The eternal war, with fanatic supporters on each side, each more convinced than the other of the eternal and obvious supremacy of the favored platform. Whenever they clash, gamers of all shapes, sizes and skills rally under one banner or the other, endless streams of binary blood flow in rivers and forums moderators have nervous breakdowns. …Why? I mean, apart from our probably natural and most certainly healthy need to argue over every single little thing, why do we do it? What supports this conflict and what exactly generated it?

It’s the platform exclusiveness of certain titles that fuels the fire of the general conflict? On one side we have the old aristocratic club of gamers that declare on solemn tone that the day in which a decent RTS will see the light of day on a console they will hang themselves in the attic with a cordless mouse next to the old commodore. On the other side the new age gamer laughs in contempt every time a new MGS or Final Fantasy hits the shelves and would even mention Gears of War too if wasn’t for those Railgun and AWP snipers he had spotted in the other camp. Or is it simply a matter of peripheral preferences? Every day whole regiments of veterans fall under the heavy fire of arguments such as “Does your console come with a mouse? Then how can you even hope to play a shooter at a competitive level?” and new hordes of recruits immediately fold in and strengthen the weaken lines with something like “Please define fps, I have never heard of it until you mentioned it. And while you are at it, let me know how you can do fighting combos on your keyboard.” And this goes on for weeks or even months until some hot and highly anticipated game is released and the Gods favored faction temporarily abandons the fight to enjoy their moment of glory.

Yet the conflict is rather pointless because rarely the released title targets a mixed Computer/Console audience, and when it does it generally gets a cross-platform release. Even more, many serious and responsible gamers have thoughtfully invested in their glorious cyber-future and secured both a Computer and at least one Console. Still the war rages on without any clear reason and it will do so forever because none of the two sides seems willing to back down, crawl in a corner and die. The computer will always have a spot reserved in our society simply because it’s mainly a tool and only secondly a source of entertainment, and the Console will constantly grow in order to provide for the growing needs for fun of its followers. But conflict is (sadly) the catalyst of progress so as the years go by Consoles and Computers will smash each other faces in on a regular basis, but then leaning on each other they will continue together towards the next mile marker of the road of technological ingenuity and development. As pompous as it came out, it’s the truth.