I'm not sure that the terms themselves are the best which could be chosen, but I know that I am on the more 'hardcore' end of the spectrum. I've been playing games for over 20 years now, and I appreciate them as much more than simply entertainment (As a whole; many individual games are just entertainment, but so are many movies, books, etc.) I devote a majority of my free time to gaming, I generally don't limit myself to genres too strongly (Though I of course have preferences), I spend a considerable amount of my monetary resources on them, and they are not something I just "do" in the way I just happen across a neat TV show. It isn't merely that I play games, or play them a lot, or play certain genres. I play them with a knowledge of them going back a long way, an ability to desire to compare them and think critically about them, and they are a core component of who I am, for better or worse, a referential and experiential touchstone of what has made me me.

I don't really scorn 'casual' players per se. I do however scorn companies for pursuing them when, let's be quite honest about this, they have absolutely no brand loyalty or love of the industry. Wii Fit might be fun for some but if anyone honestly believes that housewives will sacrifice X, Y, Z to get it once the initial hubbub surrounding the Wii has passed, I challenge them to prove that assertion. I absolutely will still buy games despite being a student on a tight budget. Maybe I'm being an elitist jerkass but the reality is that I am an enduring customer who will stick with the industry, even if not a particular company, through thick and thin. But this is predicated on there being games I want to play, and I've seen nothing offered by Wii, Natal, or the PS3 motion controller that I require them for. I can do it all on a regular controller. So I do complain about the direction of the industry because it's somewhere I believe has little potential (And what potential it does have, in strategy and management games, is unlikely to be top of any priority lists). They are, in short, spending money on something I'd rather they didn't.

On the other hand I'm not some neckbearded mouthbreathing troglodyte who thinks that any game less complex/difficult than their chosen ambrosia is for, at best, cultureless philistines. I honestly don't understand people like the inhabitants of No Mutants Allowed, RPGCodex, or that one person I saw over at the Space Empires V forum who declared in as many words than anyone who likes any game less complex than SEV is retarded.