Is Gaming Really More Complex?

If you've been playing video games for at least a decade and would never confuse a PS2 with a PS/2 [fill in the blank], this isn't really for you. Or then again, maybe it is. After all, you (or should I say we) may have contributed to the problem.

What problem? The one Don Reisinger's after in his CNET blog, namely that the proliferation of scalable options in gaming (particularly console-dom) like five versions of the Xbox 360 and four for the PlayStation 3 is making things too confusing for consumers.

Or is it?

Nostalgia trip. Anyone remember CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT? HIMEM and EMM386? DOS/4GW and MS-DOS mode in Windows 95? Setting IRQs and DMAs and I/O addresses manually to get a sound card to output properly? You could fill a small book with all the trials and tribulations PC gamers have had to endure over the years sussing out design quirks in hardware and software just to get games like The 7th Guest and Wing Commander and Doom running functionally (to say nothing of "optimally"). And that's drawing the starting line in the early 1990s. I could reminisce for hours (and I'll bet some of you could too, or as quick, one-up me) about "growing up Commodore," e.g. the Vic-20 and 64 and even a monochrome B128 I used to run text and ASCII-graphics games I'd get on 5-1/4" floppies (real floppies, not the fictional 3.5" kind) from a local electrician who'd pull them down with a 1200 baud modem.

I remember the first IBM PC-compatible (remember when we called them that?) computer I bought and having to figure out what SX vs. DX meant, whether a math-coprocessor was worth a hill of beans, managing files across different sized 5-1/4" and 3.5" disks, learning what 320x200 and 640x480 was all about, and trying to get a handle on why the first Pentiums were supposed to rock my socks off compared to my putter-some DEC 486/DX2 with a whopping 8MB of RAM.

And what about video game consoles? Remember the Sega 32X? The Sega CD? The Sega Channel? The Atari Jaguar and Atari Jaguar CD? All the relentless guns and gloves and rumble pack add-ins? When I managed a retail software store in the mid-1990s, we'd have at least three or four SKUs at any given time for Nintendo and Sega and Sony consoles based on game bundles and peripheral additives (controllers, guns, proprietary gizmos). I personally spent countless holiday hours explaining the differences between these to understandably clueless parents out shopping for birthday or Christmas presents.

Remember the 3DO? That it was sold in different configurations by no less than three manufacturers (Panasonic, Goldstar, and Sanyo)?

We live in an increasingly tech-savvy society. Even my baby boomer parents have managed to adapt to a world in which cameras can have half a dozen different memory sticks (what's a memory stick?) and you can upload your digital photos in JPEG format (what's a JPEG?) to a developer like Kodak through a web site (which browser should you use?) connected via the Internet (cable or DSL?) perhaps even from the convenience of your couch on a wireless network (802.11 'a' or 'b/g/n'?).

You get the point. The geek-o-system you and I grew up in figuring out how to connect RF adapters or Game Genies or blow into our cartridge-based game systems to "clean" the connectors when a game wouldn't play, has expanded well beyond us, making nostalgic reminiscing about the "simplicity" of the game industry "back then" almost irrelevant (not to mention, as noted above, somewhat inaccurate). Somehow consumers are managing to figure out whether to buy LCD or plasma, gas-only or hybrid, iPod or Zune, Guitar Hero or Rock Band, etc. We're smarter about technology and its many, many nuances than we've ever been -- and by we, I mean all of us, not just the early-adopter geeks.

So while I have my own issues with Microsoft and Sony's fragmentation of the game hardware market by introducing simultaneous alternative models, they have less to do with consumer complexity than basic bottom line consumer value. It takes a sentence or two to explain to the average consumer that the new 40GB PlayStation 3 will play PS1 but not PS2 games -- the issue for me isn't complexity, but that Sony's pulled a software-based feature from the latter model to in part justify the arbitrary $100 cost delta to the next model up. That isn't hard to understand, it just -- pardon me for saying so -- really sucks.

Oh yeah, speaking of complexity, never mind the number of configurable settings, channels, system updates, Mii menus, "put the sensor bar on the top, on the bottom," etc. in -- that's right -- the so-called "elementary" Nintendo Wii.

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