How I Spend time, or Why I'm a Console Peasant

Some conversations I’ve had recently have made me reflect on priorities and how I want to spend my time. Because gaming consoles (and their controllers) are designed to mainly play games, in almost all instances they are pretty much traditionally plug-n-play and easy to use. Excluding cases when additional hardware is needed (4-player adapters, peripheral controllers, VR headsets, etc.) or modern games that require large downloads, pretty much all you needed to do was pop in the cartridge/disc, turn on the TV, and pick up the controller.

But with PC gaming, it often requires checking on system requirements, configuring hardware, and potentially other tasks like moving files. To be fair, platforms/launchers like Steam have made things far easier than it was when I was trying to get WarCraft II to connect to my friend’s computer over a dial-up modem in high school.

What I’m getting at is that while, yes, a PC can potentially have better screen resolutions, better frame rates, and other visual fidelity enhancements over consoles, it requires more time/effort (and often more cash for a better CPU/GPU or larger monitor) than a console does and it’s not something that I really want to spend my time or money doing. If I am chasing the “best possible experience” with regards to graphics, I would be upgrading my hardware on a yearly basis and using all of my budgeted hobby money to do so.

The reason I play games is to spend time having fun, and I want to maximize my priorities to do exactly that, so I want to spend as little time as possible in configuration menus and hardware optimization. I don’t want to spend more time researching/learning about games than I spend actually playing them, nor do I want to spend time/money on something and take weeks to get it set up and never actually play the games I’m intending to play. I admit there is a satisfying feeling of relief knowing that I have the capability to play something (because I have it installed on my 3DS or bought an N64 Flashcart, for example), but if I never actually get around to playing it, what good does it do? 

A good comparison is that I can either watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy, then watch all of the behing-the-scenes material, then the extended editions, then watch the movies 8 more times with the director commentary, the actor commentary, the music commentary, etc. Oh, and then I need to get the Blu-Ray version and then the 4K version (and a new TV) and watch those. Or, I could watch the movies once every couple years, and in the meantime, go through other classic movies that I haven't watched such as Bridge on the River Kwai, Stand By Me, and Chinatown, while keeping up on some current movies or TV series like Yellowstone. At the end of the day, I would feel more "culturally enriched" by having a wide breadth of movies and shows that I have seen. What I'm trying to say is that I would rather spend time playing a wide variety of games rather than replay the original Metroid, but now with modern controls, widescreen, and 60 FPS. 

 

I also don’t want to bankrupt myself in the process, so I don’t need to have the bleeding edge of technology to accomplish this goal. Basically, I’m trying to maximize playing time while minimizing cost and other considerations like fiddling around with settings. Does that mean I won’t have the absolute best possible experience? Yes, but it’s about 95% as good in my estimation, and that’s good enough for me. I believe that the law of diminishing returns applies here, where spending $500 will get you 92% of your goal, and spending another $500 will only get you an additional 3 to 4%. Everyone has a threshold for “good enough,” and mine is low enough that console gaming is fine even if I don’t have 120 fps and VRR. Sometimes the frame rate may stutter a little, or load times might be a bit longer, but at the end of the day, I just ask if the game playable and did I have a good time playing it. It is said that the pursuit of perfection is the enemy of the progress (or in this case, the “good enough”). I would rather play 30 games over the course of a year that are rated good to excellent rather than play only 2 games that are perfect (or put another way, I would rather play 30 games that run pretty well that are fun than play only 2 games that run perfectly). 

Would I like to have the best possible experience playing a game? Again, sure, but if I can achieve 95% of that right now with no additional cost/effort/time but it’ll take hundreds of dollars and hours of my time downloading mods/updates and needing to tinker with settings just to get it to 98%, then it’s not worth it to me.

