To analyze the interactions of gender and gaming in the post-casual era, and to indicate how the post-casual era differs from games’ previous status, I employ the idea of “core” as a means for discussing games’ center and margins. I have chosen this term and concept specifically because it is already frequently used within gaming spaces, but as a primarily industry-motivated adjective for specific types of games and gamers. At its simplest, the term “core”, as used to refer to video games, comes from “hardcore”, an adjective describing a level of commitment and a particular kind of content. A search of academic journal and newspaper articles reveals that “hardcore” was first used to describe games and gamers in the early to mid- 1990s. In October 1991, Dealerscope Merchandising, a monthly business publication focusing on technology sales and marketing, described video game company Konami’s decision to market a new game entirely in gaming magazines as a deliberate attempt to court “the more advanced and hardcore gamer” (Hogan and King, 1991). This indicates that the term was already used enough to be familiar to business analysts, but it was not yet common enough to appear
frequently outside gaming magazines. By 1994 and 1995, however, it had made its way into the vernacular of journalism as an adjective for committed gamers or difficult games. For instance, the Chicago Tribune described the magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly as the perfect gift for
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“a hardcore gamer” (Carter and Carter, 1995), while Business Wire referred to the development team that created video game Warhawk as “people who used to make high-tech flight sims for the military and hardcore gamers” (”Warhawk”, 1995).
As Merriam-Webster defines it, hardcore means “a central or fundamental and usually enduring group or part: as a: a relatively small enduring core of society marked by apparent resistance to change or inability to escape a persistent wretched condition (as poverty or chronic unemployment), b: a militant or fiercely loyal faction” (”Hardcore”, 2015). Hardcore gamers, therefore, are the most committed, experienced, skillful, and obsessive players; hardcore games are the ones that require this level of obsession in order to complete.17 Describing them as hardcore also implies that these players and games are central to the development and existence of the gaming industry and game culture more broadly, given the term’s association with “enduring” and “fundamental”.
Assuming that “hardcore” and “core” are only based on this dictionary definition of commitment and loyalty, however, ignores the subtle connotations attached to these terms. Core gaming has developed particularly masculine undertones that serve to bar other groups from full participation in the community by seeking to limit them to one subset of gaming, the area of casual games. While the core/casual divide has only recently become prominent in gaming, the development of masculine connotations regarding “hardcore” is not new. Similar changes have occurred in many industries that have used this term, such as pornography and music.
Specifically, although “hardcore” seems to be a simple adjective, for a type of punk music or a variation of pornography, a closer analysis reveals that it encompasses many levels of meaning beyond this. Its most obvious use is, not surprisingly, as an industrial category or as a
17 This use of hardcore remained relatively unquestioned until the mid-2000s, when the rise of casual games provided a new counterpoint for this term.
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genre tag. But “hardcore” or “core” also indicates a style of masculinity, generally based on physicality, violence, or sexual explicitness, depending on context. Through these more subtle meanings attached to the term, and often only apparent to those within the described sphere, “core” can serve as a political tool. When deployed by musicians or music fans, by pornography creators or consumers, “hardcore” prioritizes a version of hegemonic masculinity based on an ideal of toughness, aggression, and dominance over women and other, non-hegemonic men. Hegemonic masculinity also often involves sexual prowess or power over women as well as mastery of technology, including weaponry, vehicles, or, in the case of music, instruments like drums and guitars. Finally, it can include an emphasis on the male body, its musculature,
strength, and ability to withstand injury and pain (Brod, 1987; Hanke, 1992; Connell, 2000). Put simply, hegemonic masculinity prioritizes men’s power and control over their environments, selves, and others. In tapping into, reproducing, and inflecting these elements of masculinity, “core” marks out who belongs in a cultural sphere and who does not, who can possess power in that area and who cannot. Specifically, it equates “power” with “men”. “Core” serves as a subtle but forceful means for determining centers and margins in diverse cultural spheres.
Take, for instance, the use of “hardcore” in punk music. From a purely definitional standpoint, “‘hardcore’ was a purist style of the music developed initially in Washington, DC and Southern California in the early eighties. This, the music’s essential, ‘classical’ mode mounted a deliberately anachronistic attempt to sustain early punk’s negativity against its diffusion and assimilation by the music industry” (James, 1988, p. 35). Hardcore was a
movement to return punk music, which had been affected by corporate interests, to its original anti-establishment rhetoric and political beliefs. The music was faster, louder, and more abrasive than much of the original punk movement, in order to make it more extreme and less mainstream
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(Blush, 2010). Hardcore punk culture also tried to be abrasive and deliberately fringe, setting itself up against mainstream society and popular culture. Because of this, it ostensibly rejected social constructions of gender, race, sexuality, and more, fighting against “the isms” associated with these constructions- sexism, racism, etc. However, the particular ways in which hardcore identity was expressed ended up excluding many of the groups that should have been welcomed by hardcore’s open-minded and anti-establishment definition.
