If you're like me, maybe you get a good feeling when you hit up a game store, a little rush of positive sentiment that goes beyond the familiar aura of shelves stocked with potential adventures still gleaming in their plastic. Especially now, as the Holiday shopping season starts to get underway, these stores are filled with people buying and trading games, just like you. In one shopper's hand you see a favorite title of yours, and the two of you make eye contact and smile, because you just know, you just get it, right?

Maybe not.

I can't remember what I was in to buy just a week or two ago when I happened up to the shelf alongside a customer holding Silent Hill: Homecoming, poring over the back of the box in a decidedly indecisive fashion. He caught me looking, and managed to make conversation.

"Do you know if this is good?" He asked, hesitantly, nearly immobilized by his dense parka.

Well, of course I know. I review games, and I was one of the few reviewers who really, really liked this one. I can barely resist launching into my spiel on all its good points and its flaws — so what I say instead, as a preface, is, "did you read any of the reviews?"

The consumer shakes his head slowly. He looks a little nervous - perhaps it's the fanatical gleam in my eye. But he should understand, right? Like, he's a gamer, right?

"I don't read any reviews, or anything," he says, looking like someone deftly trying to sidestep a Jehovah's Witness. He puts poor Homecoming back on the shelf, and later I see him get in line with SmackDown vs. RAW 2009 for PlayStation 2.

He doesn't read any reviews? Or anything?

Well, you can at least expect your local GameStop employees to be on your wavelength. Everyone's heard the stories about the long-suffering GameStop worker, especially as the holidays approach. They're already busy behind the counter here, and on another recent outing I came in for the second time in a month with a bushel full of trade-ins, and the register-worker recognized me.

"Got a lot of games again, huh?" He says cheerfully, going through the work of scanning my used titles through the system and crediting them toward my new ones. "Yep, you sure get a ton of stuff." He's looking at me curiously, as if wondering why should this gal come and go with so many games?

I begin to wonder if he thinks I'm casing stolen goods, or something, so I quickly find myself saying, "well, games are my job, so I've gotta… you know, keep up."

"You make games?" Asks the employee.

"No, I write about 'em," I reply, cheerfully. And he looks at me like he's waiting for more information, so I add, "like… on Kotaku."

"On what?" The scanner machine continues whirring and flashing as he rings me up.

"Kotaku," I say.

"Is that, like, a website?"

Ladies and gentlemen, there is a world in which people do not know that Kotaku exists. And for the record, the GameStop employee, while he seemed perfectly knowledgeable about the titles in his store, doesn't know what GameSpot, IGN ,Edge or anything else of their ilk are, either.

The Strange Gap

And these incidents kept on happening to me - popping in and out of game stores in order to research this article, I quickly found that most people are unaware of the topics we discuss here every day. They know what Gears 2 is, perhaps, because they had the first one - but they don't know what Mirror's Edge is, they haven't gotten to hear about how awesome Left 4 Dead is, they don't know about the fire in Far Cry 2. They don't know that EA tried to buy Take-Two this year, they don't know that Nintendo is "abandoning the hardcore gamer," they don't see why it's a big deal that Final Fantasy XIII is coming out on Xbox 360.

In your average game store, customers do not read reviews. They do not post on forums, they have never been motivated to leave Amazon feedback just to "send a message," they do not blog. They do not know which publishers have poor reputations and which ones have good ones. They do not know the names of famous Japanese game designers; they might have Mario Kart Wii at home, but they do not know who Miyamoto is.

We often talk about how the life of a gamer is something of a lonely one - how the love of gaming still, even in the purported era of social acceptance, often feels like a personal secret, and how seeing, say, another DS in the crowd can feel like a private high-five. But according to recent NPD data, 13.7 million Americans own Wiis, 11.6 million own Xbox 360s, and 5.7 million own PlayStation 3s. Add those numbers up . Sure, some people might own more than one console, but more don't than do, so you can get even a rough idea of just how many people are playing video games just in the United States.

Now, think about ubiquitous pop sensation Rihanna. Chances are, all summer you heard her smash hit "Umbrella" more times than you wanted to. Lately you've probably heard her earworm "Disturbia" drift by you on the airwaves, piped in over the mall speakers or sung out loud by teens on the bus. Even if you're not into pop music, more likely than not you know of Rihanna's songs and would recognize her cute Bahamian face, even without being aware of it. You can tell it's a cultural sensation, even if it's not your culture, per se. But Rihanna's newest album, "Good Girl Gone Bad," which contains both of the songs I just mentioned, has sold only 6.2 million copies - and that's not just in America, that's around the world.

We're talking about a global smash music success that goes platinum several times - and it's only half as popular as the Wii in the U.S. alone, and only relatively slightly more popular than even the third-place PlayStation 3. So why is it that while everyone's heard of Rihanna, it seems like no one knows what Fallout 3 is when you're not at the computer?

