User:Hornpipe2/Against Console Generations

Wikipedia's Reliance on the System

Let's first look at how Wikipedia uses the system. Most readers' first encounter with it comes through something like the Video Game History infobox, shown on dozens of pages. An inclusion of the template is on the right. Note the specific way in which (console) history is broken down into "Generations" articles. Other types of game system or software - say, arcades, or handhelds - instead link to a "History of..." article.

Clicking the link takes you to History of video game consoles, which literally hundreds of articles link to. This is the main landing page to learn the history of video game consoles on Wikipedia. From here are links to all sub-history pages. Reading the history, the entire system is split into sections of "console generation". These generation divisions are supported by a three-paragraph section called Console generations, along with a few references that argue that game consoles can be broken down into this framework.

Digging further: all game consoles then slot into one (and only one) of these "generations". Viewing, for example, the Dreamcast article: the infobox (top right) immediately lists a "Generation: Sixth" link back to the parent article.

It is basically inarguable that Wikipedia's history of game consoles relies entirely on this system of classification. There is no Timeline of video game consoles or other alternate presentation. (We do have History of video games, with a decades breakdown. In turn, it links back to the "generations" articles as the "main article"...) By way of comparison, here are some ways Wikipedia organizes other chonologies:

• History of arcade video games - Another video game history article. This one makes no attempt to classify arcade games by "generation", but rather describes "eras" of games based on market trends and year. Each "era" receives a descriptive title. Eras overlap, and can be supported by specific citations.
  • For example, the Golden age of arcade video games - generally, the time period between the 1970s and the 1980s, when rapid development and industry boom pushed arcade games into the mainstream. Note the Time period section, which describes which sources have coined the term and what their opinions are on when the era started (or ended). Also, note that not every arcade game released during this time period is listed - only the most notable popular, and the highest grossing.
• History of film - A different media. History of film is simply divided by decade. Each section contains a summary but also a link to a specific article about the decade, such as 1950s in film, with market statistics and important events, releases, and controversies.
  • Looking at individual decades, 1950s in film (for example), all articles begin with a Trends header, outlining general changes in the industry landscape. It further links to year-specific entries for an extremely granular breakdown.
  • Another take on film: the "Silent era" - the time period during which "silent films" dominated the market, before the rise of "talkies". Note that the very first sentence links to chronological entries ("1894 in film - 1929 in film"), and again its existence is supported by outside sources who delineate the era.
• History of the United States - an incredibly broad topic. Like the "History of arcade video games" (above), this one divides the chronology into named time periods. Aside from division into "eras", there are some articles linked like History of the United States (1964–1980), which are useful to our discussion because they are year delineations that are "arbitrary" (i.e. "not on decade boundaries") but rather follow what historians think are "significant markers" - like one might divide a book by placing a chapter boundary at a cliffhanger.
  • I like the Progressive era article a lot, because its first line is "The Progressive Era (1890s–1920s)" immediately followed by two citations from external sources. There can be no doubt of who determined those date ranges nor why Wikipedia is using them here.
• Phylum, a scientific taxonomy system. Entomologists love nothing more than categorizing bugs into the right genus. I include this one here because it is an externally agreed upon classification system that Wikipedia's role is to transcribe and document.
  • Contrast with History of life - the main entry point into the "chronology" or "timeline" of life. Phylum is not a substitute for the History, but rather an alternate means of grouping organisms. But there are some crossovers as well: the Evolution subsection of Mammal indicates the geological era of their first appearance, leading back to the timeline system.

Why Console "Generations" Are Bad

Having established Wikipedia's reliance on the "generations" system, let's look at the many many problems with it.

The first issue is that Wikipedia itself invented the notion of numbered console generations. An in-depth examination by Time Extension, with quotes from historians and industry sources, finds that this numbering scheme (and its designations) arose almost entirely from Wikipedia's own original research and internal debating. Nowadays, these inventions would be smacked down by WP:NOR policy. This system seems to predate that, however, and has remained up since then.

Even this might not be an issue IF the nomenclature had since been widely adopted and citations were available - but they are not. In fact many experts find the system to be useless, and the handful who do use it disagree on year or system classification. There is NO outside consensus on what constitutes an "Xth generation console" (that is not a regurgitation of Wikipedia's designation, or with some addendum that the classifications are imprecise by nature anyway).

