Reading through some discussions on this board, I noticed that a lot of stereotypes came up over and over again about "mass appeal" games and "mainstream gamers."

"Mass appeal", "mainstream", vs. "hardcore". Forget about it! The terms have elitist positive and negative connotations. The mainstreamers fall for money-making, commercialized mass appeal games with splashy flashy effects and can't recognize a good game if it kicks it in their butt, while the hardcore gamers have lots of knowledge about games, emphasize gameplay, and recognize a good game. It's nonsense.

1) I have confidence in the "masses" because (as a general rule) the best games are also the top- sellers. That doesn't mean that there were and are always sleeper hits and hyped bad games which sell well; but the vast majority of players are very good at recognizing a good game and gameplay if you look at older and newer sales figures. When I bought Windwaker and Gran Turismo 3 I was glad to be part of the belittled "mainstream."

2) Playing older games doesn't make you hardcore, and neither does your knowledge about games and/or collecting them. I bought and played the top-selling Super Metroid a couple of days after it was released, did this make me mainstream back then? and does it make me hardcore now because I know and play the SAME game once in a while today? If you collect games more than you play them, this might make you a hardcore collector, but not a hardcore gamer, and a guy who knows statistics about baseball isn't a baseball player.

3) Looking at an individual game, sales figures don't say much about the quality of a game. A well selling game isn't necessarily bad, and a poor selling game isn't necessarily good, and vice versa. Judge a game by it's quality independently of sales figures. A good game is a good game, no matter when it was released, for which platform, and who is playing it.

4) Games are always about business, no matter what. Games are a commercial product. Even "homebrew" developers don't live in the clouds. Every game developer loves to know that many play his game. This goes for "homebrew" developers who target a niche market, and smaller developers and developing powerhouses of the current games. I never met an author who complaint about that his book sells well and/or is read by many. As soon as they have a firm, game developers and publishers are exposed to the market, and they have to calculate accordingly. Every form of art always was and is business, and every artist was and always is a businessman, and this goes even more so for the videogame industry in which millions can be earned and lost.

Result: replace "mass appeal" and "mainstream gamers" with casual gamer, and "hardcore" with frequent gamer. Knowledge about games, collecting them and playing experience are indicators of a deep interest in games which result more or less in increased play time; therefore these terms capture all kinds of aspects of our hobby, and elitist implications and belittling mass connotations are avoided.