Knowledge, once gained, is impossible to ignore, and so it’s difficult to remember what things were really like in the past. The attitudes and assumptions we held before time torpedoes them tend to disappear, and everyone acts as if they’d known the truth of the matter all along. But rewind to the year 2005 and recall that gamers, technology journalists, soccer moms and developers alike imagined the PlayStation 3 as a mysterious and formidable box with potentially earth-shaking powers. The Xbox 360 was a fine machine, the thinking went, but the PlayStation 3, when it arrived, would blow everything else out of the water.

“Video games [...] owe their appeal to a combination of skill and chance. Winning, or at least doing well, in these games is desired as a demonstration of skill and, by implication, worthiness, but it also suggests one’s superiority to real or imagined competitors. Unconsciously, winning is also taken for a demonstration that fate favors one, an idea that adds considerably to the feeling of self-confidence which one seeks to attain. No wonder, then, that these games are played with great intensity and persistence by persons or age groups who are insecure, such as teenagers and adolescents, who try to compensate for their feelings of inferiority and to quiet inner doubts through demonstrations of both their skill and their luck.”

- A Good Enough Parent: A Book on Child Rearing, Bruno Bettelheim