How can this be, given that Wikipedia has some sources? Well,

• Look again at Console generations. There is a table here which lists a few academics who have taken a shot at classification. Note that they do not agree. Also note that Wikipedia disagrees with all of them, making its own classification up out of pieces from the academics' choices.
• A key source throughout this segment is Winners-Take-Some Dynamics in Digital Platform Markets. Read this carefully, these quotes are particularly damning:

While these successive competitions have proven useful to researchers, the establishment of a consistently applied scheme by which to classify the generations of competitions has proven problematic. Although Gallagher and Park set out an initial classification scheme in 2002, many researchers have opted to draw from only a selected slice of market data, often without respect to boundaries around discrete competitions [12]. Still others have invoked the concept of generations, without clearly citing the source of those categorizations. This is problematic in that understanding potential changes in dynamics among the various competitions will be less useful where there is not an agreed-upon set of competitors within any given competition.

Adding to the significant variation in competition classification schemes is the existence of a separate classification scheme on the widely-cited website Wikipedia, a scheme that neither coincides with classifications used in the academic literature nor presents the criteria used for determining its own classification. As a result, between Wikipedia’s popular classification and those conveyed by the academic literature, researchers and managers are left with a wide, inconsistent, and undocumented variety of ways by which the various video game consoles have been separated into discrete competitions (see Fig. 2)

• One of the sources underpinning the claim that this is "...an approach that has generally been adopted and extended by video game journalism." is a BBC listicle which simply regurgitates Wikipedia's own groupings. In fact, this is a really common problem now, a form of citogenesis perpetuated by Youtube talking heads and authors filling an article quota. Wikipedia invented the term, now "everyone" is using it, and now there are "sources" coming back to us. (Wikipedia itself is not "responsible" for breaking the cycle, but it DOES become increasingly difficult to sort out the independent ources from the ones that are just proxies for Wikipedia)

In short: even IF the system is no longer strictly WP:NOR, it is almost certainly WP:SYNTH.

Off Wikipedia, the concept occasionally has some legs, but comes with caveats. Here is a Kotaku article about the end of the "eight generation" of home console gaming:

As for Nintendo, well, bailing on the Wii U and replacing it in 2016 with the Switch, right in the middle of its competitors’ console cycles, kinda excludes them from such sweeping generational chat, but I’m sure we’ll find some room in the next week to talk about their disruptive and hugely successful moves as well…

In other words: the generational model completely broke down, because Nintendo "jumped the queue" with the Switch. Of what use to us is a model that breaks down like this?

This is putting aside the outright disdain for the system that many industry veterans have. It's widely regarded as a flawed system that needs to change, useless, or an embarrassment. When the experts speak we ought to listen!

Not to drag this out anymore, but just to be clear: the problem with numbered console generations is that they're not *useful*. The numberings aren't descriptive, and the groupings are arbitrary and US-centric. That's why people who study game history don't use them
Phil Salvador, Video Game History Foundation librarian, Sept 3rd, 2025.

... People only use them to simply things that weren't simple. There is no other use to them, and that's my thing. I want things that I can use to better understand what happened then, what happened next, and what is going to happen next -- and generation numbers don't serve that.
Jeff Grubb, president and CEO of Giant Bomb, Sept 3rd, 2025.

It's the one attribute in our data set I refuse to look at and grumble about every single time it's brought up.
‪Mat Piscatella‬, Executive Director of Circana gaming division, Sept 2nd, 2025.

To be clear: historians do independently define certain "eras" of games, but they use more descriptive and flexible terms, rather than the number system. For example, the Smithsonian's 2012 exhibit The Art of Video Games provided its own five "eras" division with descriptive names like "8-bit" and "Transition". Wikipedia's insistence on its own numbering and categorization scheme discards such scholarly input, and uses its own system.

The final nail here is the obsessive desire to slot every console into one and only one generation. The use of "generations", "eras" etc. to delineate a period of market competition for the two or three top competitors of roughly equal performance characteristics is almost certainly defensible. At a glance, Fourth generation of video game consoles seems OK: yeah, I remember the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the Genesis from middle school debates, and here they are. But it falls apart as soon as you consider any edge cases, like:

• Handheld consoles are shoehorned in here as well - even though they did not compete with standalone consoles - and their rules for inclusion are even more arbitrary than the market leaders
• The system is fought out in US-centric terms. Console release dates varied by region, and the future was not distributed evenly. In Brazil, Tectoy began production of Sega Master System clones in 1989, well into the "fourth generation". How does this fit into the framework? What about the PC Engine, which was launched in Japan as a competitor to "third generation" machines, yet winds up in the "fourth generation" bucket against the US heavyweights because, well, only the US release date matters?
• Things that only barely qualify as a "console" also end up in here, grouped only by release date. What does the PocketStation have to do with any of the heavyweights at the top of the Fifth generation of video game consoles aside from "release year in about the same time"? It surely ignores all other "hallmarks" of a fifth generation console, like CD-ROM support or 3d graphics. The article merely serves as a proxy for year.

