If you’re so inclined, The Morning News has made available the final essay in my six-part series about my life in video games, “Consoles I Have Known.” This one is about the console war between the Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360, and how I became one of its many casualties. Oh, read it for yourself. It’s called “Second Place is First to Lose.”
In a way, the article is also about the way popular opinion is formed, and how that has changed a lot in the blog era. (yuck. sorry.) One video game blog in particular, Kotaku.com, figures pretty heavily into the story as its been kind of a daily obsession for me over the last couple of years. I really do enjoy this site though I do often lose patience for it just as I lose patience for most things published by Gawker. Their writers tend to stretch too often and too hard for the put-down, even where it can’t really justify one.
Kotaku also has a very lively comments section which is, above all else, frustrating. I’ve always felt like, in comments sections, intelligent discussion can often exist but never prevails. Kotaku is very guilty of that, so I usually try not to read the comments. Unfortunately, they’ve made that impossible for me today because they (very nicely) linked to my story on The Morning News, and now it (and the question of whether I’m funny, boring, gay, or simply a tool with no opinion) has become part of a typical flame war on the site. I can’t say I didn’t have this coming to me.
