Watts Up with PS3?

PlayStation3 is out. I’m under-whelmed. The most odd part of this is

that people are actually leaving their jobs, schools, and family to camp out in

front of stores to be first to get a GAME. Go figure. Are they so lacking for

meaningful things in their life that this becomes the most important thing?

For those who wonder why there’s a bunch of hoopla surrounding this game,

part of the reason that it is so anticipated is that this game box has a very

powerful CPU and GPU (graphics processing unit) combo that gives tremendous

real-time 3D rendering capability for unsurpassed realism. Reportedly up to 2 Teraflops per second (2 trillion floating point operations per second) which is the kind of performance a supercomputer like a Cray used to boast ten years ago. While the PS3 isn’t quite there yet for 100% photorealism in real-time, I anticipate PS4 or PS5 to render things so realistically you won’t be able to discern it from photographic or film imagery. Here is an image

from the PS3 game "Gran Turismo". Is it real or rendered?

Another feature of the PS3 is the built in Blue-Ray DVD

player, which plays HDTV DVD’s now starting to be available. Hi-Definition TV is

catching on and for gaming with a big 52" flat panel it can be an immersion

experience. I’ve seen demos at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas. Its

really getting hard to tell what is real anymore.

Living in alternate reality is OK for some people…its

a diversion. But I worry about the kind of folks whom get so addicted to this

that they have to camp out to get the next game. What sort of future do they

have? Gaming doesn’t put food on the table, nor help our economy, or foster good

citizenship.

My son will be asking for these games someday. When that

day comes I plan to call up Michael Jones and ask him to help me give my son a

crash course in hiking the natural world.

In the meantime, I may just buy one of these: