[game_preservation] Generations standards?

[Andrew Armstrong]

On 15/04/2010 00:35, Devin Monnens wrote:

> Personally, I think the 'generations' term is a bit overused and isn't 

> really very meaningful (to the average person) when we talk about 

> anything older than about 10 years. Generation is also used when 

> discussing cell phones (2G vs 3G), so I am a bit curious as to how and 

> where this terminology arose. 'Current Gen' 'Last Gen' and 'Next Gen' 

> is used rather frequently when talking about games in retail, and this 

> is usually what people are thinking - anything older than PS2 can 

> really be considered 'classic' at this point, which effectively limits 

> our realm of thinking.

I'd certainly quote this part of Devin's response - mainly because this 
is truly what occurs for most people, and I've honestly never really 
heard much about "generations" myself - although the "era" thing comes 
up a lot ("8-bit era", etc.). It's generalised to "old consoles" and 
"tinny music" I think, mostly driven by the chiptunes and so forth nowadays.

You are right though, that it's not been defined and that in fact there 
are some good reasons to roughly define things. I certainly still want 
to push on doing some actual history articles with SIG members - and to 
do so, having a baseline of definitions would greatly help any 
ease-of-ing. Stating years is typical but referring to a general era or 
generation makes sense too - sometimes more so since a systems height of 
power might be different to simply it's released dates (for example the 
PlayStation 2 is still selling, but is not at it's peak - but if it was 
stated it was a main console at the moment, it'd be the wrong 
"generation" and typically not be what you'd refer to - although it does 
still sell of course!).

So it might be worthwhile to define some general era's or generations - 
using whatever terms are appropriate, since I think in many cases all 5 
of those points can cover things, and generations/eras obviously 
overlap, and so forth. I'd start this myself but I'd be guessing for 
many things - for a start I'm in the UK, where the era's are typically 
either ages behind (depending on the period), have entirely different 
consoles, or have generations where the popular console is entirely 
different! (meaning you can't use system identifiers to identify a 
era!). More complicated to do a worldwide perspective for sure - gives 
people a good general view about what was happening at the time, to 
allow some kind of comparisons, although Devin is right that PC and 
arcade hardware is generally always superior to home consoles.

One thing that is harder to track down sometimes is the length of 
support or sales of the device or the games for a certain console, or 
even worse when people actually stopped using the consoles (ie; brought 
a replacement). Would be nice to have a timeline with all this info, 
since the bars would highly vary in length :)

Andrew