Apologies for the off-topic tangent, B-Cell, but others responded so I thought I might as well.
Charcharo said:
Yet to see anyone bar very rich people say otherwise.
...wow, this thread must be a revelation for you, then.
There is nothing it does better. Inferior hardware and engineering, worse (if any) backwards compatibility, worse (if any) modding, zero to none emulation, mortal and without any hope of a long term future.
Thankfully emulators will save our art form long term. But not cause consoles helped. To add insult to injury consoles are for rich people to boot, hence why Poor Eastern Europe is PC Gaming land.
You really do sound like you've got a chip - or several - on your shoulder/s, or you may not have a very good knowledge of gaming history - or you don't care and just have an incredibly selective, myopic view of the medium.
"But not cause consoles helped" the medium? Riiiight, because neither Nintendo, Sony, Sega, or MS
ever had anything worthwhile to add over the decades...
You do acknowledge gaming's sheer breadth, right, essentially what gaming
is? As in; gaming exists from browser apps, mobile freebies, handhelds, consoles, and monster hi-end PC's? The uniqueness of this medium is its phenomenal versatility and variety, which no other medium can quite match. Ergo every single tier of what this medium 'is' has a role to play, and an audience entertained by it.
Perhaps consider the radical/not-so-radical notion that people care about, and engage with, this medium in many different ways.
As for the dreary comparison between PC's and consoles (when no comparison is really needed - both will continue for the foreseeable future, both have added greatly to the medium), here's why
I personally can't stand PC's and have almost always gamed on consoles: I hate keyboards and mouse - it's like using a garden hoe for a paperweight... it wasn't the object's originally designed intention, and it shows - keys'n'mouse are,
to me, nothing more than office implements. A game pad is a dedicated device for gaming[footnote]Is it perfect? Hell no! Sadly all interfaces are imperfect, and always a compromise. But it is, at least, native to an entertainment medium.[/footnote].
Ease of use: on XB1 I press one button to turn the thing on, it boots faster than my laptops or any desktop I've owned, and then if I want to play the current game I whack another button. Two presses, and I'm in the game
, EA stylee. Sod PC sign-ins, sod all the other junk OS's throw at you, sod manually arranging files and trying [in vain] to keep desktops from being cluttered, and so on...
Lack of responsibility: this may sound like an odd one, but frankly, I don't want to be responsible for expensive tech going nuts. I don't want to fix it, and I don't want to be responsible for things going wrong... I had a kit PC many years ago and whilst initially fun it turned into a bit of a nightmare, though the MS virus known only as 'Vista' played a part in that as well. Even with vanilla PC's and laptops there's all sorts of things I could make go wrong if I wasn't careful, and didn't want to learn how the damn things function in every sense of the word.
With consoles? I press a button to turn the thing on - I press a button to turn it off. Sometimes I delete stuff from the drive! Sometimes I clear caches, which pretty much involves the same power button. There is nothing I can 'do' to upset it, short of actually kicking it across the room or pouring water on it... It just does its thang, and I leave it well alone. If it breaks, I send it off to get unbroken.
I like not being responsible for its--- er, technological mental health.
Do you pay a little extra for that hands-off convenience? Sure, but that's fine - our species pays extra for conveniences all the time, and always will do (DIY maintenance on consoles is also doable for various things, though I try my hardest to never engage with it).
Freebie mobile games, handhelds, consoles, wacky VR systems, whatever Nintendo are doing, PC's, and the two main consoles - all have their place in this medium, all catering to various people in various ways. Isn't
that, surely, what makes this "artform" - as you so delicately label it - so special?
...now for a veritable bombshell: I'd rather consoles died off. But the evolutionary path I'd want to see is probably something you might not like (it ostensibly includes the death of conventional console and PC gaming, in terms of physical platforms), and frankly it's a rather idealistic vision of a truly unified medium, and there's no need to go into it here/now.
