| RolStoppable said: No, it doesn't work. "Post" is in this context is just another word for "after". The first Pong machines for people's homes, the Atari 2600 and the NES, all of them weren't defining themselves through hardware. Their respective competitors, yes. But the machines who got things started were not. At the center of the advertising campaigns for these consoles were families playing the system together while the competitors advertised their more powerful specs. New consoles focusing on the user experience is not something you can label as "post-PC", because in actuality it just means that consoles are returning to their original roots of which the NES was the last one in line. All home consoles launched between the NES and Wii were defined by trying to be more powerful than the competition. Is the Atari 2600 a "post-PC" console? By your definition of the term it has got to be. Does it make sense? No. |
Everyone is agreeing that post-PC is a bad name for the term, but it's the one we have right now. So if that's your complaint, you're welcome to help find a new name for it.
What it refers to as a design paradigm, is that you're no longer looking at this compilation of machines as some hardware for user input, some machine to translate that into a picture of some sort and a screen to display said picture. It's about looking at the user's needs, and designing hardware and software in a way that makes it as easy as possible for that to happen while making it a great experience at the same time.
It doesn't have anything to do with the PC really, it's just a new way of looking at how you design your software (and hardware in some cases). The PC is just the main representation of the "old" design paradigm, hence the new one is called post-PC.
For games, all of this is about looking at how you can bring the user into the experience and making games that are less cluttered, less confusing, less intimidating and all around easier to work with. That's where motion controls come in. And I don't know if the term applies to the Atari 2600 or any other old hardware, but there is no reason why it shouldn't be possible.
