Arguing About Your Game Console is a Waste of Time. Here’s Why.
Arguing about your game console is a waste of time, and everyone involved should know why.
I see console war arguments online all the time, and I agree with a lot of the points from both sides of the aisle. Let us be realistic — In terms of console exclusives, Sony has invested a ton of money in their first-party development studios and their faith has paid off. Some of the best games of the last generations are exclusive to Playstation. Microsoft has some catching up to do in that department, but Phil Spencer has been pushing the company in the right direction since his promotion to Head of Xbox, and the company has acquired some fantastic first-party studios. I think they’re about to make a big wave with the next generation of games, xCloud looks promising, and the Series X is shaping up to be one hell of a powerful console.
Everyone has opinions. Summed up in one idealistic sentence, opinions help humanity progress and arguments are what keep opinions not based on fact from going unchecked. Opinions are a good thing! Arguments are a good thing! Here’s the catch: arguing for your opinion doesn’t make the argument itself constructive. The biggest rule for conducting a constructive argument is that it must culminate in some sort of resolution. The console wars are unconstructive because any sort of positivity or good nature that may have once existed in the console discourse has given way to argument for the sake of argument. There isn’t much hope for resolution in that scenario. Another rule in argument is to avoid allowing emotions to take control of reason. This is big, because in the case of the console war argument, emotions have been controlling us from the very beginning.
Gamers don’t just buy consoles for the games, but because they are the subject of manipulation into an emotional investment in a piece of hardware by the company who made it.
Buckle up, fanboys.
Gamers have emotions! Not only that, big companies like Microsoft and Sony are experts in appealing to them. In my undergraduate rhetoric classes at Florida State University I spent a bunch of hours writing about Aristotle’s modes of persuasion, or Ethos, Pathos, and Logos. In a nutshell, they are the three ways that a person can be convinced to believe in a new idea. Companies like Microsoft and Sony invest millions of dollars in product branding and advertising campaigns designed to build trust with the consumer, make them feel a certain way, and convince them to buy their product. A product’s value is determined by how much of their precious life minutes people are willing to spend interacting with it. Tech companies, especially those in the video game industry, have the especially important task of convincing the consumer to not only buy their product, but to spend hundreds or thousands of hours using it.
Think about the console ads you’ve seen in the past, especially those leading up to the release of a new console generation. Do you remember this ad for the PS4? Or this one for the Xbox One? How did each one make you feel? Did you feel a little shiver run down your spine, or that pleasant little fluttering feeling in your stomach? Congratulations! You, the Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo fan who believes that your console is the best of them all, have been successfully manipulated by one or more or the biggest companies in the world! This isn’t necessarily a terrible thing either! Sometimes it feels like the product is handmade just for you, and that feeling creates a lot of positive emotions.
The reason I went with Microsoft over Sony in 2013 is because of the way I felt when I looked at the Xbox One, and the kind of gaming culture Microsoft was promoting. I was one of the few who were sold on the “all-in-one” entertainment idea they were going with at the time. It all looked bright and new and exciting. I felt that Sony was marketing a mood that didn’t match what I felt drawn to, and the near guaranteed promise of great exclusive PS4 titles in the future wasn’t enough to overtake how Microsoft made me feel about their product. It was everything about Xbox One — the glossy finish, the feel of the controller in my hands, and the excitement I felt when I looked at it on the demo shelf in Target — that convinced me to buy one. Microsoft spoke to me in a way Sony couldn’t. Do I think the Playstation is an inferior console? Not at all. Sony just wasn’t giving me what I didn’t even know I wanted. Successfully marketing a product means knowing who your target audience is and finding ways to speak to them like a friend. Microsoft made me feel like a friend in 2013, and they have continued to do so ever since.
Arguing about consoles is a waste of time, and it honestly is destroying the gaming community. One reason I believe in Xbox so much is because hold a strong conviction that gaming is for everyone. When gamers bash each other online for no reason other than their emotionally charged opinions about which console is superior, it tears the gaming community apart. We have so much potential to be such a positive online community who values taking care of each other no matter what console we play on, yet we choose to spend that energy tearing each other down. Do gamers need to continue to divide themselves on this issue, or can we all come together around a shared love for playing video games? At this point, gamers are just creating divisiveness for the sake of having something to argue about. In 2020, as we usher in a new generation of consoles, it’s time to do better.
