Something amazing happened while I was watching videos from E3 this year, I was surprised by something completely unrelated to a game or product release.   Watching the (so-far) marketing genius (until they run it into the ground) persona from Sony, aka Kevin Butler, something rings true from someone that should be selling me on their system.  A speech for everyone to serve under one gaming religion, regardless of their denomination, struck a chord with the crowd.   True, the words may have been pandering, but it got me thinking about the alliances that people have with their systems, where mine have been in the past and where they may be in the future.  

I’ve never bought into the Fanboy concept even when I was younger.   I owned both a Super Nintendo AND a Genesis at the same time.  The world did not collapse into a black hole, and I was a happy gamer as I could finish off a level from Super Mario World and Sonic in the same sitting.   I could play Mortal Kombat with blood, and then go and play Super Castlevania.   I had friends that trashed one system or the other until they were blue in the face, but I only saw that there was beauty in both.

I had a Playstation, but never bought an N64, not due to a preference for either system, but because I was in post-secondary school at the time and there was no room in my life, or more accurately my wallet, for a second console at that point.   I never slagged the N64, it had some great games that I would have loved to get in on at the time, and thankfully have been able to catch up on now.  Flash forward, I own all three major systems and have a great collection of titles for each, and see no reason to slag one over the others.   All three systems have some great exclusive titles, all three have their fair share of crap and more importantly, all three have made their mark on the gaming community.

Competition and having differing goals is the only thing that leads to innovation and the expansion of gaming in general.   This is why there is no way the one console future can be a boon to gaming and also why pledging one’s self to one particular console to the exclusion of all others is nothing but a form of fanaticism.   Excitement, enthusiasm, and being happy with what you have, are all great qualities to have being a gamer.   If you have no option but to have one console and it’s a choice, that’s a different subject, but flaming someone else because of their choice of gaming is nothing short of moronic.

Fanaticism in any form in this world ensures that there will always be some form of conflict.   Where someone takes a strong enough stance to change the strength of what they say from an opinion into a fanatical statement, there will always be someone else with the exact opposite strength of opinion to counteract it.   Where opinions can differ and everyone is entitled to one, it’s when the magnitude of that opinion becomes strong enough to become a point of conflict that it becomes counterproductive.

Long live gaming in all its forms, except those stupid little Facebook games.  They can burn in hell.  :)