Nintendo WiiU is not a next-generation system!

[WereKitten]

RolStoppable said:

Pineapple said:
The technology definition is also one of time. It's one of when the technology was available, rather than the release date of the machine.

A couple of years back, there were a fair bit of people on VGChartz stating that the DS was a 5th generation machine, while the PsP is a 6th generation machine. Those people (at least most of them) were not trolling, they genuinely felt that was the best way of defining generations.

I don't agree with them, but those people are just wrong (or, well, have a slightly strange definition), and that doesn't make them trolls. Calling them trolls is just as wrong a use of the word as defining generations by technology is. Probably worse.

I doubt that any of those people were Nintendo fans, so there was most certainly an agenda involved. If you don't like them being called trolls, then make a suggestion what they should be called. Enemies, perhaps? Can't go wrong with that one

I am one of those who in the past defended the point of view of feature-defined rather than strictly chronological generation definitions. I have no particular emotional attachment to Nintendo, but I come from a background of technology enthusiasts.

Nuclear power plants, wind turbines, common rail injectors, they are all characterized by "generations" associated with features and technology, not just with the timeline of their development and commercialization.

More fittingly in computers, which is where I come from when it comes to videogaming, we always talked of the 8-bit vs 16-bit era, of the introduction of coprocessors, of the AGP to PCI Express transition,  of directx 7 compatible GPU hardware, of multicore or hyperthreaded CPUs. It is the norm to categorize your gaming hardware based on its features, not on when it was marketed. Ask any PC gamer to define the GPU generations and they will probably all agree, for example, on clustering directx compatibility for 7 and 8 together, but consider directx 9 a whole different thing for its shader model.

I can live with a "chronological" definition of generations for the past if that's what the forum dwellers are used to and in the name of clarity in communication, but I keep thinking that it's a weird exception of a definition, stemming from the fact that technological quantum leaps in the console world used to happen more or less synchronosuly between a very reduced number of manufacturers. Thus defining generations by enumeration made sense enough. Still, I feel it's quite a perversion of what "generations" mean in tech or more general in product development.

At the same time, no agenda whatsoever. Not everybody coming to console gaming from a different background has actual emotional investment in Nintendo or their policies, it's simply a little lexicological and cultural clash. One that is to be expected as more PC gamers turn to consoles.