The guy buying Smackdown vs. RAW could not be called a "casual" gamer. Neither can the GameStop employee who doesn't read video game websites. But perhaps what our online culture has taught us to expect from other "gamers" is a little bit skewed.

All of us "on here," within this world of ours, are not just in love with games - we're in love with the culture we've created around games, and that culture, obsessed with information related to our pastime, is only the most vocal minority at the tippy-top of a great big bell curve. Outside in the so-called "real world," away from our regular guildies, the folks with familiar forum handles, and the hundreds of comments spewing angry invective on the latest contentious review, there are millions of gamers in the world. They just aren't "culturalists" (cultists?) like us, and so we fail to recognize them.

Getting Lost

And it's convenient we were on the subject of music, because the difference between the fan and the cultist also appears in the music genre. There's often an assumption among music fans that you either read music mags religiously and talk about bands few people have heard of in terms few people can understand, our you're a Celine Dion-loving, mainstream-embracing plebian with nothing that could be called taste.

In fact, in music as with games, there is a great and broad-ranging middle ground; some music fans can be quite seriously into, say, indie music, without ascribing to all of the telltale tenets of modern-day "hipster" culture. But as with games journalism, writing about music is enormously bipolar - it's either designed to satisfy the most scrutinizing culturalist, or it's glossy MTV-ish pap about artists like, say, Rihanna.

Which is why I don't really read music articles at all, even though I buy several albums a week on iTunes and love to share undiscovered songs with my friends. But recently, I happened to notice that the elite Pitchfork Magazine had reviewed one of my new favorite albums, so out of curiosity, I decided to see what the review said. It called the album "inherently disjointed, very much the product of two distinct, if exceptional, songwriters," immediately compared the album to the two songwriters' prior work as separate acts, and also compared the album to the band's prior one.

I could barely puzzle out what a phrase like this means: "focused on skewing darker, on sounding nastier, more perilous, and less straightforward than its predecessor, with elaborate arrangements and, you know, no singles— translates into a lot of proggy diddling (and, ironically, less theremin). The approach yields predictably mottled results…"

In short, it was a mixed but fairly critical review of an album I love, rooted in comparisons to the artists' other work (which I also love, but supposing I'd never heard of 'em?). If I'd read this review first - well, I would have had to struggle a bit to understand the critic's language - but after that, I might have not wanted to buy the album. So because I neither possess nor relate to the critical vocabulary of a Pitchfork writer, high-end music reviews are fairly useless to me.

It occurred to me that this is how the "average" gamer - you know, the people in line at GameStop, the people who would never in a million years be reading this article - probably feels about game reviews, and the associated culture we've built around game websites. And that's why we don't know them, and they don't know us.

Different Things to Different People

That guy in the parka who wondered whether to buy Silent Hill: Homecoming probably doesn't read game reviews for the same reason I don't read music reviews; they would have told him all about the controls, the environment, the vibe and the themes, would have listed for him a raft of minor criticisms he'd never even notice, but wouldn't have told him anything about whether or not he'd like the game.

He doesn't need the extra facts, the peripheral humor, the sneak peeks we get from our favorite game sites. And he probably doesn't need the sense of community that we get from socializing, networking and sharing content with other elitists online - because he's got about millions of possible pals out there, average gamers just like himself, who are happy to just play with him and enjoy it.

"Oh hey," a shy girl who looks about my age notices that I've got my DS in my hand as I'm on my way out of the store. She's holding the new Tinkerbell DS game, she looks a little lost, and I can tell she's been hoping to ask another female for ideas. "Do you have this one?"

I tell her I don't; I tell her it's a game for kids. And she laughs a little, shrugs, makes a gesture that encompasses the entire store, as if to say, so? These are all just toys, aren't they? To some people, they are.

So yes, our existence is still somewhat a lonely one; we are in the minority, still. But it's not because we're gamers. It's not even because we're hardcore gamers. It's because we're such fanatical culturalists that we forget about the middle ground. Is it a divide we can bridge?

[Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, reviews games at Variety,and maintains her gaming blog, Sexy Videogameland. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.]

This comes minutes after Molyneux explains to me why he asked reviewers to get casual gamers to check out Fable II before writing their review.

I point that out to Molyneux and then say that I agree with him about the dangers of separating the "core" games from the "casual." It's the Wii effect, I say. I don't say this to attack the Wii, but it was from Nintendo that I first started receiving requests to have "casual" gamers check out their games and not hardcore gamers. It was Nintendo that, I think, was first to argue that hardcore gamers didn't "get" their Wii games.

Molyneux seems to agree.

"I wandered around the show floor yesterday and I kind of realized it was like walking back in time a little bit," he said. "I'm sure I saw that ten years ago, that approach to little groups of people, not worrying so much about the animation, but worrying about the mechanics.