As an alternative example, would I like to watch movies on a 50-foot screen with perfect sound quality and nobody else around other than my wife? Sure. But I don’t want to spend the money to rent out a theater or buy a big enough house build my own private theater every time I want to watch a movie. Instead, I can spend no additional money to watch my 46” TV from 2012 while lying on my couch and not have to put up with other people in a theater, and that’s good enough, even without modern enhancements like HDR. When my TV finally goes kaput, then yeah, I'll get something that is far more capable than my current setup. But I don't see the utility of replacing a piece of equipment that is still functioning as intended. 

 

There are limited occasions where I will do some of this kind of thing. I spent the better part of a summer trying to get a Philips CD-i emulator to run so I could get a chance to play the Unholy Triforce of Zelda games. It never ran perfectly and would crash during the infamous cut scenes, so the work-around was to skip them and instead watch them on YouTube at the appropriate times. But once I had it running enough where I could experience the game (mostly) as intended, then I was satisfied and haven't really touched it since, having achieved my goal of playing all of the Zelda spinoff games. But I wouldn't do this for most games - it was only because it was a Zelda game. 

Also, for what it's worth, I did use a few emulators like ZSNES on the computer somewhat frequently because they required almost no configuration and worked without too much effort. Later emulators for the N64 required more work so I didn't use them except for a few times to see how well they perform. And when it comes to the hacking scene for the 3DS, most of the work was done for me and I just had to follow basic instructions to get it work.  

I also think that the games/equipment that I grew up with has an impact on how I see things these days. Louis CK had a great bit on Conan's show that perfectly illustrates my perspective. When I first played Nintendo games at home, I had 3 games on a 13" Black-and-White CRT with an 8-bit system that sometimes struggled showing more than 8 sprites. Because I now have a system with a controller than can turn it on remotely and play 3D open-world games on a 46" widescreen TV, I think we're doing pretty good, even if it's only 95% as good as the experience I could be having if I spent 10x the money.  

 

Another thing that influenced me to my position is that back in the 80's and 90's, comparing PC games and console games was like comparing apples and oranges. Due to the nature of PCs having disk slots, keyboard (and later mouse), and hard drives, it meant that games had to be both programmed and played differently. It allowed for games like Zork and King's Quest to accept typed commands, and for games to have larger sizes because they could span across multiple disks or use hard drive storage. Controllers were available, but they were expensive, and many games didn't support them, and even when the option was available it meant hours of configuring and troubleshooting them by trial-and-error messing with DOS and BIOS settings because Google didn't exist. The monitors were also an issue, as many early computers had monochrome screens, and having a graphics card installed was seen as a bit of a luxury, so graphics were necessarily simpler with lower color bit-rates. But the worst part was loading, something that was almost unheard of when it came to console games because of slow disk read speeds. 

Due to these limitations/factors, computer games tended to be more slow and intellectual games with poorer graphics. "Computer games" and "console games" were seen as two different things in most people's eyes. Sometimes you would find a port of Street Fighter 2 or Mega Man for PC and they ran terribly and looked worse. 

By comparison, consoles ran games like Ninja Gaiden and Super Mario Bros. which had fast action, better graphics and sound, and a controller that worked well - all which was just Plug 'n' Play as long as you had a TV. But while there were some educational games or things like the Miracle Piano game that kinda teaches how to play piano, they weren't very good and would be much better suited on PCs back then. Likewise, The Oregon Trail or the various Chess games were much better on PC than it was on a console for a myriad of reasons. 

Another reason I tended to lean more to the console side of things is that often the family computer was being used for school work or budgets, which took priority over playing Doom. But since a console was solely focused on games (which had a dedicated TV), I never had to stop playing to let someone type an essay or print a flyer. This is one of the reasons I love the Nintendo Switch - because I can play on TV if it's available and handheld when it's not. 

To summarize, I think everyone has differently optimized priorities (“different strokes for different folks” and all that), and mine includes frugality so I don’t feel the need to run out and upgrade my hardware until it’s absolutely necessary as long as the length of play, the ability to play the game, and the amount of fun that can be had outweighs the amount of time/effort/cost to actually play it. Also, when I did the majority of my growing up, PC games were different beasts than console games, and it was much easier to get time on a console with games that didn't need hours of configuring settings before playing.