In Exile wrote...
MerinTB wrote...
For most console gaming I've done / I've seen others do, it's usually the distance from the tv that they watch tv. Unless it was a crowded dorm room or very small apartment, most people seem to set their couch and chairs a good 6 to 8 feet from the screen, with some seating further back. Especially with the larger screens (and when I say larger I'm even meaning like 32" as I'm speaking from over a decade+ of experience, not just recent time) I've rarely experienced anyone placing furniture closer than 6 ft from the screen.
People use a living room TV for gaming? The TV I use is a 30'' Samsung in my room, which is relatively close to my bed, so I'm maybe 5-6 feet away from the screen at most.
A living room TV would be a pain, because that would mean sharing.
Yeah, see, I'm in my mid-thirties. So my gaming experiences -
when I was a kid? Almost no one I knew (save some very wealthy families) had more than one tv. If they wanted to play the Atari 2600 or the NES, they had to use the one tv. While the consoles were put away when not in use, everyone I knew would pull the console out to the fullest length of the cord from the tv and then sit at about the fullest length of the controller cord (though sometimes we'd have to pull separate stools or folding chairs up as the cords wouldn't reach most of the furniture.)
College age? Dorms are very small, so you could put the tv at one end and stand at the other and you'd be lucky to be 6 feet from the screen. But college apartments? The tv in the living room of the apt had the consoles hooked up (if anyone had "gaming" systems in their bedrooms it was their computers)....
Post college twenties? Everyone had their own apartments, and usually a lone guy or a couple would only have the one tv they shared. A group of guy friends sharing an apartment would likely share one tv and console as well (though I'm sure some had their own tvs and consoles in their room, most visits I made saw a bunch of guys multi-playing on the split-screen and what not) - LAN parties are a different thing, but comptuers aren't consoles. XBOX live was just around and I'm not sure how popular yet...
Child raising years? If the kids were young enough, you just had to game away from them (as I'm doing now with my daughter)... once they get older, odds are you are either sharing the game system and tv with them or they aren't interested in gaming (I've not hit that age, my daughter is about 1 1/2).... by this age (again, we're looking at my generation) unless you are very, very poor (and why do you have a game console them anyway?) you or family members have old small tvs or, more recently, SD tvs that have been replaced so the old tvs can be given to the kids to game on separate from the parents watching adult programming (and by this I mean things not meant for the PG-13 and younger eyes) as well as M games and such.
I'm not of the generation of each kid having a tv and a cell phone and a computer in their room, nor of the economic class.
So, yes, sharing a screen was the thing for most people. I did have a couple friends who had tv's in their room when I was a kid, but they were very wealthy families.
And once I hit middle school we had a second tv as well, a little one - that was used as a computer monitor for the C64. The Atari used the living room, non-computer, tv.
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Overall, I think kids living with their parents and college dorm / very small apartment people are probably the "tv 2 feet from my face" console people.
There are, I'm sure, a sizable number of exceptions to my anecdotal experiences and extrapolations - but, suffice to say, I don't think it's as weird as you make it sound, In Exile. Are you living at home with your family?
As a married man I know that gaming on a console in the room my wife is trying to sleep in is a no-go.
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