If you're a dedicated PC gamer, there hasn't been a lot to celebrate lately.

It seems that ever since Microsoft and Sony figured out how to attach their consoles to the Internet, there's been a steady prioritising campaign under way to attract the hard-core gamer away from the PC, and towards either the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. The reasons for this are many and varied, but it doesn't take a genius to see why these corporate giants have a vested interest in where you spend your gaming dollar.

Whilst PC gamers have generally been content to sit back and receive whatever titles developers are willing to make, Microsoft and Sony have waged a new kind of war. Backed by billions of dollars and armies of PR people, they've cultivated a new take on console gaming that not only appeals to a wider audience, it positively oozes these three extremely important traits: practicality, perception and addiction.

Practicality

The 1990s saw the birth of not only first-person shooters, but widespread internet connectivity. In a gaming market inexorably shifting away from the infancy of 8-bit arcade titles and moving instead towards the living room, gamers would forever seek the social companionship that was the cornerstone of the arcade experience. We reached out and connected across our telephone lines and coaxial cables in our thousands. Then millions. Other people, it seemed, were not only up for a game, they were a whole lot better at it than we'd imagined.

The console manufacturers, despite their best efforts, were limited then as they are now by one major defining issue: the generation game. The compatibility of a particular console with every game made for that console is of huge significance to the casual gaming market. Coupled with a large, easy-to-find "ON" switch, and you have all you need to play the majority of the best-selling titles out there now, meaning you don't even need to invest in learning how to operate a gaming device. You don't even need to buy a specialised screen; 98.9% of all homes in New Zealand have a television set. That's practicality.

Perception

Unfortunately, as a hardware manufacturer, once you've invested hundreds of millions of dollars producing a device that has no real upgrade potential – indeed, which is specifically designed to last for years in an industry practically defined by its fast-paced technological changes, you'd better make damn sure you can grab and hold enough market share to justify the expense.

This can't be achieved by having the developers making games for your console continually increase the graphical fidelity and overall complexity of their games – at least not in the same way that developers can with PCs, where the hardware platform is always evolving. While console games do get marginally better throughout a system's lifetime as developers learn how to get the most from the technology, the edges of the envelope are soon reached.

It's not a prerequisite to success to have mind-blowing visual effects in a game, but there needs to be a clear progression through the years to inspire consumers. Otherwise we'd still be reviewing PlayStation One games. The real problem is that all those games that looked so pretty when your current-gen console was released start to look positively primitive after about the third year.

In order to keep their target demographic happy, game developers try to push the limits of both the hardware and players' credulity, releasing titles promising "cutting edge gaming technology featuring the Disparity Rendering System" (PS3: Haze).

Or when that fails (which Haze did, spectacularly), you simply appeal to everyone's innate wish to be just like everyone else, with claims like "over ten million sold" (Xbox 360).

Sooner or later, the thousands of hours and millions of dollars you've spent convincing gamers that your platform is the best will pay off. That's perception.

Addiction

Ultimately however, as a console maker, the biggest problem comes when your hardware is past its prime. That's when you simply point to your back-catalogue, integrated store and handy online shopping facilities where a host of hugely-popular arcade titles can be found, promising hours and hours of budget entertainment for the entire family. That's addiction.

If you've done everything right, people will be playing your games for years, and you might just have given your competition something to think about. And copy next year.

Those who primarily prefer the PC as a gaming platform however have no such concerns. They also have no advocates. The PC doesn't have armies of PR people, and as a gaming journalist nobody invites you to go to a swanky PC media event and talk about the latest PC-exclusive titles on offer.

You can't even turn your television on without seeing a poorly conceived advertising campaign from Apple (of all people) berating the PC because they're too afraid of litigation to actually attack Windows directly. (Either that, or they're appealing to an audience that is incapable of separating the two.)

Pirates. Arr

Of course, the fact that console titles are more expensive than PC titles, despite being produced in far greater numbers, has nothing to do with the popularity of console titles – according to various commentators out there, it's actually rampant piracy rather than share prices that dictates which platforms get the most love.