The new machines - especially the Xbox One - accelerate this multipurpose evolution. They will compete with products like Roku and Apple TV in addition to the Wii U and the personal computer. Yet consoles face new competitors, too. There are now more places to play games than ever before: hand-held devices, computers, smartphones and tablets. New entrants like the independent console Ouya arrived this year, and Valve's Steam Machines, living-room versions of the dominant PC gaming marketplace, are expected in 2014.
With this uncertain environment in mind, we put our hands on the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One this week. What follows is a preview of what they offer.
PlayStation 4
In a world of Swiss army entertainment devices, Sony is promoting the PlayStation 4 as something closer to a Swiss clock, elegantly designed for a single use. From the start, granted, its new console will include 11 entertainment applications - Amazon Instant Video, Redbox Instant, Netflix, Hulu and the like - with more to come. But Sony has pushed the new PlayStation as a games-first console that, at $399, is $100 cheaper than its rival.
The breadth of the price difference is deceptive. You have to buy a $60 camera to enable voice and facial recognition, or even just to play the three free mini-games that come bundled as the Playroom, a technical demonstration of how game designers might use two new features on the PlayStation 4 controller - a touch pad and a light bar that can change colors - to create new forms of play.
In one demo, a player can swipe the touch pad to make it appear on screen as if a small army of robots were being flicked out of the controller and into the living room. The camera acts as a sort of mirror, reflecting back an animated-robot-augmented version of the actual room. The robots waved back to a friendly hand gesture and were comically toppled by the cord from a set of headphones.
The PlayStation 4 controller is a significant improvement over the PlayStation 3's, which had mushy bumpers instead of triggers on the back, making it inferior to the Xbox 360 controller for shooting games.
The importance of a controller to interactive entertainment is one way that new consoles are not quite the equivalent of innovations in movie theaters, like cup holders or stadium seating. A movie may be more enjoyable in a more comfortable theater, but the essential nature of the film doesn't change with such perks. By contrast, the player's relationship to the controller is at the very heart of interactivity.
Perhaps the most visible change on the PlayStation 4 controller is the removal of the "start" and "select" buttons that have been with us since the introduction of the Nintendo Entertainment System in the 1980s, in favor of buttons labeled "options" and "share." Press share, and you can upload a screen shot of your game play to Facebook or Twitter, or a video to Facebook. (The system is perpetually recording the last 15 minutes of play. You can post the whole thing or quickly edit a snippet.) The PlayStation 4 also makes it simple to broadcast your play live on the services Twitch and Ustream.
The share button is part of a shift toward consoles as social networks, a transformation that began years ago with Microsoft's Xbox Live and its friends list. More so than Xbox One, the PlayStation 4 is constantly notifying you what your friends have been doing with their consoles. And if players consent, the system will use their real names instead of the anonymous CB-style handles that, perhaps, encourage the culture of harassment and bullying that afflicts online play. In a notable change, the PlayStation 4, following the Xbox model, requires a subscription to compete with others over the Internet.
A big difference between video games and most other forms of entertainment is that they can be exclusive to a device, which inhibits games from reaching a broader audience. When you buy a new television, you don't have to choose a whole new set of programs to watch. Nor do you have to buy one TV to watch "The Good Wife" on CBS and another to watch "The Americans" on FX.
When you buy a new game console, however, you end up doing something very similar. And yet, on release day, the games-first PlayStation 4 does not have an exclusive title that fulfills the console's potential as a showcase for excellence and experimentalism in the medium, even as "Knack" and "Killzone: Shadow Fall" demonstrate the console's graphical abilities, and "Resogun," a reimagining of the 1980s arcade shooter "Defender," signals Sony's support for independent game designers. The rest of the 30 games scheduled to come out for the system by January will be available on at least one competing platform, including the PlayStation 3.
Xbox One
Like the PS4, the Xbox One plays games, Blu-ray movies and streamed or downloaded television shows, movies and music. The "One" part of the name signals an intent to be the conduit for all electronic entertainment. To that end, Microsoft's new console can also serve as an intermediary between a cable box or any other device that traditionally plugs into a TV through an HDMI connection.
Microsoft's proposition is that you'd rather watch cable TV that is funneled through an Xbox One, because, when it is, you can do more with your TV signal. You can use the Xbox One's voice commands to change channels or use its "snap" feature to multitask. For instance, you can have the show that your cable box is emitting play in one corner of your screen while the rest of the space displays a video game or a Skype call or maybe a fitness app. This split-screen "snap" feature is the Xbox One's best trick.
Unfortunately, the Xbox One doesn't entirely upgrade whatever signal is passing through it. When introduced to the public, the box will reduce any surround-sound signal coming from a cable box to stereo. Microsoft intends to enable full surround sound through the console, although it's not clear when.
The Xbox One offers surprisingly effective, if optional, voice control, which is detected by a new generation of the visual and audio Kinect sensor. The Kinect must be placed above or below your television. When the sensor's on, you can turn on the Xbox (and the television and cable box) by saying "Xbox On." Voice commands also allow you to switch channels, shop for movies, start a Skype call and capture 30-second moments of games. When the TV volume is cranked, we found, you have to speak loudly to get the Kinect to respond, but otherwise a conversational tone will get the console's attention. A tip to frustrated significant others everywhere: Say "Xbox turn off," and then quickly say "Yes," and that annoying game being played will be shut down right away.
Microsoft's hub approach is appealing. Thankfully, in testing of a near-final version of the software, the console provided a smooth experience. It switched from a cable TV feed to a video game to Internet Explorer with little delay. Skype calls took longer to connect, making us fear that the caller would give up after so much ringing.
Microsoft's hub approach is also presumptive. The company wagers that the television is still the screen around which people want to congregate and connect their entertainment. The rapid uptake of smartphones and tablets, however, has diminished the primacy of the TV screen. Time-shifted television viewing may also undermine the Xbox One's potential for pairing apps to any live feeds coursing through it.
A console is only as good as its games, and to the extent that the Xbox One is still at its core a game machine, it now faces at least five years of ups and downs. The system's first-day lineup, which we've experienced a half-hour here and a half-hour there, has visual stunners like "Ryse" and "Forza MotorSport 5" but nothing with the magnetism of the simple, rapturous "Wii Sports" games for the 2006 Wii or the revelatory first-person-shooter "Halo" introduced with the original 2001 Xbox.
Games get better as a system ages. So, too, will Microsoft's software, which starts impressively enough. The console is somewhat held back by its bulky industrial design: It is boxy and seems to resemble a VCR. With its power brick and the Kinect, it pushes three hunks of plastic and metal into a living room. The skinny PlayStation 4 and its tiny add-on camera feel invisible by comparison. What's inside the box is still remarkable and potentially paradigm shifting in how we use our television sets.
