By Scott Markoski
Ever since I can remember, I’ve liked playing video games. The first video games I ever played were on an old computer from the early 1990s. It wasn’t much but it had a color screen and the games were comparable to anything you might play on a Playstation or Nintendo console. In the mid ‘90s, desktop computers were starting to become very commonplace and unlike a Playstation, you could do a lot of different things on a PC. It could satisfy almost all of your home computing needs including gaming. If you were lucky enough, you could even plug it into a phone line and explore the internet--albeit a very different internet from the one we know today.
Throughout ‘90s I had a few different PCs the longest lasting of which was one of the first “laptop” computers made in 1989. It weighed twenty pounds, needed to be plugged in and had a 15 inch monochrome screen but I was able to play all sorts of games on it. As computers evolved I started to play games with better graphics, better sound and more elaborate game play. But since then I’ve never owned a console. No Nintendo-64. No Playstation 1, 2 or 3. No Xbox, no Game Cube or Wii. It isn’t that I don’t like those systems it’s just that I already have a PC and it can do a great deal more than an Xbox.
There is something even more than that though. I think PC gamers often take a certain pride in their machines in the same way car enthusiasts take pride in their cars. Many PC gamers do a great deal of customization to their computers. They buy fancy graphics cards with names like “FireGL V8600” or “Radeon X1300 Pro.” They hook up the processor with a liquid cooling system or maybe they install nice case fans with cool looking lights. I won’t even bother talking about tweaking the operating system or other software components. Herein lies the biggest difference between PC gamers and console gamers: while many diehard console gamers may choose to modify or “mod” their Xbox with some fancy soldering hack, most are content just to play more games with the system as it came out of the box. This isn’t to say that there aren’t any really serious gamers using consoles. Quite the contrary. Consoles and their games clearly dominate the market and they show no signs of relinquishing that status any time soon. The casual gamer is obviously a big portion of the gaming market and most would rather play games than buy or modify high end PCs. Game makers know this and so create more games geared towards that demographic.
Here our story takes an interesting twist. The latest generation consoles, like the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, are no longer the distant cousins of conventional PCs. Both the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 come fully equipped with regular old hard drives, motherboards, integrated graphics processors and CPUs. Sounds an awful lot like a PC doesn’t it? After passing through the 90s it seems PCs and consoles have become more like brothers. How did these newer consoles become the way they are? The people that designed them are the same people that spent untold hours upgrading and modifying their PCs. And so our story of gaming seems to have come full circle. While I still probably won’t go out and get the latest and greatest console, I think I might be more inclined to do so as they become more and more advanced. Maybe someday they’ll come out with one you can build yourself.
