Hello. My name is Travis Arbon and welcome to Game Flow, a collection of audio essays about the culture of video games and experiences with gaming. Today’s essay is: Tales from the Console Wars. If you have an essay you’d like to submit to the collection, head over to gameflowpod.com or send an email to [email protected].

Do you remember your first battle in the console wars?

For me, it was sitting at the lunch table in middle school, drawing a pros and cons infographic comparing the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Nintendo DS and Sony Playstation Portable.

Yes, I was that kind of nerd.

Once I’d finished my 12-year-old’s renderings of each console, with the appropriate amount of near-meaningless technical specification listed below, I took a poll of my classmates. It was DS vs. PSP in the ultimate showdown for the world welterweight console championship.

And I couldn’t tell you who the winner was.

What I can tell you is that, despite my extreme bias toward the DS at the time, the secret behind my console warring was that I actually wanted both, but could only realistically pick one.

Console wars have a long history in the culture of videogames, with the classic clash being the early-90s battle between the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis that was fueled by marketing slogans like “Sega does what Nintendon’t.”

In the past, at least in the middle-class American experience, the battleground for these branded skirmishes was often the playground, the lunch room, the after-school get-togethers. Anywhere children and teenagers convene. Today it’s the internet. It’s social media posts and youtube comment sections. But it’s all fueled by the same emotions: jealousy and desire.

Excluding the wealthy from the conversation, most kids are effectively poor regardless of their parents’ economic situation. They may technically “own” things, but really it’s the parents who control and regulate their kids’ lives. There’s very little agency, certainly very little economic agency, but that doesn’t stop kids from wanting things.

Companies know this all too well.

They know children are in the position of wanting many things without having the full means with which to pursue them. And it just so happens that this coincides with other strategies, like console exclusives, that force consumers to make a decision and stick to it.

It fosters a sense of loyalty in the consumer. Not because a company ever does anything particularly worthy of receiving that loyalty, but because the consumer is constantly searching for ways to justify their choices.

And one of the best ways to justify a choice is to convince other people to make the same choice. The last thing people, especially kids, want is to be the only person doing a specific thing.

At schools this isn’t limited to games. It’s a pretty broad peer-pressure phenomenon that extends to clothes, music, interests and beyond. With games in particular, there are experiences that you will simply be unable to have if you don’t convince someone else to play with you.

Imagine being the only kid with a certain console, and there being a co-op game that you desperately wanted to play, but having no one to play with. It’s a recipe for developing a console warrior.

And console warriors are more properly called brand evangelists.

Because that’s what this is really about: companies using targeted marketing techniques on susceptible demographics in order to increase their foothold in the marketplace. It all preys on the psychology of people, and even more so on the psychology of children.

It’s one thing to be morally fine with that as an economic concept. It’s another entirely to fold this console warrior, this brand evangelist identity into yourself. Kids don’t often think in those terms though. They’re not weighing the consequences of attaching their emotional state to the performance of products. All they care about is having stuff and people to share that stuff with.

And I think we’ve all done this at various stages of our life. Some of us are still doing this to this day. Every time we type out a lengthy, time-consuming response to someone who dislikes something we like, we’re console warring. Every time we put together an infographic listing all the “Game of the Year” awards a console exclusive got, we’re console warring. It’s easy and it infects all of us. Some of it is more categorically toxic than others, but all of it is a form of consumer-generated marketing.

I don’t think I woke up from the heights of my console warring until more than a year after my DS vs. PSP polling. I was still in middle school, and I was over at a friend’s house, and we actually got into a shouting match over the merit of the Wii and the XBox 360. I’m not proud of it, but his parents actually had to separate us. And all because I was way too aggressive in my assertion that the Wii’s 512MB of internal storage was more than adequate.

It was ridiculous, patently ridiculous. But it really opened my eyes to just how far down the rabbit hole I’d gone. The argument was the most utterly pointless thing, and here I was, actually angry that someone else didn’t find merit in the same product I did.

I hope that everyone gets a chance to learn that lesson, and to check themselves before falling into that trap. Whether that’s at the schoolyard, or on the internet, all of us are susceptible to the influence of marketing, and we should take care that we do not become marketers too.

The battlefield may shift and morph but the console war, the console war never changes.

That’s it for this edition of Game Flow. Thank you to Sylendanna on Soundcloud for letting me use the track “Last May” on this show.  If you have an audio essay that you’d like to submit to the podcast, send an email to [email protected]. Feel free to head to the website gameflowpod.com to leave a comment, or reach out on twitter through @TravisArbon. And make sure to subscribe and leave a review via your podcatcher of choice.

Next week- Neverland: The World of Small Gaming Youtubers