PC gaming coming full circle

I had the opportunity to go out to Southwood Boys Grammar today, which is an all boys school in Melbourne's outer suburbs. For the last ten years they have had a dedicated class about building PCs and I have gone out there to do a talk on PC hardware several times over the years.

I remember that in one of my visits about eight years ago, although the boys were kind of interested in PCs, they had little to no interest in current PC hardware. All the buys were definitely more interested in console gaming. I got to witness a whole generation of kids totally abandon PC gaming in favor of console gaming. It wasn't until this year's visit today that I saw a complete turn around.

A lot of the kids had true knowledge of current chipsets, processors, and the ability to totally build PCs from scratch. Rather than describing the basics of how PCs work, we were getting into the details of overclocking and PC RAM technology. We discussed the benefits of integrating memory controllers and PCI controllers into CPUs, as opposed to having them in the North Bridge. The boys spent their lunch break in the computer room playing on their PCs and all of them were discussing their latest activities in World of Warcraft and Crysis 2. When I asked one of the boys about console games, they referred to their Playstation 3 as a good "filler" but that the majority of their gaming was now done on their PC.

This is a great sign for PC gaming. Although I never really made the console jump myself, I did see a whole generation put consoles before PCs for a time. I believe that everybody gets far more out of building and creating their on PCs than they could ever get from consoles.