Gamer #1 — The youngster. The youngster grew up playing games… The NES isn’t so much nostalgic as archaic. They don’t have much money working on getting through high-school, college, or fresh out. But what they lack in cash flow they make up for in time. These are the purists. If this person spends $60 on a game they want it to be CHALLENGING. They want as much time and value out of a game as they can possibly get. These are the WoW players who think spending 30 hours a week is a good investment of their time.

Gamer #2 — The spouse. The spouse used to be a youngster. But they’ve since acquired this marvelous, and strange, new thing — a life. Now they have a career — not a job — a wife, and possibly a kid or two. When this person forks out $60 for a game he wants a good respite from real life without consuming his real life. It’s challenging for this person to put in 5 hours a week into a game and 30 is completely unrealistic (even if they’d love to be able to.) This gamer wants to be completely engrossed and entertained for a while but also needs to be able to put the game down and pick it up again in 2 weeks without loosing much.

I get reminded of this from time to time on forum discussions and the like. Especially when you have these two factions arguing over things like gold farmers, and cheats, and glitches. I happen to fall into the Gamer #2 category, and I can tell you that when I get 3 hours to sit down and play a game I do NOT want to spend that hard earned time grinding. __I__JUST__DON’T__. The real PITA about that is that I would LOVE to play games like WoW.

I hope that game developers start looking at my demographic (unlike kids (who in their defense can’t) I’m willing to pay for my games…) seriously. give me a WoW server with the exp and gold tweaked so that I can get past the crappy ‘kill 50 fluffy bunnies’ grinding quests, and get to some fun gaming before I turn 60.

The youngsters will, of course, argue things like “taking away from the game,” “why even bother playing,” and things like “it’s not that hard and doesnt take that long, you just suck, n00b.”

To which I say bite me. Until game makers start understanding that some gamers want a time sink, and some gamers cant afford one. I’ll be the low level guy who just payed for 60 hours of some Chinese gold farmers time…. Because one of these days I’d like to get to do something interesting… I’ll be the guy who uses the game glitch to avoid spending 15 hours forging swords or chopping wood.

I would like to not have to resort to these measures… and If the game manufacturers would just throw us a bone, I bet we wouldnt…