Consoles are for Pussies

A little gem from the wilds of the internet that is not only useful but also prompts some thinking around the philosophical culture of gaming and computer technology.

Game Hunter is a database system for gamers who take their gaming seriously; a catalogue utility to manage their game title collection.

Game Hunter allows for entries for each game in your collection and for you to annotate such detail as developer and publisher, whether you have completed the game or not, what platform the game is for and personal notes. Making the process easier is the fact that Game Hunter talks directly to Amazon online to automatically retrieve cover art, game description blurb and all the tech specs and publishing details.

Game hunter will particularly appeal to those with console based collections who often find themselves loaning games to friends and fear losing track of who has what?

Game Hunter is smart, simple to use, effective, detailed, stable and free. Almost nothing not to like. There’s only one irony - its Mac software.

As any serious gamer knows the good old Mac, great in so many ways, has none the less been an decidedly lame gaming platform for a very long time. (The true irony of this being that the very very early Macs were known for games and Jobs himself, as a young pimply nerd, was an avowed computer gamer)

The more audacious part of me might contest that the Mac conceptual philosophy itself is the antithesis of gaming culture.

Modding, manipulation, customization, a proactive handing over of the product to the users and letting them shape it as they will; these are (or at least were) the hallmarks of gaming’s distinctive creative-culture that set it apart from other forms.

By contrast the Mac is designed on a premise of integrated homogenization; of a specific prescription of limited access and control; of a deliberate uniformity, conformity and predictability.

Now don’t get me wrong this is not of itself a criticism of the Mac rather this is actually the strength of the Mac - the reason it has been overly stable and secure in a computing world otherwise fraught with instability and vulnerability. Where the PC, by its relative openness, is a melting pot of infinite variability in hardware and software configuration, the Mac’s predefined inflexible uniformity heralds that most coveted of technology traits, consistency.

But this perspective, inherent in the Mac over many generations, is arguably the antithesis of gaming’s origins. Since the days of text-based adventure games and the legendary ‘crashed the network’ distribution of the original Doom, through to the vibrant and rampant modding, MMORPG and machinima cultures of the contemporary age, gaming has not only been built, but thrived, on ProdUser (producer-user to quote Axel Bruns) culture and user co-creation. The ability for the user to take control of a game (and its hardware) not just as a player but as a creator (be it building Mods or just implementing them) has been the lifeblood of gaming culture. (*there’s an excellent slide-share presentation by Axel Bruns called Anyone Can Edit here)

But something happened with the Console Wars. As gaming moved from a ‘nerd’ past time to a mainstream entertainment in the home living room it moved from a sophisticated ProdUser culture in line with a PC perspective, to a conforming, lowest common denominator, no control, use-as-is, philosophy hat seems decidedly Mac-like.

To be accessible to the every-man gaming had to be watered-down for the console and largely shed the prod-user, proactive techno-ownership that had been the traditional pillars of gaming culture. The console had to steal back the proactive control gaming had once openly relinquished to users. In doing so there were gains - wider audience, easier game development processes and delivery, mass production and economies of scale. But there were also distinct losses (albeit losses often only obvious to veteran gamers), gaming became simpler, homogenized, less sophisticated, less adventurous, less malleable. More significantly, gaming also became more ‘disposable’ as the console possesses that unique pick-up/put-down casual nature that the PC largely does not.

That process has a direct parallel with the philosophy and culture of the Mac. The arrival of the Mac heralded an concept of a hi-tech machine whose modus opperandi was to hide its hi-techness. The Mac is built on removing the user from the inner-workings, of creating a ?veil of ignorance? between the user’s intentions and the mechanics of their realization. The Mac has presented itself since the 80s as the computer for people who don’t want to know anything about computers.

Again, this is no criticism, just observation and one that reflects in parallel how I feel about my car. I don’t want to know what’s under the hood so long as it gets me from A-B.

Further their are distinct technical advantages of a closed system for both the Mac and Consoles. For game developers the console is a closed, pre-defined, predictable and uniform platform, there are no custom variations to accommodate. The Mac is the same, no real custom configuration of hardware, uniform predictability garnered from excluding the user from a deeper level control. When you buy a console game you have 100 percent guarantee the game will work. When you buy a PC game no such guarantee exists as the variables of GPU, CPU and OS are almost infinite.

Discussions of the demise of PC gaming, swamped by the console juggernaught, have raged for a decade or more. Of course extremities of these debates are obtuse and there really is nothing to suggest that PC gaming is going anywhere save for a move (which happened long ago) from the mainstream to the alternative. And in this regard the PC will retain a very specific role in being the forward scout of gaming development. Technical and Aesthetic and Artistic evolution of gaming will continue to be pioneered on the PC and filter down to the console simply because the PC is conducive to the founding culture of gaming - dynamic user co-creation combined with raw processing power that a console cant match.

The tragedy I find in this however is that so many newer generation gamers I encounter seem no less passionate about the art of gaming and yet their only real experience of it is the insular predictability of their consoles.

If I may make a analogy, it is much like a person who considers themselves a passionate music fan - avidly collecting and playing their music collection - but whose only source of music is commercial generic FM pop radio blaring Britany Spears and Beyonce. With a twist of the dial to independent, underground, alternative music stations that persons world might well be turned inside out and horizons, heaven forbid, expanded. But ignorance makes Brittany Blissful.

I see many of my students seemingly in this category. - passionate about gaming but with a perspective on gaming spied through the confined prism of insularity that is the Console. Gamers who have never downloaded a Mod, never built there own level, never swapped levels with friends, never modded a character or made Machinima movies, never built up characters in MMORPG?s over months and years, never tweaked hardware, spec?d out a gaming PC or over-clocked a graphics card. I feel like they are stuck on gaming equivalent of commercial radio and missing out on a bigger world of gaming experience. I want to open their eyes to games that exceed the console’s limitations, I want them to experience the precision of FPS games with mouse and keyboard rather than the spongy computer-assist clumsiness of the Controller. I want them to possess an Ownership over their gaming experience as prod-users rather than lounge room disposable gaming consumers.

But in making such arguments I inevitably start to sound like a nostalgic old dad and I resort simply to declaring emphatically that “consoles are for pussies”, smiling condescendingly and walking off with an air of superiority..

Thus we return to Game Hunter - a very useful utility for ‘hardcore’ gamers…. for the Mac. Not so long ago the very idea that the sort of people who would want a Database tool for the computer game collection would use a Mac would be absurd. But it seems the over-bearing onslaught of the Console has changed everything. I love my consoles (i do own two of them) but if the balance swings too far gaming as an art will loose its edge and become mired in the predictable, inflexible lowest-common-denominator environment of the console.

And a sad day that would be…. much like all the world?s alternative music stations sucked into a black void leaving only the dulcet tones of Beyonce on the airwaves….

shivver……

Comments

[HEHEHE]

True, my fellow, very true.