BioShock creator Ken Levine says gamers who want to look into the future of gaming should “buy a PC,” because it “will always be the place that drives innovation.”
Ken Levine is a PC. How do I know? Because he said so. A lot of gamers are reluctant to pick a pony in the long-running PC versus console debate (or at least pretend to be) but Levine has no such qualms, a fact he made very clear in a short piece for Kotaku’s ongoing PC Gaming Week.
“As a gamer, I’m a PC. I like the kind of games you can play on it. I like that designers know they have your full attention, so they feel comfortable EXPECTING your full attention,” he wrote. “I like the ergonomics of the thing, the mouse and keyboard, the effortless transition from gaming to browsing to typing. I’m an alt-tab kind of guy.”
Even the most ardent PC supporters have to admit that its share of the mainstream gaming market has been reduced to a small fraction of what it once was thanks to the advent of consoles, but Levine thinks that the PC as a platform is still a very important part of the industry. “The PC will always be the place that drives innovation,” he continued. “The PC is the place where great game developers are born, even – and maybe especially – where great console game developers are born. Halo, Mass Effect, Call of Duty… PC developers first.”
One of the big draws of the PC is the “low barrier of entry,” which lets fledgling developers pursue their ideas without needing any kind of official approval. Most of those ideas are terrible, he said, but sometimes you end up with something like Steam or Minecraft, projects that revolutionize the industry and take it to entirely new, unforeseen places.
“If you want to know the future of gaming, buy a PC. And pay attention,” he wrote. “Because above all, that thing on your desk is a crystal ball.”
Levine and the rest of the gang at Irrational are currently at work on BioShock Infinite, which is expected to come out sometime in 2012.