"It's a big shock. It's a big worry for me as a designer. I think this industry needs to move forward and make these opuses for a much broader audience not just the casual audience."

Instead Molyneux sees traditionally hardcore games adding things to appease to the casual gamer, something he doesn't think Fable II is doing, exactly.

"Here was the design problem," he said. "You sit down with Fable and there are an awful lot of influences you have. Your publisher is saying one thing, your audience is saying one thing, your team is saying one thing and all of those sort of come together in the mixing pot.

"The thing we realized, we could build that combat function and say that foundation we laid down in Fable one was right or we could ask ourselves what we could do with combat. What we chose to do is to make it much deeper and while making it much deeper, make it much simpler as well."

Instead of making Fable II more casual, Molyneux hopes the Lionhead game expands the genre in a way that doesn't hurt it.

"I think the pigeon hole of RPG is not doing Fable any favors," he said. "We have to persuade people it's not an RPG, this is an experience. Ultimately i think we are hoping to broaden (the genre). I think the way i happens is to get people playing the game.

"The whole of the coop mechanic is actually because we want to get more people to play the game. My theory is you or I are playing Fable and our partners or friends walk in and we have to turn the game off. Wouldn't it be brilliant to just give them the controller and say give it a try. And that's I think is probably going to do more for than casual audience than anything else."

Most of the findings in this regard are trivial. Hardcore gamers rated themselves higher for the importance of all the emotions we inquired about (and all these findings were highly statistically significant) – which is to say, Hardcore gamers were more emotionally invested in their play, or at least more likely to rate the importance of any emotional factor in their play higher. Hardcore gamers also rated themselves higher on every aspect of game literacy or player skills in the survey (and these results were even more statistically significant). Finally, Hardcore gamers were more interested in games of challenge, structured play (Caillois’ ludus) and games of escapism (acting out in a virtual world) – all of which broadly validated the findings from the earlier DGD1 survey.

But these results obscure something interesting about the players who self-identified as Casual. Firstly, Casual players still play games very often. 81% of those who self-identified as Hardcore said they played videogames everyday, but 49% of Casual players also said they played everyday. Hardcore players gave themselves high marks in game literacy (more than 95% of Hardcore respondents claiming the top two marks, and about three quarters the very top mark), but Casual players didn’t exactly rate themselves low on this (around 85% of Casual respondents claimed the top two marks, and roughly half the very top mark). So while some of these Casual players might be mass market players, many of them are highly game literate players who play videogames every day. (Incidentally, those who were unable to choose between Hardcore and Casual looked remarkably similar to those who self-identified as Casual).

He goes on to say there is a gap between 'casual games' and the so-called 'casual player'; he ends by asking if there's anyway to redefine our terminology in a way that is useful and usable. I think an 'either/or' split is here to stay, at least for a good long while, if for no other reason than people like clear divides — even if they don't correlate to reality.

Redefining Hardcore & Casual [Only A Game]

Well, it reads like an essay, but this piece by David Hayward is actually a transcript of a talk given at the "Under The Mask, Perspectives on the Gamer" event a few days ago (slides included!). It's a brilliant and somewhat lengthy piece on culture-with-a-small-c, as it relates to gaming (as, in Hayward's appraisal, just about everyone is a gamer these days by some definition or another). Games, despite coming off as a niche subculture at times, are worming their way into all aspects of society:

There are still people who fail to understand games and fear them, but with the publication of books like Grand Theft Childhood, dust is beginning to settle on the paranoid scare mongering so often stirred up by the anti-videogame lobby. Everyone is surrounded by increasing amounts of technology, and interacts with it more each passing month. People are primed to play games, and videogames are now going to keep spreading and adapting to new markets ....

I think our industry is progressing marvelously. I’m proud to be a gamer, I’m proud to work with games, and I can’t wait to see where else they go this century.

Definitely worth a read - it's long, but interesting and has some great points within.

Under The Mask: Games Culture [Functional Autonomy via GameSetWatch]

Hardcore gamers consider me a casual gamer and casual gamers consider me a hardcore gamer, so what am I? ...In any case, I have decided to call myself a MID-CORE gamer. I have no idea if there is another term for me or the millions like me, but I like this one and I'm sticking to it. I know it's not CATCHY or SEXY, but it is accurate... I always hear industry people talk about CASUAL and HARDCORE, but never the in betweens like me. I have to search online and bargain bins for games that fit my needs.

Popular complaints from gamers were the system's price and the timing of the Elite's release. But convert detractors to supporters, says BrandIntel, and they'll positively influence the more casual market.

