and N64 did not inspire the same mainstream passion that the SNES and genesis did.

From this point I was not a gamer so I cannot offer an insiders perspective until the release of the Wii. I returned to the hobby as did countless others who had not played a game since the SNES (my mom and Dad, even my always non-gaming sister). This is when I began to get confused because I heard the Gaming journalists and other gamers talk about the Wii as if it were Satan! “You can’t do REAL games on the Wii” they sneered. The hardcore, now the gaming majority, had migrated to the PS3 and the 360.

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There are some common characteristics that have always united these gamers. They tend to favor technology over gameplay, exclusivity over mass-market, and complexity over simplification.

To me, gaming always represented family, friends, and relaxation. To the hardcore, it represents Status, a career opportunity,  and bragging rights.

And this is the fundamental difference that the game industry needs to bridge. The problem with Mcdonalds not serving Big Macs is that nobody identifies Mcdonalds as serving health food . You eat Mcdonalds because it’s cheap and filling, and it tastes good. Sop serve the health food to the niche person who may be dragged to Mcdonalds but doesn’t want to eat shit. They take care of the primary need (cheap, good food) first

Why do most people play games? It’s not for fake achievement scores and Artistic Narrative adventures. ITS TO HAVE FUN AND SOCIALIZE! So make most games to serve those needs and put the hardcore games in the smoky corner where they belong.

It’s not like they won’t show up….The hardcore will show up.

Instead you are prioritizing the ones who will come to the party ANYWAY, thus leaving the rest behind. It is easy to add hardcore elements to a game like Mario. Speedruns.

It is much harder to make a casual gamer buy Bioshock.

No,I am almost positive that today’s hardcore gamers would not even know who Monty mole is lol! I was merely showing a snapshot of the Hardcore through time.

What I was implying is that i believe that the Hardcore of yesteryear have a similar if not identical mindset to the hardcore of today. The same gamer who ridicules the Wii is the same type of gamer who laughed at the NES. As for the Hardcore of today I believe you are correct in your origin story. The hardcore always begins life as a “casual”, then moves upstream.

When has gaming ever grown by following the hardcore? As a matter of fact I would make the argument that more hardcore are created through NOT focusing on them. Most modern hardcore games are low on content and filled with recycled ideas and rushed productions. By contrast look at a game like Super Metroid which was very much a hardcore game that was polished to a mirrors shine. If you focus on the gateway games (Mario, Sonic, Pac-Man) and make less hardcore games, then the hardcore games are able to get the time, attention, and money they need to truly be compelling and move gamers upstream.

I look at modern gaming and see a broken pipeline. I started with Baseball and Excite Bike, then moved upstream to Mario and eventually ended up at Zelda and Final Fantasy. Today, new gamers play Wii Sports, move upstream to Mario and then…….stop. They don’t move onto Zelda or Metroid or Final Fantasy. Maybe COD, but again they stop.

It’s created a new class of gamer: The Almost. They were ALMOST gamers if only they were given the same caliber of content that gave us that “push”. The problem is that the pyramid had been inverted. There are many more Advanced games than gateway games (And they are much more expensive to make and complicated to learn), and I think they get it wrong when they do this. You NEED the install base created by the gateway games in order to have an audience (always smaller) for the hardcore games.

Game sales do not exist in a vacuum. There exists a few mega games that create new markets. Other games come that exist only through what this new market created. For example without Pac-Man many other video games would be unable to exist. Sure, they could have been made, but there would not have been a market for them. Look at Tetris for example. Tetris created a new type of gaming market. There were many clones but there were also many innovators. Games like Dr. Mario, Yoshi’s Cookie, and Puzzle Bobble likely couldn’t exist because the existing market was not there until Tetris fulfilled the appetite.

Look at Super Mario Brothers. do you like Mega Man? Metroid and Castlevania? Sonic and Bonk? Games that are not as popular but well loved by gamers, such as Metroid, could not and would not exist without Super Mario Brothers.

There are so many first person shooter games due to the sales of games like Doom, Quake, Halo, and Call of Duty. Games like Duke Nukem or Bioshock could not exist without the existing market those games helped make. It shouldn’t be difficult to recognize that these games allowed other games to exist. It is already recognized how much of a system seller they game are. What is not understood is that they sell SOFTWARE, too. People bought Bioshock BECAUSE of games like COD and the appetite they acquired from it. Without it, no one would have cared enough to make it because there would be no proof that the market exists.

By focusing on the Hardcore games the first-party games are filling the shelves with God of War and Uncharted when that is traditionally the job of the third party ( which is doing this, too) Sony should be making the games that LEAD to Bioshock and Dead Space. Let the third parties placate the hardcore while the first party grows the market. Win/Win Synergy.

That’s how we used to GET SHIT DONE!

ARGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

I had a response but then my internet shorted out!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyone else ever have this happen after you type 200 words?

Here I’ll try again……Wish me luck lol!

In 1994 we had an estimated 255 million people. In 2004 we had an estimated 300 million people. the difference added is an estimated 45 million people in NA.

So not counting multi-console ownership (which is much higher in the sixth generation than it was in the fourth generation) we added 35 million gamers.

How is that growth? If we had added 46 million gamers then I would say that gaming has grown, but this says that gaming was not even keeping up with population growth. I imagine it gets worse if you apply the same math to the seventh generation sans Wii.

Barley keeping up with population trends does not constitute growth. I look at these numbers and I see STABILITY, but not growth. This tells me we lost some, we gained more.

This does not even factor in that aside from 2001 those post-cold war years were an amazing time for the economy. Yet this anemic growth is all we have in an established market?

My god…………………….It’s worse than I thought!

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It also begs the question: Where the hell did all those PS2 Gamers go? Because the pS2 was a success, and it had over 100 million users.

Where did they all go?

These are fast becoming more epic and informative than my conversations with Grimm.

We have GOT to do a roundtable,guys! There is nowhere else you can get this depth of discussion, and we need to start using this to our advantage!