Skyrim - Todd Howard Interview @ Game Informer

I can give you my guess, which is people underestimate how many core gamers there are; people who want a lot of depth and will play a game for a long time. There are a lot of them. If you give them something unique and good, you don’t have to dumb it down.

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So he is talking about a new type of gamer, the "core" gamer (not "hard" core, just core)?

Thrasher said:

But also, there are people who spend just as much time on Facebook games as someone on Skyrim. Therefore, is Farmville as hardcore as Skyrim?

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I don't even have a Facebook account, so I wouldn't know.

Anyway, if a hardcore gamer is somebody who spends a lot of time playing, then a hardcore game would be one that demands that kind of time and devotion to fully appreciate.

Does that mean that the game has to be hard to the core? Of course not. Every game should have difficulty settings ranging from easy to impossible these days. (By easy I mean really, ridiculously easy, and by impossible I mean actually impossible, even for those who like to complain about games being too easy on the hardest difficulty.)

Sorry. That last bit was aimed at Dark Souls. I've spent almost as much time with Dark Souls as with Skyrim. (Because I suck and because I don't play online and because I don't like reading walkthroughs, dammit.) Not since playing Chuckie Egg on the Spectrum have I felt so frustrated by a game. Even though I really like the design and the atmosphere, I've decided to never play another game that requires you to go back and gather your corpse/bloodstain. (Though I'll probably pick up the next Diablo game when it comes out.)

Conclusion: Both Skyrim and Dark Souls demand lots of time and attention, but in entirely different ways. If Farmville does that too, I don't mind calling it hardcore…