Hardcore Gamers, Wii, Elitists, Fanboys, and More

For the last two years or so, a disturbing and aggravating trend has formed in the gaming community and media. This is the excessive bashing and double standards against the Nintendo Wii, and the elitism that either caused or was caused by it. Let’s get this out of the way, this is pretty much entirely a pro-Nintendo article, at least in any area where the chance to criticize or defend comes up. Many people online seem to have an impulse to label any defending of a company as an act of fanboyism, but let’s look at what being a fanboy means under a reasonable definition.

A fanboy is someone who has a blind devotion to a company, a bias that forces them to defend and praise everything a company, system, or any other gaming entity does. So basically, being a fanboy means your opinion is based on the company, not the actual issue being discussed. Under that definition, I believe my argument is much less of a “fanboy” one than what it is arguing against. Nothing I plan to say in this article depends on Nintendo being benevolent, every defense I use for Wii is based on games released or comparisons to other systems. On the other hand, many of the anti-Nintendo sentiments are quite emotional and dependent on a personal attachment to the company. Claims that Nintendo “doesn’t care about hardcore gamers” or criticism of specific comments made by Nintendo of America representatives who have little if any control of what games are actually made are about personal feelings towards Nintendo, which is supposed to be the realm of the fanboy.

The fanboy witch hunt is particularly annoying to me because at a time I actually was a fanboy. Not the “shows even the slightest preference or loyalty to a game company” type message board posters are always flaming, the real “will only play games on one system” type. I was a Nintendo fanboy from 1995-1999, so for most of the 32/64-bit era. And let me tell you, it is not fun. I suffered through N64 game droughts while trying to convince myself that PS1 was garbage and I didn’t want to play anything on it. When I finally overcame my bias (like most of my other defining moments as a gamer it involved Mega Man, but that’s a story for another day) the relief was incredible. I looked at one of those ultra price guides Funcoland used to give out that listed pretty much every NA release, and it dawned on me as I looked at the PS1 section that I could actually play them, all of them. The point I’m getting at with this reliving of a personal epiphany is that being a fanboy hurts the fanboy, not the people who encounter them on message boards. They should be pitied, not subjected to witch hunts.

That said, let’s get to the issues. It is my belief that Wii is being held to rather blatant double standards by many in the gaming community. The biggest one is the belief that the percentage of bad games on Wii affects the system’s overall quality. Every major system in gaming history has had an overwhelming percentage of bad games. SNES, the system so revered that even anti-Nintendo trolls will often avoid bashing it, had over 700 games in North America. I have been collecting SNES games for years and have 133, and finding quality ones I don’t own is getting harder and harder, I’m going to reach the peak soon, and dozens of the games I have aren’t even that good. 100 truly good SNES games would be a generous estimate, and that’s less than 20% of the total library. Each generation gaming grows bigger and the dominant system gets more and more games, and the percentage of good ones shrinks. PS2 and GameBoy Advance probably had the worst quality-crap ratios of any systems with a good library up to their point, but did it ruin them? Were we forced to buy every game on them? PS2 has well over 1,000 games, can you even remember a couple hundred of the bad ones?

So why is it different for Wii? Yes, like every other market leader system it will probably have a worse ratio than the one before it, but would it really improve your gaming experience if Wii had 100 horrible games you would never buy instead of 1,000 ones by the end of its life? Do you honestly think people who would otherwise buy the obscure but quality Wii games are not doing it because a Nickelodeon licensed game distracted them? More to the point, do you think they’d have bought Zack and Wiki or No More Heroes if there were only 5 bad licensed games instead of 50? There are people who don’t put much effort into researching a game’s quality before buying one, there always have been and while there are more now, that doesn’t reduce the amount of informed gamers who will seek out obscure but good titles. No More Heroes and Zack and Wiki, despite being very low in typical mainstream appeal, still sold hundreds of thousands.

That leads to my second point about unfair criticism of Wii, the gaming community refusing to allow certain genres to exist. I personally have no plans to buy Wii Fit or Wii Music, but there is absolutely no justification for the absolute hatred so many have expressed towards these games for simply existing. They are not automatically “shovelware” (after seeing this term applied to VC games made 20 years ago, I have concluded that the term’s original meaning is destroyed and we should just move on) just because you aren’t interested in their genre. They have not stopped Wii from having as many traditional genre Nintendo releases in the same time frame as the previous Nintendo systems. They are not going to destroy gaming, and you are not morally superior to people who buy them. The companies that churn out cheap copies that actually are horrible are not the same ones who would otherwise make good games. Good developers have seen awful games cashing in on the latest mainstream trend sell more than they had any right to since the dawn of gaming, Wii Fit won’t change their world perspective.

Now that I’ve got that rant off my chest, let’s examine the root causes of this. The most obvious answer would be anti-Nintendo bias, but I think something deeper is at work. The gaming market has changed radically in the past four years, with DS and Wii returning Nintendo to prominence among mainstream gamers in a way they hadn’t been in nearly a decade. There has been a shift in who is making games and systems a success, and what type of games they want. The kiddy image that haunted Nintendo since Mortal Kombat 1 (I could go into a page of how unfair it was that people are still bringing that up when SNES had three uncensored MKs, but I won’t) was released without blood has been reversed, the mainstream market likes Nintendo’s image now, and this really is a good thing. Gaming must expand to be something done by everyone, how anyone who grew up with the stigma placed on gaming can deny that is beyond me. And I don’t think many of those people are denying it.

This leads to the crux of this article. I believe the casual gamer vs hardcore gamer argument is a false dilemma, hardcore and casual gamers have coexisted ever since gaming became (relatively) mainstream. Real hardcore gamers have seen the mass market swept up with bad clones of Mario, Sonic, Street Fighter, Final Fantasy VII, and GTA3, they know bad clones of Wii Sports won’t destroy gaming. So who are the people complaining so much about Wii? They’re the casual gamers from last generation. They are used to being aggressively catered to by game companies, they want the image of gaming that dominated sales last gen (violent, realistic games) in their games, and they want those games to be the most popular. They aren’t really hardcore gamers, they’ve just adopted the image. Hardcore gamers will play any game they want to, but fake or elitist hardcores only want a certain type of game, and are angry at the mainstream market shift and the system that personifies it. They don’t have the ability to accept their co-existence with new gamers the way real hardcore gamers do, and they aren’t used to having to turn to relatively obscure games to play what they want. I’m not labeling everyone who started gaming in the Playstation era or prefers violent games into this category, only those who can’t peacefully co-exist with new gamers and Nintendo fans, to the point where they would rather pretend gaming was dead.

But don’t think people who label themselves as hardcore gamers are the only ones who can be elitists. One of the things that annoys me the most in life is generalized retaliation, attacking an entire group because some people from that group attacked yours. There has been quite a bit of this in the gaming community against hardcore gamers as a whole. As contradictory as it sounds, there is such a thing as a casual elitist. These people think that not being that into gaming makes them better than hardcore gamers. Knowing a lot about gaming makes you pretentious or a nerd according to them, or researching gaming news and history means you can’t really enjoy games. Pretty much everything I said about hardcore gamers applies to casual elitists; not all casuals are like that, and if you just don’t want to get that into gaming all you have to do is be willing to peacefully co-exist with more dedicated gamers.

So pretty much the point of this article is that the reasonable factions in gaming should get along and not blame all casuals/hardcores for what the elitists do. Neither Wii nor anything else is capable of destroying gaming, momentum is on our side. However, we can make things a lot more pleasant for gamers if people can just try to get over their elitism and stop worrying so much over whether someone is 100% unbiased towards every game company.