I am not a gamer! I am a free man!

Call yourself a Gamer? Like, do you call yourself a TV Watcher or tell your friends ‘I'm a bit of a Cinema Goer myself'? Of course you don't. That's because it's daft.

Other people might refer to you as a Gamer, of course, or a Cinema Goer. Kids call cows ‘moo cows', and can spend a good while observing just one. Farmers call cows Livestock, and send them to the slaughter house in return for cash. For the other people it's about the money, you see. Forget the cow analogy now, it's terrible.

Being a Gamer, or a TV Watcher, or Cinema Goer, isn't cool. It stands for nothing, because you contribute nothing to the experience. You're just glued to it, even helplessly as some would have it, and that makes you kind of a moron.

But these days enjoying games is a different thing altogether. If it's casual you're not a Gamer, therefore it's acceptable if not encouraged. Although only if it's so easy that grandma can play too. That makes some games okay. Your grandma isn't a gamer. She's not a cow either. She just enjoys spending time with her family having fun.

Problem is this: games could be getting so simplistic that you may as well not play them at all. Not when it's just miming to some music, or swinging a bat at a ball; bowling; singing; dancing... What do you need the games for if you want to try all that? You don't need them at all. Do it for real. It's cheaper, and way better.

This is why it is so dangerous for game creators and publishers to abandon the so-called Gamers, the ‘Hardcore', the ‘Traditional Market', to go chasing after fickle folk who are one step away from abandoning all this latest puff in pursuit of the next media craze. Let's mention Nintendo Wii specifically here because there needs to be a distinction drawn: we're not saying that motion-sensitive control has limited appeal, but the current range of implementation is starting to show its limitations.

How many pet nurturing games are we going to buy? How many sports compendiums, whacky or otherwise? Then again, how many more first-person shooters can we care about; WWII or otherwise? Driving cars, or driving karts... all these ideas are wearing thin, and tapering out toward roughly the same vanishing point on the horizon, and that horizon is getting too close for comfort.

The games industry currently hangs in limbo, with one hand grasping a hot air balloon (casual games), the other on a kiloton weight (Game X: Part XII). Overall it doesn't appear to have the volition to let go of both to pursue its own way forward and acknowledge that games can offer depth without presenting themselves as unfathomable, and provide light entertainment without being so terribly shallow.

We really need the publishers to remember that the ‘markets' now categorised as Hardcore and Casual are really just people who want to be richly entertained.

And that leaves you in the hot seat. Or should we say stuck in a rut? Are you getting everything you need; playing plenty of games, in which case does this make you a Gamer? And does being a Gamer dictate that you only play certain types of games? What the hell is a Casual Gamer? Surely you can't be Casual and a Gamer?

Is Wii a flash in the pan or the way forward? Are we being had? Call yourself a Gamer? Do you? Do you, eh? Let's have your thoughts on this.