PC gamers have no friends, except on MSN (jk)

Hi,
Hopefully not too many people will click on this thread without reading the post first, I'm after your attention, not your flames. I could have written 'SEX' in the subject to get your attention but I'm not 15.

I was on the train to Bristol this morning and I was thinking about video games platforms and their impact on our lives. The following are my desiderata, I'd be interested to hear what you have to say on the matter:

PC games have traditionally been for lone gamers:
Many old PC games were designed to comply with the system. It is given that a PC should have a mouse and keyboard, hence the success of solitaire, whose name proves my point. Successful PC games have often needed nothing more than a decent PC, monitor, mouse, keyboard and (relatively) later on a pair of speakers. Here's a list of games I've thought of that just use a mouse and keyboard:

Most first person shooters
Side scrolling shooters (resulting in many a broken spacebar)
Windows card games
Dune 2 style games (like Command & Conquer)
Games like Day of the Tentacle, Hugo's House of Horrors or Manic Mansion

I don't think I really needed to make that list, but I just wanted to prove my point - PC games are a little limited because of the input devices associated with PCs. It's pretty hard to control a character in a game using just a mouse and sharing a keyboard has never been a great draw, so multiplayer games on a PC are much more limited to online games...fair enough.

On a side note, it's easy enough to get 2 or more plug & play joypads nowadays, but are there many RECENT games available for a PC that would make use of 2 joypads? Not really. Sports and racing games are sold to the console market.

Games consoles are designed as social tools:
Until the advent of the Nintendo 64 I cannot think of a games console which had more than 2 controller ports readily available without the purchase of a device to allow more than one controller to be plugged into each port. Games consoles have always had a '1-up' (pun intended) on PCs as gaming platforms because a controller is designed for gaming and hence it's easier to pick up and play a game on a console than it is on a PC, although the common knowledge that is the WSAD key combination could be considered detrimental to my argument.

As games consoles are easier to get into than PCs it's easier for a friend who's over at your house to play your games against you. The simplistic nature of console hardware set-ups makes them more likely to be common hardware between friends and as such they are already recognised as a fun device, the PC is associated with work, long hours at a desk, software which crashes and can only be sorted out by either a technician or a laborious and overly technical manual.

Consoles are now posing as components of our hi-fis and home theatres, connecting with our PCs to play our music and video files, connecting to our LCD TVs using high definition connections. Sony's PS3 will contain a blu-ray drive and I see the major gain of this being to users wishing to gain a reasonably priced blu-ray disc player, not for gamers wanting longer gameplay. I don't see a majoy increase in game length in proportion to the increase in file sizes - a GameBoy game can be rated in kilobytes whereas a PSP game can be larger than a gigabyte. Bloatware is a fact of life, but no matter which way you look at it games consoles are looking to be THE digital device which integrates itself into our social calendars without us even noticing it.

So...what do you think? I'm sure there are a lot more points I could have gone into and I could have made my argument a lot more organised and focused, but I hope you get the point of what I'm saying, that it's easier/more likely to have a good afternoon in with a Playstation than it is with just one PC.