Heads Up, Hardcore: You Don’t Matter

I don’t follow what you mean by hardcore gamers and hardcore gaming agenda. Do you mean long games? Difficult games? Sequels to franchises that have been going on for years?

I take ‘hardcore gamers’ to mean those who take their gaming seriously. They are the Penny Arcade audience and the people who buy and play games regularly. I wouldn’t really consider either of us hardcore gamers any more although we probably would have fit the bill when we were in high school.

Anime/manga otaku (especially Western ones) have of course known this for a while now, even if they don’t like it.

No, I mean what do hardcore gamers want that casual gamers don’t? How do you pander to them in your releases? Just more single player games, less party games?

Oh, right. I consider the following to be some of the things that constitute ‘pandering’:

1. When the game is more than 5 hours long
2. When the game requires you to unlock things
3. When the game requires large amounts of time to be invested before fun is had (eg. Counter-Strike)
4. When the game is a sequel to a game from the 80s (and of interest only for that reason)

Most Wii titles don’t do this, for instance, and then are largely decried because they aren’t ‘real’ games.

Hi Mike!

Sorry for this off-topic-comment, but I would like to ask you how you managed to make the “Share this”-plugin use a URL with the “/share”-endpoint?

The code you once provided here is no longer available.

Best regards
Jan

It was a while ago but I think what I did was to add a function called share_rewrite. This was way back in version 1.4 and I haven’t bothered to upgrade Alex’s plugin since (it works fine for me as is). I probably should have just made a new plugin rather than hacked his but feel free to do that!


### Function: Share htaccess ReWrite Rules
add_filter('generate_rewrite_rules', 'share_rewrite');
function share_rewrite($wp_rewrite) {
$r_rule = '';
$r_link = '';
$rewrite_rules2 = $wp_rewrite->generate_rewrite_rule($wp_rewrite->permalink_structure.'share');
array_splice($rewrite_rules2, 1); // Pops off everything except the first element
$r_rule = array_keys($rewrite_rules2); // Selects the key for the first element
$r_rule = array_shift($r_rule); // Pops off the key and sets it to the variable
$r_rule = str_replace('/trackback', '',$r_rule); // Replaces /trackback with an empty string
$r_link = array_values($rewrite_rules2); // Selects the value for the first element
$r_link = array_shift($r_link); // Pops off the value and sets it to the variable
$r_link = str_replace('tb=1', 'share=1', $r_link); // Replaces tb=1 with share=1
$share_rules = array($r_rule => $r_link, '(.+)/sharepage/?$' => 'index.php?pagename='.$wp_rewrite->preg_index(1).'&share=1'); // creates array with two keys
$wp_rewrite->rules = $share_rules + $wp_rewrite->rules; // Adds the new rewrite rules
}


Oh, and this is largely taken from based on Lester Chan’s WP-Print so full credit to him for the PHP mastery.

Thanks for your quick reply! I’ll try to add it to my blog

No worries. I probably should write a proper entry for this so other people can find it without needing to look through these comments

Hmm, I have problems getting this to work on my blog. Where do I add this code? Somewhere in share-this.php?

I have it inserted at line 410 which is just after the share_variables function and before the share_this function.

Oh, and from memory you need to refresh your permalinks for it to work (from the WP Admin dashboard go to Options -> Permalinks and click ‘Update Permalink Structure’).

Surely even the most casual of gamer wants more than 5 hours of play - although perhaps you’re talking about single player mode.

I imagine most people want to be able to play games multiplayer for at least three or four big group sessions of 3-4 hours each to get the price of the game back - at least that’s what games like Guitar Hero 2 and Mario Galaxy seemed to yield at my friend’s houses.

Yep, I did mean single-player mode. In terms of multiplayer, then sure, things like Guitar Hero or Singstar are where you want to be (almost endlessly replayable so long as each play session lasts no longer than about an hour).

Is comment nesting broken?

Comments are no longer being indented but they are still being nested. I haven’t worked out quite how I want it yet. Nesting was fine for a while but I prefer the look of the page when the comments run straight down.

Do you think maybe get rid of nesting if they’re not being indented?

> Do you think maybe get rid of nesting if they’re not being indented?

From a design and psychology point of view; yes.

Right. I’ll see if I can’t undo this mess I’ve made.

(Really shouldn’t have hacked that plugin like I did.)

OK, I think that’s fixed it.

Fair enough

Here’s a post I recently came across on Newsweek’s Level Up blog where a father laments the lack of time to play ‘hardcore’ games.