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When Consoles Lose, Everyone Wins
Ground Glass writes "Does the traditional knowledge that 'history is written by the winners' hold true with consoles? Perhaps, but there's more to it than that. Sometimes, systems that fail do so because their most salient concept was one no one was ready for - these provide future 'innovations'. Sometimes their loudest message was one only a niche group would ever want to listen to - they provide much needed perspective. In an early medium, the failures are the ones questioning what a game should be. It's no wonder the winners keep writing their ideas back in."
Someone joked that the author sounded a bit like Nietzsche, but I think he really sounds like G.W.F. Hegel. From Hegel's Wikipedia entry... "Modern philosophy, culture, and society seemed to Hegel fraught with contradictions and tensions, such as those between the subject and object of knowledge, mind and nature, self and Other, freedom and authority, knowledge and faith, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Hegel's main philosophical project was to take these contradictions and tensions and interpret them as part of a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity that, in different contexts, he called 'the absolute idea' or 'absolute knowledge'." This concept is also known as the "world spirit", and this teleology attempted to synthesize the world's successes and failures into a positive betterment of humankind. A Hegelian will argue that the Holocaust has a potentially positive effect on the world, ultimately; because we have suffered a single holocaust, the world spirit will advance beyond the conditions that would allow such a thing to happen again - thus bettering the world. Hegel is notoriously abstruse in his writing, but it is clear that the author of this article has only a cursory understanding of his philosophy. First off, it is entirely unclear as to whether or not any of these "advances" in video games are actually leading to a better video game experience. I think a strong argument can be maintained that console/generation x was the pinnacle of gaming enjoyment, and subsequent generations are simply decadent. Also, Hegel was comparing the actions of nation states; by evolving this scheme to include corporations we are inclined to accept more than the straightforward conclusions presented. Hegel was notorious for defending the existence of the nation state as being entirely rational and necessary, and for this reason he was highly admired by Frederick William III, and a major boon to the budding concept of nationalism. This focus on the nation state completely deemphasizes the individual, a main criticism of Hegelianism and nationalism. Corporations and nations are not real people; to focus only on the achievements of "Nintendo" or "Sony" is essentially a dehumanizing insult to worth of the individual and a reiteration of the complete modern acceptance of corporate fascism.