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Corbeau
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At the moment, this is little more than an idea that I came up with after playing Mirror's Edge. As a gamer introduced to 3D platforming with Prince of Persia (2008), the most "casual" of the Prince of Persia games (making the 2008 title suffer, in many fan's eyes), Mirror's Edge was a bit of a shock because it frequently provided no margin for error. Mirror's Edge demanded that I improve my skill with the game in a way that Prince of Persia never really did. The representation of error is also different between the two games; Prince of Persia's character gets magically saved after a mistake, while Mirror's Edge simply kills you (over and over again). They're very different games that provoked very different critical reactions, and I'm curious about that difference.
I intend to go digging through the game studies material out there to see what has been written about the divide between "casual" and "hardcore" games, socially and/or ludically. If anyone knows of articles or books on this subject off the top of their head, I'd love to know.
If the issue is still intriguing after research, then I'll make it the subject of a Spring focus group modeled on (and hopefully improving on) Actions Speak Louder. Specifically, this would be a seminar-type discussion surrounding actual play experience with games on both sides of the divide (Prince of Persia and Mirror's Edge, in this case) grounded in selected readings. My particular emphasis would be on how the two sides of the divide differ in their procedural rhetoric, but hopefully there's also material out there on other implications of the divide.
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