Hardcore is not a dirty word

[Pandastirfry]

Mmm. No.

You could design a game with an exclusively hardcore play style in mind. That would make the game hardcore.

FFXI was very much a hardcore in its beginning, and any review of the game or its expansions reflected the enormous time commitment required to make substantial progress.

In my opinion, hardcore versus casual play is directly proportional to time commitment, whether that means logging many hours to make progress, or worse, being made to work on the game's schedule as well (such as HNM windows, waiting 15 minutes to complete an airship ride, waiting till the right moon phase for HQ attempts, etc.). If the game is designed to take up your time with an egregious amount of repetitive tasks or senseless idling and preventing you from doing even routine leveling solo or in a small group, it's a hardcore game, no question. It's very difficult to play a game like that casually because you'll find it difficult to make any progress (maybe even making no progress at all) in a short amount of play time.

So, yes, it's possible for a game to be hardcore.

And I would say that from a design stand point everything you mentioned is not "hard core" but poor design. Basically, I can spend several hours in game just playing around in Ul'dah making my LS mates laugh by dancing in my skivvies. I did this the other night for 7 hours, is that "hard core" I put in a lot of time and effort making my friends laugh and it was rewarding too, It took me 3 hours to rank my lancer from 6 to 15, grinding the crap out of dodo's solo, I guess that was just casual. Time spent doing something does not make something hard core...it is just time you will never get back that you could have been doing something actually fun.