The Seventh Generation of Consoles
Thus far on this blog, I’ve discussed two generations of gaming consoles and their affects on how we use consumer electronics in our every day lives.
First came the Second Generation, or the Age of Possession. When software arrived as a finished object, sealed into silicon and plastic, immutable once manufactured. You bought it, you owned it, and whatever it became in your living room was between you and the machine.
Twenty years (or so) later came the Sixth Generation, or the Age of Annexation. Microsoft’s original Xbox transformed the home console into a networked PC in black plastic drag, quietly relocating home multiplayer into the infrastructure. Friendships moved behind a broadband paywall. Xbox Live conscripted our social lives into a subscription. I documented how Atari established a sort of economic theology of the home console with the cartridge as a relic and the platform as its temple. And how Xbox Live laid the foundation for a new kind of capture, one that would cover identity, presence, and obligation.
The Seventh Generation built the walls on that foundation.
The Silicon Horizon Defined
The Silicon Horizon marked the point where the video game industry stopped selling games and started selling states of being. This wasn’t a gradual market evolution or an organic cultural shift. It was an expansion of the technical infrastructure, smuggled in under the cover of increasingly jaw dropping graphics.
Between 2005 and 2017, the industry defined what a “product” was. The player shifted from customer to data source, from owner to licensed occupant, from autonomous agent to hardware-bound digital citizen.
The Seventh Generation; Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii; did more than just bring us HD visuals motion controls, or downloadable game storefronts. It introduced systematic capture. Where previous generations sold us tangible items be it a cartridge or disc, this era sold us access, continuity, and status, BUT it did so within a closed system. Our games became the interface to this system, and our attention was the prize.
This is the horizon: the vanishing point where ownership receded from view, where “buying a game” increasingly became a kind of euphemism for “licensing conditional access.” Your achievements, friendships, and identity got rolled into platform-specific assets that couldn’t exported or sold. Worse, it couldn’t be meaningfully escaped. Past this line our “gaming playing” went from sessions to digital persistence. Persistence that required governance.
Three Paths to the Same Enclosure
The Seventh Generation of consoles did truly change gaming, but the three remaining console makers: Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, achieved these changes via very different means. Each appealed to a different psychology. Each used different materials. All three produced enclosure.
This was not convergence by accident. It was convergence by necessity.
The Xbox 360 – Circle as Behavioral Enclosure
Microsoft’s contribution was the most elegant and perhaps the most devastating: a means to track our behaviors which we voluntarily gave them just by booting up our games. The Xbox 360 may be remembered fondly by many today, but it was a product meant to encompass our digital lives almost entirely.
Gamerscore and Xbox Live Arcade were more than just added features. These systems introduced a kind of behavioral telemetry. Every action was now quantifiable, and every experience became comparable. Every session was attached to your gamer account.
Undoubtedly these metrics contributed much to the developers for improving games. But it was also making our collective gameplay legible to the system. The Achievements tracked our leisure time and in a sense it became audited pleasure. The “1000G” ceiling became the mark of completion, yes, social proof that you were mastering a game (by developer’s standards, arbitrary or not) and thus a public display that other players could admire or perhaps envy. On the surface this seems like the old arcade high scores produced writ large. But in another sense you weren’t just playing Geometry Wars or Halo 3. You were also producing a verifiable record of having played these games.
The lock-in mechanism was painfully simple: every hour you invested in your Xbox games added to the mass of your digital identity that you couldn’t migrate to another system. “Your” gamerscore couldn’t be transferred or sold to someone else, not easily. You became an occupant and node at the same time, existing only in the Xbox ecosystem. More a ledger of your time than a profile you maintained.
The PlayStation 3: The Proprietary Sovereign
Sony’s path was perhaps somewhat predictable in hindsight: complexity as a means to platform dominance.
In the wake of the ultra successful PS2, the Cell processor and Blu-ray drive represented declarations of independence of a kind. These were architectural assertions: the industry could either speak Sony’s language or pay the price of non-participation.
The Cell processor wasn’t designed for easy development. The new architecture functioned as a sort of toll system. To ship on the PS3 was to submit to Sony’s hardware philosophy, one that required the developers to go the extra mile to play in Sony’s massive fan base.
The inclusion of Blu-ray completed the maneuver. It served simultaneously as a Trojan horse and a moat: advancing Sony’s format war while raising the cost of entry. By binding game distribution to a proprietary, capital-intensive disc standard, Sony attempted to control not only the platform but the medium itself. Every PS3 installed a Blu-ray player into the living room. This strategy had been tried and proven with the DVD player in the PS2.
Where Microsoft built behavioral cages, Sony attempted to impose platform dominance: to make exit synonymous with obsolescence.
The Nintendo Wii: Motion-Controlled Extraction
After the abject failure that was the GameCube (in terms of recapturing the hey day of market share dominance) Nintendo took an entirely different tack with its Seventh generation entry: that of the unclaimed body.
Code-named provocatively as “Revolution,” with the Wii Nintendo boldly declared it was “going casual” and in effect ceded the field of the spec arms race to Sony and Microsoft. Eschewing the “hardcore” gamer for the audiences that had been left behind in the ever raging “console war.” In other words the Wii was built for reaching the blue ocean of untapped gamer markets. The Wiimote dismantled the controller barrier that had excluded non-players, and in offering something so fresh and different, caused excitement in the audiences at large. Lapsed players returned and new ones joined them, wanting in on the fun of motion controlled bowling and other sports. Beyond that, motion control transformed the body itself into an input device, teaching players to perform for the sensors. The living room became a capture space and our gestures became legible data.
To sweeten the pot, Nintendo also made another uncharacteristic move. Long a holdout against backwards compatibility, the company apparently did an about face and introduced The Virtual Console. Nintendo would create it own digital ecosystem in the same vein (if not par with) as Microsoft and Sony had, by appealing to nostalgia of its returning players and Re-monetizing its back catalog to the extent that it could.
The Biological Connection
I contend that every mechanism we examined in our Biological Interface series: neuro-regulation, attention shaping, effective telemetry, was prototyped here at the consumer level.
The neural interface didn’t begin with Elon Musk’s Neuralink. It rather began with achievement pop-ups triggering reward loops, with motion controls training bodies to hit the right gestures, and with social systems converting friendship into retention metrics. The Seventh Generation functioned as a laboratory for governing the human.
We are tracing how enclosure evolved from the mechanical (formats and discs), to the behavioral (metrics and identity), to the biological (nervous system modulation). Each stage refined the same objective: reduce friction, increase legibility, and of course, stabilize extraction.
The Silicon Horizon isn’t behind us though we have crossed it. Everything since exists beyond that vanishing point where ownership dissolved into access, where gameplay hardened into data, where the user became the asset.
The enclosure was completed, and now I will document how it was built.
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