We know that our commenters went so far as to liken the Elite to forced anal sex, which, I'm pretty sure, is a negative. Still, there were plenty of positive statements and publicly announced intentions to buy, so I suppose we'll have to wait and see. Michael McWhertor

BrandIntel: Elite's Fate in Hardcore Hands [Next-Gen]

Some of you like games, and some of you like games. Here are the dwellings of your brethren: Ahandful of game rooms that show cool gaming rooms are less about owning all the consoles, but more about cramming it full of stuff. Hit the jump for the rest. Brian Ashcraft

Gaming Rooms [Game Heya via Jyouhoya]

Nintendo ain't just making games for Johnny-Come-Latey's. No. Nintendo is still making h4rdc0r3 gamez (along with making pedestrian stuff for my mom). With the DS appealing to the casual and non-gamers, some are worried that Nintendo's ditching the 'core. According to company president Reggie Fils-Aime:

For the passionate fan who wants something a bit more challenging, a deep story, 70 hours of gameplay, it's Zelda. It's all there, it's nine dungeons long, it is an immense area—that alone should stop all of the worries as to whether Nintendo will continue to make big, epic games. We absolutely will... We want it all, quite frankly. So when we talk about bringing gaming back to the masses it is both for this core fan, which we will continue to have great content for, and this new expanded gamer who either hasn't played in 20 years or hasn't played at all.

1337. Or as mom would say, "That's swell." Brian Ashcraft

Reggie Hasn't Given You Up [Eurogamer]

I chat with the kids for a little bit. They are awed when I tell them I had a PS3. They're both really overjoyed to be camping for the Wii. It's as if all the excitement from the Sony launch had been compressed into these two little guys.

I walk into the store to pick up a system selector for my new consoles. The boys, leaving their parents to hold down the line, follow me in. "Hey, do you play World of Warcraft?"

"Yep! Got a 60 rogue and a 60 mage."

One looks to the other. "I told you! He's hardcore!" You heard it here first folks. I am hardcore. Michael Fahey

Devoted reader Jonathan "I'm not the lead singer of Korn" Davis risked life and limb to get us this shot. Three of the hardest of the hardcore (or least sane of the hardcore, you decide) already have their mushy butts in line at a Burbank, California Best Buy, prepared to be the first through the doors when the PlayStation 3 goes on sale next Friday. Nine days from now. Looks like the rest of you can skip this location.

Still, if you're going to be in line for over nine days, you had better have the right supplies. Plastic penguin? Check. Lawn chairs? Yup. Toilets? Those potted plants will do.

The dream of scoring a PS3 at retail seems less and less like reality as the days pass. Thanks again, Jonathan. Michael McWhertor

Wired's Clive Thompson puts forth a burning question: Who are these mythical 40-hour gamers? Thompson, like most, wants to tear through an involved game title, but doesn't have the time to play for 8 or 9 hours at a stretch in order to finish it. A job, family, etc. make only short bursts possible for most, and gaming comes an hour at a time. Thus, the problem writes Thompson:

The demographic schism over 40-hour gameplay is gradually becoming a big problem for game designers. Their options are unenviable. If they develop a game aimed at the hard-core crowd, a wuss like me will almost certainly never finish it. If they do the opposite, the power cartel will blow through the game in afternoon and feel justifiably ripped off: I paid $50 for this?

At Sakaguchi's TGS press conference, I remember the famed game creator saying it took him 40 hours to finish Blue Dragon. And that's the guy who made it, so it will take normal players longer. That's supposed to be a good thing? Brian Ashcraft

More Here [Wired]

Either this guy is:

A). Worried about Carpel tunnel syndrome.
B). In trouble for cheating.
C). H4rdcor3.
D). Photoshopped in.

What do y'all think? Brian Ashcraft

More Here [ETTF.NET]

If there were a hardcore gamer test, the question "Do you have Sega or Nintendo tattoos?" would be preceded by "Do you have a gaming bumper sticker?" Spotted in a Target parking lot, this SNK bumper sticker features the company's mascot, Fatal Fury's Terry Bogard. Bet dollars for donuts that car's owner has King of Fighters tats. Brian Ashcraft

More Here [Go Nintendo]

What. The. Hell. ?. I'll admit to being somewhat of a noob to the bullet hell-style shooter category, but this is just insane. Ten minutes of eye-drying, bullet-dodging expertise from the doujin game Imperishable Night, 8th in the Toho series of for-the-hardcore-only Windows shmups.

Interested masochists can get the demo at the official site or the English fan site. Michael McWhertor

Thanks for the heads up, Alan!

Microsoft blogger extraordinaire TriXie unveiled the new, slick art for her and the other Xbox bloggers.

The new illustrations involved a photo shoot and "weeks and weeks of hard work by our uber-talented Xbox.com art team."

Sure, they each have their own swanky illustrations, but do they have a bobble head.

Hit the jump for the new pics.