Why Dedicated Game Consoles Exist
(and should continue to do so)
I saw an article titled “Why Do Dedicated Game Consoles Exist?” (http://prog21.dadgum.com/181.html) pop up on HackerNews questioning why game consoles exist. The article is more concerned about what it takes to make enjoyable games, from which perspective I think there’s a lot of merit to saying game consoles aren’t necessary. However, I think there is another perspective that I think the article misses (or perhaps to which it only hints toward the end): the gaming console market provides a perfect stepping-stone for scalable interaction technology.
Scalable interaction technology needs to have certain traits. It needs to be intuitive and flexible in its design so that many people can use it without much instruction in as many scenarios as possible. It needs to be reliable so that people can maximize their investment through reuse. It needs to be cheap so that many people can access it. Each of these traits is difficult to achieve, requiring many iterations of the technology. The design must be iterated by building many prototypes, and over time, many products. Reliability improves once problems are found at greater and greater scale. Cost is reduced once the design is so intuitive and demand so great that competition results in commoditization and honed manufacturing processes.
Game consoles provide a perfect stepping-stone market for interaction technology because they have stricter requirements for each of these traits than a research study, but have more relaxed requirements than interaction technology meant for everyone. When it comes to design, a game console manufacturer can decide what kinds of scenarios to prioritize, and limit the design of the technology to them. While having a game console crash may ruin a night of fun, it’s not the same as having your hard drive crash and take years of data with it. While manufacturers are incentivized to make the technology affordable to increase sales, their goal isn’t to make it available to everyone on the planet.
Game consoles sit at the edge of interaction technology because the gaming technology of yester-year was co-opted into the boring, productive technology of today. This wavefront creates a petri dish where humanity can learn how to use new technology effectively and eventually co-opt it into new, scalable technologies that make us all more productive, and is more generally represented by the fact that technology gradually moves from novelty to utility.
A lot of people are predicting the death of gaming consoles. I do agree that the days of boxes-underneath-televisions are numbered, but I believe we’ll continue to see hardware dedicated to the act of play, so long as humans seek to familiarize themselves with new interaction technology through novelty.
