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The Black Box

Two weeks ago, the inevitable happened. My laptop died. Its plastic and metal face was worn out from 14 months of heavy travel, egregious multitasking and constant use. It wasn’t a surprise. In fact, in my rough hands, my new or repaired laptops can be loosely tracked by, say, every new Grand Theft Auto title. (This one would be called the PS2 Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories breakdown.) Knowing this, I paid the extra money for the extended warranty: free service for three years. The problem was that I had to send my business computer away for up to two weeks. Murphy, being a friend right now, had every other computer I had access to, including other people’s, be in the shop at the very same time. 

So I did what any other cheap gaming entrepreneur would do: I conducted my business through my Nintendo Wii. Three months or so ago I downloaded the Opera beta test <www.opera.com> through the Nintendo Virtual Console. It was free. And, for the past week and a half, I’ve been sitting in my living room like it was my office. I’ve been looking over new story assignments, contract negotiations and potential book deals with a Wii-mote. I’ve researched ideas, read my favorite bloggers and kept abreast of international news. It hasn’t quite been business as usual, and I almost jumped up and down when my fixed laptop arrived yesterday ahead of schedule (evidently a dead hard drive isn’t difficult to fix – just chuck the old one out, I imagine). With the Wii, there was no word processor, no printer and, well, no way I could regularly read ‘net type off the television or spell out my words, text-message style, for longer than the time I had to. However, I can’t say that I don’t miss the ease I could put aside my Internet browsing for a quick game of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I was almost tempted to buy a PS2 keyboard so I could alternate between browsing and God of War 2. That is a very large almost. 

Besides showing the unchanging fragility of PCs, the whole experience shows how much closer we are to having what can be called the Everycomputer. It is the conceptual living room device that plays music, pays your bills and regulates refrigerator temperature. It also does movies, checks carbon monoxide levels and turns on the houselights when you arrive. Video games are somewhere in that list, too. Bill Gates is perhaps the best known trumpeter of this device (from my understanding, his main home is rigged with some experimental all-in-one computer), but I’m sure others before him have dreamed of this concept, too. It’s like the Plato idea of a perfect tree: it may not be possible to create in real life, but everyone has some perfect concept of tree-ness to which they can compare real-life trees. Of course, Plato wasn’t talking about electronics in his philosophies, but that hasn’t stopped electronic forerunners from trying to make the Everycomputer everyone will find useful. One device to rule them all. And while Microsoft and others have been working on these ideas for years, it has only been recently that the mythological Everycomputer has become the mythological Everyconsole. 

I recently got schooled on the trend when I met a colleague during my travels. He worked with Sega during the launch of Dreamcast, the sadly-neglected console released in 1999. “Everything XBox Live is doing, Sega was doing with the Dreamcast,” he said. “Online networking, the friend system, everything.” Before I could jump in, he himself acknowledged that those ideas were way ahead of their time. Probably less than a quarter of America had a broadband connection in 1999, nevertheless one free to play video games on. This was before public wi-fi, iPods and satellite radio, TiVo and cheap cell phone. In short, we weren’t wired yet. But the Dreamcast was perhaps the first follow-through attempt at having a multi-functional console: its online world was alive, albeit with nobody on there, and you can bet Sega wouldn’t have sold an optional keyboard and mouse just for Phantasy Star Online parties. Sega had bigger ambitions before being smashed by the original Sony PlayStation. 

The PlayStation also had its attempts at complex networking, but the current age of Everyconsoles naturally took off with the XBox. There were the keyboard, the mouse and the ambitions, but there was also an audience that, in 2001, was more receptive to staying online. The XBox was also coming from Microsoft. Gates has made no qualms about the XBox being a sort of Trojan horse, a way to get PC-based technology into your living room – or, more importantly, your parents’ living room.  

The foothold made by XBox has been cracked open by the latest generation of consoles. Last December Sony began selling movies, music and other media through its Playstation 3 store, as did the XBox 360. Nintendo will release the final version of its Wii Opera browser this Spring, and it just announced Americans will get a Nintendo DS Opera soon. The goal, particularly with the 360 and PS3, is to have you come to your console – not your computer, not your DVD player – for all your multimedia fun. It’s like buying a movie for the iPod: it’s on a tiny screen, but you can bet you’ll watch Pirates of the Caribbean enough on the grainy monitor to get your $9.99 worth. Imagine having one device that holds all your entertainment – and it’s not a computer. 

What is humorous is that our $599 consoles have essentially become computers. Games have downloadable patches and content, systems must be updated a la Windows, and, except for the Wii, all next-gen consoles have a relatively hefty hard drive. That said, PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi was quoted as saying the life cycle of the Playstation 2 would be a decade. It was released in 2000. We may already have this so-called Everycomputer in our houses right now, but the way things are going, tech-aggressive engineers wouldn’t let us keep it in our living rooms long enough to dependent on it. 

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