Quiet, please.

One of the things I like so much about gaming is the hardware. I’m not interested in motherboards and graphics cards, but a shiny new console or gadget really floats my geek boat. I’m a sucker for nice looking shiny things. I’m writing this on an iMac, possibly one of the nicest looking shiny things I own. Aside from the looks, one of the other things I really like about this machine is that it is virtually silent. It does have fans, but you’d have to doing some serious video encoding or other heavy lifting to hear them kick in. This, I like.

Compare, and contrast, then, to the Xbox 360 and (to a slightly lesser extent), the Playstation 3. Granted, both of these consoles have changed through the years, with the Xbox 360 (hopefully) ditching its RROD problems, and going on a pretty successful diet along the way. The PS3 appears to have just slightly miniaturised itself, and lost its fat-man sweaty sheen, becoming instead a dull matte black. The one thing that neither of them has managed to cure, though, is their asthma. The Xbox 360 was famously bad for it, particularly when newly launched. People would wonder why you were operating a leaf-blower in a flat, until they peered into your window and saw the distinctive white controller in your hands. The Simpson’s once did a wonderful infomercial for a product called “The Juice Loosener”, which emitted a terrible racket when it was on. Undeterred, the informercial presenters shouted over it with these lines:

“ARE YOU SURE IT’S ON? I CAN’T HEAR A THING!”
“YES, IT’S WHISPER QUIET!”

A few years ago I did a Google image search for “It’s whisper quiet”, and I swear to you that the first image on the first page was of an Xbox 360. I wish I was making that up. When the new Xbox 360S came out, they genuinely referred to it as “near silent”. To be fair to them, mine is occasionally entirely silent, as I do tend to turn it off when I’m not using it. Running a disc, though, and the thing whirs away steadily. It’s no problem during an epic battle in Gears of War, but I had to stop playing the latest Splinter Cell and install it to my hard disk just because my stealthing was being put off by the fact I kept thinking a helicopter was hovering overhead.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the engineering concerns that go into making these machines. We want power for super graphics, and powerful chips generate heat. We want smaller consoles, and smaller consoles have less space for airflow, and thus the fans need to run faster. I just think that these companies could do better, if they actually prioritised noise as a concern, rather than just marketing noisy hairdryers as “nearly silent” and somehow getting away with it.

In summary – when the big news about the Playstation 4 and the Xbox 720 finally breaks, I don’t want to hear a thing.