Hardcore OR Casual...More Like Silly Or Childish

E3 has come and gone, and to be honest, it was quite underwhelming. Not a lot of truly new anything was announced. To be honest, nothing much has truly excited me about video games lately, mainly because the culture of gaming has become as diluted and marginalized as everything else in society. The PSN outage showed me that gamers honestly don't know how to play a multiplayer video game without being online. Developers have helped this phenomenon along by making local multiplayer a thing of the past unless the game is a sports or fighting game. Xbox Live and PSN were great ideas that allowed players to continue to play games with friends that have moved away, and it gave gamers an opportunity to meet new gamers that had similar tastes. You know what else gave the chance to meet other gamers? Talking about video games. Not starting random flame wars on message boards, not heaping labels like "hardcore" or "casual" on someone because of what their tastes are. Those labels are almost as dumb as the East Coast / West Coast rap beef of the 90s, but at least nobody has died from a message board beef. Also, who cooked up calling gamers "hardcore" and "casual"? What makes a game either? Is it based on whether a game has violent content, adult language, is it "hardcore" because somebody told you it is? It's a little silly to me. I remember a time when the only thing that differentiated a game like Contra from a game like Super Mario Bros. was that Contra had guns. Fact is, gamers have adopted the same sheep mentality that has messed up the music and television mediums. It's sad that people with obvious bias have the loudest voices in all walks of life, and people have become gullible enough to take whatever someone sells them and proclaim it to be the best thing ever. I'm glad that I still have my old consoles, because the modern atmosphere of gaming is a sad place full of either angry or complacent people, and existing outside of that can be a liberating thing.