In her study of “straight-edge hardcore” fans, who rejected drugs, alcohol and sex as a means to avoid consumer culture, Jamie Mullaney (2007) wrote, “Even as they express commitment to the idea that gender does not play a role in the scene, [third-wave] sXers
simultaneously offer a plethora of anecdotes detailing the ways the scene marginalizes women” (p. 386). She continues on to describe how many straight-edge men, who were avoiding casual sexual encounters or abstaining from sex altogether, were suspicious of women’s intentions in the hardcore scene. Many felt women were only “hardcore” as a ploy to get a boyfriend, and that this made them a potential threat to men’s ability to remain straight-edge18 (Mullaney, 2007, p.
401). She also explores how, while many hardcore bands did include women, they were
frequently limited to the role of bassist, rather than taking on more prestigious positions as a lead singer or guitarist. Mullaney argues, “Women’s overwhelming specialization in the bass points to women’s ghettoization within bands. Rather than disrupting the established gender structures, women bass players fill positions men have deemed less desirable and have begun to abandon” (p. 387). This limitation of women’s participation to only specific areas prevented them from becoming full members of the hardcore community, ensuring that they remained on the margins despite hardcore’s ostensibly open-minded nature.
18 Female gamers encounter similar challenges to their authenticity through “girl gamer” stereotypes, which posit that women only play video games in order to meet and attract men.
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Limitations like this were not only part of straight-edge hardcore. Rather, they echoed throughout the genre and its scene. The very physical style of hardcore dancing, also known as slam dancing or moshing, for instance, restricted the extent to which women participated as audience members at shows. With moves such as “the floor punch”, where a dancer would lean forward and violently punch towards the ground, or “the windmill”, where dancers flail their arms in wild circles, slam dancing often resulted in dancers accidentally or intentionally hitting those around them. Crowd surfing, pushing others out of the way to get closer to the stage, and jumping up and down in time with the music also made being in the crowd at a hardcore show a physical and potentially dangerous option. Because of this, many hardcore fans were relegated to the margins of convert venues. “Hardcore made [concert-going] more like a sporting event than music— with like the worst jocks you’ve ever seen. It excluded women. It became exclusionary only because it was violent— people couldn’t handle the physicality” (Blush, 2010, p. 25). While some women no doubt became well-practiced slam dancers, anecdotal evidence seems to show that most avoided “the pit”, the area in front of the stage where hardcore audience members tended to be most violent (Fenster, 1993, p. 81; Willis, 1993, p. 372; Blush, 2010, p. 37). “As Ian MacKaye, former lead singer of Minor Threat, a hardcore band, laments, ‘I stated to notice this drift—women at the front of the stage drifting towards the back… and eventually out of the fucking room’” (Mullaney, 2007, p. 385).
It was only in the area of style, the very consumption-based practice that hardcore was supposedly against, where women and men achieved parity. In terms of dressing the part,
“hardcore chix enjoy more socioeconomic parity with their subcultural male copractitioners than any other female component of a previous subculture group. If anything, teenage girls
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industries than their male peers” (Willis, 1993, p. 372). Therefore, women could look hardcore and were definitionally invited to be part of the hardcore scene. In practice, however, they remained on the margins, limited to participating in only a few, carefully delineated ways. Hardcore music, therefore, was overall a male sphere, enacted in masculine ways that excluded others.
Another area where “hardcore” has been masculinized is in pornography, where it describes material in which there is “explicit sexual expression” (Escoffier, 2009, p. 1). Within the industry, this generally means the display of erect male genitalia (Hirdman, 2007). Because of this, the material naturally requires male actors and a male presence; “the female body cannot, or very seldom can, by itself express hardcore pornography” (Hirdman, 2007, p. 162). Hirdman also emphasizes the ways in which narratives around hardcore pornography focus “mostly [on] where the penis penetrates (anal, oral) and how (hard or soft, fast or slow) and which kinds of women get to ‘get the cock’; schoolgirls, big breasted, virgins, etc.” (p. 165). This further indicates how male genitalia is a necessary component in, and indeed the main character of, the hardcore genre. While hegemonically masculine elements like the direct domination of women are not specifically necessary for pornography to count as “hardcore”, hardcore pornography is still inescapably gendered male, due to its requirement of male body parts in order to qualify.
Drawing on these past industries and how they have defined “hardcore”, many
similarities with video games become apparent. As with music or porn, “hardcore” or “core” is a term ostensibly defined in ungendered terms. In porn, hardcore refers to a level of graphicness. In music, it means a more political, less consumeristic form of punk music, usually with sped up rhythms and vocals. And in games, hardcore nominally refers to a level of time or skill
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through different forces, such as the physicality of hardcore dancing. In doing so, they have limited women’s power in and influence over the futures of these areas.