by icycalm » 12 May 2012 17:45
Note to self to explain in one of the future articles something that I didn't in this essay (and with good reason, since in order to understand this one needs to have read and understood a bunch of articles I haven't even yet written): that even people with much wider tastes than aspie cyber"athletes" are CASUAL compared to me. People like GaijinPunch, for example, or even Recap. GaijinPunch and people in the same vein (Shou, etc.) are all CASUALS compared to me. Put simply, if you don't SALIVATE at the MERE IDEA of a Far Cry 3 or GTA V, you are about as hardcore into the artform as some fagot who thinks that movies peaked in the black and white silent film era and thinks that Heat and Blader Runner are "mane streem dependie sellouts that focus on the graphix instead of the moviewatch". The analogy is perfect, and there is no valid objection against it, as long as you have understood the application of set theory on art, and the correct definitions of the concepts "art" and "videogames" (i.e. that these two concepts are ultimately the same).
If people knew anything of my gaming history, that I've been playing games obsessively since Pong, and how much trouble I've put myself into and how much time and money I've poured into them, they'd find the idea of GaijinPunch, WHO BASICALLY GOT INTO GAMES WITH THE SATURN LOL, and who only basically plays 4 or 5 ancient genres, to be somehow more hardcore than me, LUDICROUS. And the same with all the rest of them.
The only one from the gamengai circle who can justifiably be called hardcore is Macaw; everyone else in there, regardless of how much specialized info they might have in a bunch of extremely limited areas, are CASUAL when it comes to videogames as an artform.