Continued from Part 2...
John - I'm with everyone else: very little has changed from the old days. Everyone loves competition, it's exciting, and even if we lived in a world where there was only a single console, devoted gamers would find something to argue about elsewhere (in publishers, in creators, wherever they can find it.) And they do. The number of these angry, "fanboy voices" out there is exaggerated by the nature of dialog on the Internet too. The vitriol is noticeable, but what percentage of Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Wii owners are actually in the pissing match? We're talking about close to fifty million people worldwide there.
I think the other thing to consider is the inevitability and appeal of the console war as a narrative. Right after the game market crash in '83 and right when multiple multi-game consoles became available in the US, Europe and Japan, a new audience was born. Consumers not just invested in the games themselves, but everything about games, from the businesses making money off games, the creators behind games, to the secondary/collector's market for games. Professional sport is a great corollary for video games in a lot of ways, in the way it threads a story around its stars, trades between teams, and the management/ownership of franchises. That narrative fuels enthusiast culture, and that culture demands it. Hell, everyone in this conversation knows about many more games than they've actually been able to play, and more about game culture than they've probably experienced first hand. We all love video games but, and I suppose I can only speak for myself, part of my investment in games comes from engaging the narrative of the medium's history and current landscape. The console war is part of the story that keeps gamers hooked. And just like with sports, people choose their side. Like Cole said, people throw fists in Pennsylvania over the merits of the Steelers and Eagles.
Joe, your point about games being "a young person's passion" is a great one in light of how console fandom is changing right now. The 61 FPS crew's shared generation sits around and couches console war talk around the schoolyard because we all grew up in that atmosphere, but that same audience is well into consumer adulthood at this point. Yet console allegiance persists in the public, and I think it's precisely for the reasons listed above re: narrative.
Shit. I'm ranting.
My question back to everyone else: where's the portables war? Why isn't there constant forum battles over PSP and DS and why weren't there Game Gear/Game Boy/Lynx fights back in the schoolyard?
Derrick - But weren't there portable fanboy wars? I remember friends with Game Gears who thought they were so much cooler than those of us with our Game Boys, but all that pride faded away when they realized that more color came hand-in-hand with nonexistent battery life. After that, portable gaming was pretty much exclusively Nintendo's field and nobody questioned it until the PSP, which is without a doubt a more powerful and more technically impressive piece of hardware than the DS. I remember my college roommate Max getting a launch PSP and flaunting it. Such a smooth, shiny screen, it could play movies and mp3s and hey look, Lumines! Again, he thought I was crazy for buying a DS instead. And then I showed him Electroplankton and Mario Kart DS. And then he sold his PSP for a DS. That was not my intent, I just wanted to show him the DS was fun without being as fancy. Well, okay, maybe I wanted someone to play Mario Kart against and for more people to buy Electroplankton.
Taking the New York City subway every day, I see a lot of PSPs. Next to the myriad of iPods in seemingly everyone's pockets, the PSP is the most popular personal media player on the street, but that's exactly the difference. An overwhelming majority of PSPs I see on the subway (because I always sneak a peek) are being used for watching videos or listening to music, only occasionally for games of Madden or Final Fantasy (arguably the games I see the most on them). It actually becomes difficult to remember when I'm commuting like this that the DS is without a doubt the market leader because I hardly ever see them. I think alot of this has to do with who is on the subway, primarily adults who want entertainment not in the form of Pokémon. The PSP markets itself as more mature, more modern, and more urban. I love my DS, but my favorite games for it are all decidedly cute, and yeah, sometimes I get a little embarrassed to play them in public (particularly the upcoming "The Chase: Felix Meets Felicity", which I'm totally buying next week).
As for the Lynx, why not bring up the fan support for the Jaguar and 3DO while we're at it. Oh yeah, because there was none! BOOSH!
Nadia - Very little has changed in terms of gamers' attitudes. We were whiny little shits on the schoolyard, and we remain whiny little shits on XBL and message boards. Therein lies the small difference, I think: our fights used to be limited to the schoolyard and occasional visits to a friend who pledged allegiance to the "wrong" console. Now we fight our wars on the Internet, and I think we're all familiar with John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
That makes a difference, too: we don't even have to look someone in the eye when we stand up for our Wii, nor do we risk a punch in the nose. It's not a case of game fans getting nastier because "these damn kids today don't know their manners." The fights have just escalated because we can have them at any hour of the night, and we can put on a mask during battle.
John, I have definitely seen my share of handheld fanboyism. I know in Toronto the DS is definitely the system of choice for the subway, though I've seen my share of PSPs too. But most of the current-gen handheld wars were fought ages back. By now, there's little reason to pit the DS versus the PSP: both have such a different library of games that it's literally impossible to compare them side-by-side.
This, by the way, is why I don't understand the hatred towards the Wii, other than some irrational floating fear that *all* gaming is going to descent into waggle-casual hell. There are games for my Wii that I enjoy playing, and when I'm done with those, there are plenty of other, very different games I enjoy playing on my Xbox 360.
Someday, the good citizens of Game World will realise that most of us have better things to do than judge each other by systems of choice. Even so, the fighting is curious, isn't it? The days of one-console houses are mostly over, yet we keep on sniping at each other.
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People do certainly like to snipe. The fact that your global neighbor has one system and you have another does no harm to you and yet fanwars break out all the same. Humans are strange, strange little animals. The drive to join one group and attack another and the shield of Internet anonymity seem like primary causes of the degree of vitriol we see today; but we all seem to agree that vitriol has always been there, boiling beneath the surface. That concludes this edition of 61FPS Roundtable. Don't feel the discussion has to end just because I wrote a concluding paragraph though! Feel free to add your own hypothesis on the Fandom Phenomenon in the comments section.
Related Links:
Roundtable Discussion: The Fandom Phenomenon Part 1
Roundtable Discussion: The Fandom Phenomenon Part 2
Design Resurrection: How Capcom Finally Proved That It’s Game and Not Graphics That Matters
