Things have been changing in the video game industry since Wii started crowning back in late 2006. Nintendo had the creative vision to break the mold of iterative technical upgrades with a system so unassuming and Apple-like that it ushered in an age where games are again for the whole family. In many ways it was the final catalyst for this superficial schism of demographics: supposedly every game now serves one party or the other, either the “hardcore” demo or the “casual” demo, elitists versus populists. A game is either brimming with dialogue-trees and branching complexity to serve us vested old-timers, or it’s covered in cheery swatches of green and blue and was made for your aunt to enjoy. Rarely is there crossover between the two because we don’t want any crossover - we at the helm of the industry equate “casual” with watered down depth, with an inferior experience. Our journalistic rhetoric supports that theory and asks readers to do the same.

What we have is a marginalized group of dedicated people asking for attention from an industry who once catered to them fully, creating games with such complexity it would make your grandmother’s teeth hurt. Dedication keeps them alive - the “hardcore” demo (or, traditional gamer) will probably always be a valid demographic in terms of generating a dependable profit. If you build them a big enough feature set and handle your marketing correctly, they will come.

But the kind of development schedule required for massively epic games isn’t sustainable. The days of intense pandering from million-dollar studios creating seven-figure games are waning; already those studios’ function is slowly becoming one that now either runs in parallel or, in many ways, operates ancillary to statistically lesser development studios who’ve approached these segmented demographics more deftly.

Things are changing everywhere - even the very notion of a “gamer” and what qualities define you as one is undergoing an overdue development. Gamers as slovenly pizza-huffing males doesn’t benefit anyone.

Inarguably, we “hardcore” gamers get antsy about welcoming these new gamers to the playing field because in many ways it does mean a departure from our comfortable aesthetics and rule sets; it means less of what our traditional segment of the audience enjoys and more of what will benefit everyone. Our dirty little secret? We don’t like “casual” gamers. They’re ruining all of our fun. Hardcore gamers aren’t endangered, but rather a marginalized species. So it’s no wonder when we try to undersell the design achievements in something like Wii Sports Resort - validating something as accessibly deep as that is precarious for a traditional gamer.

Our gaming insularity makes it awfully easy and chic to dismiss Wii Sports Resort as a toy to lure casuals into the gaming snare. It’s true that Wii Sports lacks the technical visual refinement found in something like, say, Bioshock, or even Metroid Prime. Its narrative doesn’t stem from stark, half-shaven men grumbling about war, and the controls don’t require a litany of furious button presses to play. Thus, we have a very difficult time understanding the inherent depth and gravitas Wii Sports Resort carries. It’s not a traditional hardcore experience in terms of aesthetics or the control scheme, to be sure.

To us, Wii Sports is a toy. It has no depth. The experience cannot parallel something like Mass Effect or Devil May Cry. We’ve agreed to dismiss it as a mini-game collection since it looks like one. “This game is not for us,” we say.

I wonder about games after I finish a large session of play. Between my age and the summer season I’m easily prone to wasting time, a habit I’m trying to minimize. I try to think about the value of my time spent whenever I commit myself to a game and try to learn and write about what interests me about the experience, to try and articulate, if not qualify, the inherent value of what I’m doing. Sometimes that feels a little like trying to justify a worn-out hobby, but generally I think it’s a valid and telling exercise.

I picked up Fallout 3 the same week I picked up Wii Sports Resort. They’re both undoubtedly great games, but they make me wonder. Which of these is a deeper game? I’ve been vacillating between which of the two, forcing to me qualify the notion of depth itself - when we’re playing these games, how are they engaging us? What’s the nature of the interaction between us, the player, and the game, the system of rules, and how far does that connection reach?

Fallout 3 is an impressive wasteland chock full of activities that invite the player into the game world. I’ve spent a lot of time discovering the bleak dystopia Bethesda has created for me. Though it does all sort of blend together after a point, a meticulous attention is paid to detail in most aspects of Fallout, making it thoroughly engrossing if you’re willing to commit the time and energy. Its depth lies in its ability to initiate the player into the immersion and then keep a strangle hold on them there with a steady stream of new events or fetch quests within reach. The interactive tie between player and played is a stream of choices fed to the player that impact the game world’s perception of that player; important events are displayed to the player, who chooses the general flow of game events.

Wii Sports Resort brandishes an epic island resort created as an escapists dream: it is pure gameplay; everything important that happens in Wii Sports happens in real time according to the player’s motion. The interactive connection is congruous with your body’s capacity to move. The depth is intuitive, meaning that actions on screen are analogous to the player’s real-time motions. As opposed to Fallout, where, beyond the coddling of VATS and your ability to roam the landscape, the depth only reaches as far as the developer was inclined to program; every set piece to deepen the gameplay is and must be manufactured. Which of those is truly depth?

Variations on core mechanics like differing enemy types and stat-boosting items are anathema to the notion of depth, which is why “casual” gamers have just as hard a time understanding why we spend our time locked in these virtual worlds as we do understanding why you’d want to spend more than five minutes with Wii Sports. The same dismissive attitude we apply to Wii Sports is the same a “casual” gamer would apply to Fallout 3. There is a difference between gameplay depth and interactive latitude, and Fallout is the latter: your raw interaction with the game is actually quite limited and simple.

For the most part, Fallout always boils down to dusting off more of the world the programmers created for you. The actual gameplay depth present in something like Fallout is all arbitrarily based on what’s happening on the screen. Your actions don’t really connect to what’s happening: you push your thumb forward and your avatar moves forward; you move the thumbstick to select targets and sit back and watch as your avatar picks off appendages.

That is not depth. That’s complexity. It ultimately reduces your inputs to really nothing more than animation enablers. Wii Sports takes our traditional notion of depth and turns it on its head, into something that translates well to audiences not drip-fed on gaming culture.

If nothing else, we’d do well to appreciate the design achievements in Wii Sports Resort, even if we hardcore gamers don’t find the aesthetic particularly pleasing or the concepts terribly complex. In actuality, Wii Sports Resort is a game that, in terms of depth, is made for an audience like us, even if we don’t care to validate its possibly truer notion of depth. It’s made for an audience that enjoys tinkering with mechanics, sitting in a dank basement and exploring parameters. The time required to master something like Wii Sports is not dramatically far from the time to master a hardcore game like Ninja Gaiden or Mega Man. To get really good at archery requires as much, if not more, skill and precision timing as fending off a graphical blur of super mutants and zombies.

Wii Sports Resort is one of the most satisfying and rewarding games I’ve ever played. Like Wii Sports and Wii Fit before it, the accomplishment I feel from doing well or completing a task feels unique in Resort because it derives not from a litany of correct button mashing, but from the correct arch of my back when aiming my arrow, or from the slight inflection of my wrist in table tennis that scored me a point. It comes from the direction of my stance in frisbee golf, and the subtle curve in my arm in bowling. Your canonical first-person shooter gives you one mechanic of aligning cursors, piles on input complications, and we call it deep.

Wii Sports Resort is not easy to validate. We tend to ignore it for the most part because of its aesthetic - It’s true it’s wrapped in something ostensibly juvenile, but as an experience, it offers something varied and incredibly deep. There are so many interesting aspects at play in Resort that deserve more discussion, more journalistic focus. So far, we haven’t been willing to give it that.

Let me at least say this: I have played Fallout 3 for 25 hours. I’ve played Wii Sports Resort for 30.