Words Worth Knowing: Console Generations & Families
Words Worth Knowing was a vertical I wrote weekly explaining key pieces of gaming jargon to parents, guardians and teachers, as part of the larger overall GameHub outreach effort. The column ran for nearly two years and resulted in around 60 WWK articles. GameHubHQ.com closed in late 2017. This piece originally appeared on Sep 21, 2015.
Console generations can be a hard concept to get your head around, especially when manufacturers insist on calling them all the same thing! So if you don't know your Playstation 3 from your Playstation 4, or your Wii from your Wii U*, this week's Words Worth Knowing is here to help you out!
*And quite frankly, why would you? Life's too short. This kind of technical boondoggling is ours to worry about, not yours!
What It Is: Console Generations = successive iterations of gaming console hardware
What It Means: When a new console or handheld is released, we will speak of it as being of chronological " generation" of hardware. For example, the original Xbox was a 6th Generation console, the Xbox 360 was a 7th Generation console. All these generations belong to the same family of Xbox devices, but each generation represents a significant advance in the technological capabilities of the hardware. Each generation should be a technological improvement on the last.
Why You Care: When a console or handheld is released, the manufacturers may describe it as having "backwards compatibility", meaning it can play games bought for the previous generation consoles in that console family. Hence Xbox 360 was backwards compatible with Xbox, but the Xbox One is not backwards compatible with the Xbox 360. Backward Compatibility is not a concept that applies to PC gaming, as all computers are of the same "family" and do not advance in generations. When buying games, handhelds or consoles, it is important to check carefully that the game will run on the generation of console you own.
