Total PC Gaming investigates the rise of casual female gamers

Hello viewers! Let’s talk about sex! And by sex, of course, I mean videogaming taxonomy. Just like with sex, videogamers nowadays break down into two basic ‘genders’ – hardcore/casual. While recent innovations in the console world (such as Xbox Live Arcade and the invention of the Nintendo DS) have broadened the phenomenon, nowhere is this gaming apartheid more strikingly institutionalised than in the place it was born – the ironically named PC. And as with men and women, everyone thinks they know which is which, and sometimes everyone’s frighteningly and completely wrong.

The very fact that you’re reading a PC gaming magazine almost certainly means that you would classify yourself as a ‘hardcore’ gamer – after all, who spends four quid just to read about a pastime that they’re only casually interested in, right? You have probably spent quite a lot of money buying or upgrading your PC so that it can play the latest blockbuster games in their very prettiest forms – you may well have spent more on your latest graphics card than some casual player forked out on their entire setup. (Heck, I’m old enough to remember when a fairly basic gaming PC came in at £1,500 just for the main box, not the £299 you can pick up a pretty capable complete system, including a nice flat-panel monitor, for these days.)

You’re serious about your games. You can correctly punctuate every title in the Vampire: The Masquerade series. You wouldn’t dream of playing any kind of racing game with a joypad rather than a steering wheel and pedals. You would actually genuinely consider spending £35 that you worked hard to earn on something that simulated the experience of driving a passenger locomotive from Derby to Nottingham on a Tuesday afternoon in October (and another £150 on a special ‘train yoke’ controller, too). And you wouldn’t even talk to someone who had racked up fewer than 100 hours in World Of Warcraft when you met them at the real-ale convention.

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WOW, EVE, EverQuest and all the rest really belong to the same family as MySpace and Facebook and Habbo Hotel”