What are people playing on?

Sometimes it is important for the industry to look at not just what people are playing, but what people are playing on... And the experiences that drives certain people to prefer consoles over computers. Warning: a bit of uncharasteric blogging will follow.

During a routine upgrade process this past week, I have recieved no fewer than 2 broken motherboards, 1 bad stick of RAM, 1 bad processor, and a wonderful motherboard that doesn't work if a particular screw is tightened down... All of these parts new. I have also run into the issues of the highly advanced Windows XP not natively understanding SATA drives, RAID drives, or drives over 130 GB without software patches that the installer does not come with, and therefore cannot utilize. I have created no fewer than 4 boot floppies. Problem diagnostics involved freeware, shareware, commercial software, and open source software.

In short, it has been a nightmare... A nightmare the average gamer will not want to undertake. Even with fully functional hardware (purchased at a premium that the average High School and College gamer may not be able to afford), current hardware standards are so fractured as to present significant unnecessary barriers to system-wide upgrading. The USB, Firewire, and Front audio ports could be easily standardized, yet if such a standard exists nobody told Antec, whose otherwise excellent case Sonata ships with individual wires for every single pin. And what is with that insecure floppy power connecter? Not only does it add unnecessary bulk to an already intimidating number of wires, but it is also not properly a keyed mechanism. This makes it surprisingly easy to destroy an otherwise servicable power supply, I have found.

I'm glad to see that more motherboard manufacturers are shipping with RAID, SATA, and SCSI functionality, but in order to boot from an SATA drive on this particular implementation one must set boot device to "SCSI", Set the SCSI device to "RAID", and set the RAID device to "SATA." The manual, of course, will get the order of instructions wrong, making actual installation more of a trial-and-error than anything else.

I shouldn't be too hard on the technology manufacturers... Maxtor's New Fluid Dynamic Bearing HDD's are so impressively quiet, I bought two (neither of which Windows natively recognizes). This Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 is one of the most impressive motherboards I have ever laid eyes on, with reams of documentation both small and large, and which almost correctly detected the speed of the processor and almost ran perfectly the first time... once a screw was removed.

I have less positive things to say about, for example, the sales associate who sheepishly claimed the nForce2 chipset provided GeForce3 quality graphics (It is, in fact, a northbridge equivalent and has no visual capabilities aside from a few blinking LEDs). Or Shuttle, AKA Shoddy, who produced not one but two fried motherboards in sealed, unopened packages. And while I love the ANTEC sonata, the individual cables on mobo headers wasted enough time to warrant a strongly worded e-mail.

All of this to be able to use the level design tools for Half Life 2 when it ships. It's no wonder that more and more computer gamers are going to the supposedly unnecessary expense of buying a pre-built system instead of upgrading... Current system internals are a liberal mix of outdated and experimental technology, with enough conflicts to drive a person batty. VIA's AMD ROM conflicting with your ATI card? Maybe your Certified DDR400 RAM needs to be Kensington Certified DDR400 Ram, which your distributor doesn't sell? Is one of your ATA devices set to Master, the other to Cable Select?

In short, there are many, many errors that are likely to come up in the process of updating a modern computer, all of which relates to the fundamental problem that our industry is moving so fast that no product or standard is fully matured before it is shoved out the door. There is no reason why all IDE system devices don't ship as Cable Select, and likewise no reason why a motherboard maker would knowingly put a 1-inch tall transistor in the middle of an area otherwise occupied by the processor heat sink. These things just show the immaturity of the nuts and bolts hardware side of our industry... details that serve to push people away from computers and towards more polished, mature products like consoles. What we need is standards bodies that push for that last mile... a standards body that can say "this is what an onboard USB header looks like" "This is an acceptable failure rate" "This is getting phased out". This standards body would need to tie up the loose ends, literally and figuratively, that are dangling around the insides of our computers. Relying upon individual companies and vested interest groups has gotten us pretty far, but there is still a long way to go.

I guess I'm advocating one major thing: never become complacent. Always demand better, and vote for quality with your dollars. This is true in all things.