A few weeks back, Handelabra sponsored the 5by5 network of podcasts. One show in particular, Hypercritical, is hosted by John Siracusa. If you are not familiar with his work, he's a long-time contributor to Arstechnica and is probably best known for his verbose and prolific writings on Apple and Mac OS X.While discussing GAME.minder, he made an observation that the app was best suited to "Casual-Hardcore" gamers. He defined this as: "You're enough of a gamer to know that a game is coming out ahead of time, and excited enough to be annoyed if you forgot about it but you're not so hardcore that you are constantly playing games."
He followed this up by saying it might be insulting but I really don't think so. In fact, it kinda describes me to a tee and speaks to exactly why we created GAME.minder. The games industry has exploded over the last decade and the fact is, hardcore or casual, it's almost impossible to keep up on every game you might want to play. When you couple this with the fact that the average gamer is 37 years old, it truly does make GAME.minder, as John put it, an "application of its time".
We as gamers, if nothing else, love to play. But most of us are old enough to have jobs, maybe families and myriad other things pulling on our attention. While we may be interested in what are often called "core games", our approach to gaming may fall more into the casual realm. However, the broader category of "casual games" usually means the Bejeweled and Angry Birds fare.
So now, John has given us a new category - the Casual-Hardcore gamer. Does this describe you like it describes us?