And the system continually gets worse with new console releases that need to be argued and retrofitted into the existing framework. The most instructive example is that of the Nintendo Switch, a console which functions as both a handheld and a standalone. Released in 2017, it became the dominant market force. But because it "jumped the queue", editors fought over whether it was "8th" or "9th" generation - an ultimately meaningless decision in the end, as it continued to trounce the PS5 and XBox Two in market share in both cases.

At the highest level: Generations are not the right way to tell the story of consoles. It is flatly an incorrect portrayal of video game history, one which suggests by its nature that home video game consoles compete within certain technological "weight classes", that the story of video game consoles is "everyone puts out their new console and fights to the death", that handhelds and standalones at all manner of price points and regional availability are competing at once - a concept completely at odds with reality. We have substituted an invented taxonomy in place of a documented chronology.

How did we get here?

Largely, the answer appears to be "inertia".

A simplified timeline goes like this:

1. Early Wikipedia has many articles about individual video game consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System or the Sega Genesis
2. Some editor wants a way to gather the consoles of a particular time period, especially those locked in a console war. That editor writes some meta-history called something like 16-bit era and puts in things like "Sega does what Nintendon't", along with the the major consoles of the era.
3. We end up with a few of these like 8-bit era or one for "early 3d consoles". Then it's realized we need some for proto-Atari 2600 systems like Pong, and newer consoles are arriving all the time. They need new names!
4. The solution entirely devised by Wikipedia editors is to rename these to "generations" of consoles.
5. As these articles are the best meta-history available for summarization of the History of Video Game Consoles, they begin to be incorporated into things like the Template:Video game history, infobox, See Also pages, etc.
6. Now for completeness we need to cover ALL consoles, not just the winners. This leads to a lot of talk page arguments about where specifically to place the Amiga CD32. In other cases, they simply become a dumping ground for "handheld released around the same time as the Sony Playstation.
7. Listicle authors looking for a quick article uncritically dump Wikipedia's "generation" into the press. Some game journalism outfits also do this, but fortunately are more skeptical of the term. Still, it's a usage. Citogenesis ensues.
8. Now it's "Too Big to Change". The entirety of Wikipedia's home console history is locked into this self-imposed category system. Changing this requires (perceived) tremendous amounts of work, and even if we do that, Kotaku still once said the Nintendo Switch was "eight generation", so don't we have to keep the article around as they're a reliable source?

Why can't we break this cycle?

Hopefully by now, you're understanding that the generations system is flawed, but also that Wikipedia is dependent on it to maintain internal consistency. There is a circular relationship created by Wiki's deep reliance on this system, which makes it difficult to dismantle.

1. All console history is told on Generations pages
   1. Attempting to rename or delete the pages is "too disruptive": these are load-bearing pages!
   2. Attempts to create some parallel construction go nowhere, because the work is already done, it's on the Generations pages. It is redundant and ends up merged in. Just put your new stuff where it "belongs".
2. New consoles (or newly uncovered, obscure ones) must slot into one of the Generations
   1. When some time has passed that people think Ninth generation of video game consoles is too stuffed, they make a new Generations page
   2. You can't continue this as a plain chronology, because Wiki is locked in the Generations system. "Nine" is followed by "Ten", not "2026-present"
3. All existing consoles have a "Generation" entry prominently on the Infobox.
   1. You can't remove that! That is how you get back to the primary timeline!
   2. Any console without one is "lacking" and will be sorted accordingly
4. No other lenses or groupings are acceptable.
   1. 8-bit era is turned into a redirect into Third generation of video game consoles, and so on.
   2. You can't rename the pages, because we already decided where the TurboGrafx-16 goes, and now the article title is "wrong"!

Trying to break the cycle at any of these points results in a tremendous fight: what will you do about (other article dependent on this framing)?

Consider some scenarios:

• You would like to add info about the forthcoming portable Xbox gaming systems.
  • As mentioned before, there is no available chronology article to put it in. So you have to put it in the 9th Generation system. That's all we have.
• You've found a handheld chess-playing machine and want to put it on the site.
  • Well, it came out in 1995. Go find which "generation" covers that year and slot it in. Never mind that such a device never competed with the Playstation. That's where it goes.
• You want to write about the PC-Engine, which was a competitor to the Famicom in Japan.
  • Sorry, we already put it in the 4th Generation, because it released against the SNES over here in the US. Hands are tied.
• It's 2027 and the PS6 is here.
  • Time to make a 10th Generation article, because it's certainly not the Ninth. You're not going to stop using this, are you? Some editor will be along shortly to rename your "History of video game consoles (2027-present)" back to "Tenth generation", that's how it is done here.
• You want to talk about the Nintendo 64 vs Dreamcast sales numbers and technical specs.
  • Too bad, they are in different Generations. Dreamcast competed against the Playstation 2 and Gamecube as we already decided.