Personal Computers and Consoles

It seems like the future of gaming lays more within the hands of the consoles judging by the recent game sales trends and how major game development companies have turned their attention to making games for this platform. But what will happen then to the computer gamers?? Surely the computer will not solely become and instrument of non-gaming things, nor the console remain stagnant as simply a game specialist.

With the advent of the Xbox 360 from Microsoft, we saw a leap into a completely different realm from the ways of the Xbox (The First Xbox from Microsoft) and the Playstation 2 from Sony. Within this first generation of consoles there lay an ability to upload music from compact disc and put it onto your console to listen to it within select games as a soundtrack to your gaming experience. Which vastly improved some games' dismal repetitive soundtracks. With this new generation of gaming consoles, we have seen the expansion from simply music players, to movie players as well. This new ability has required more hard drive space which can be used for not only movies and music, but also game demos. With the Xbox live marketplace (an online feature that requires an annual or monthly subscription fee),  you can download demos of all the new games that are being sold in the store currently, or are yet to be released. This addition of video and game download has brought the console much closer to the PC as far as content. Yet it still lacks when it comes to the functionality of the PC because the PC can do a lot more productive things. What I think we will see is the mergence of Television, Home Theatre, Gaming and basic computer tasks (email, internet) all wrapped up into one package, A "Jack of all trades".

A noticeable feature of the two platforms differences is their standard control inputs. While both console and PC users can buy different controllers like steering wheels and joysticks, the standard controllers are keyboard and mouse for the computer (arguably the better for first person shooters such as counter-strike and strategy games like age of empires) and game controller for the consoles (a better all rounder). Moreover with the "Wii", Nintendos entry into the console wars, we have seen the first move towards more realistic and less abstract control input. It operates on motion sensors within the controllers that respond to your movements and translate to an action on screen. It makes you feel as if you actually are swinging at your friends face as you try to knock him out in a comical representation of a boxing ring. It will be interesting to see where these platforms decide to compromise through evolution, and if there even exists these platforms to even compromise with each-other at that point.

The consoles are making their way away from the specialist gaming platform and branching out into more capable machines, but as they become better at more things, I ask you the question, how far is this melding of specialization going to continue? Would it be ridiculous to assume that we will have one computer in our house that controls daily functions such as energy management, plays us our favourite music, communicates with our friends and enables us to play our newest games online, together?