WELCOME | High Definition magazine

A few years ago I wrote of how designers and architects of new housing in the UK were adopting large TV screens into living spaces. One award winning home, designed in a tradition style (is there any other style in England?) featured a 36 inch LCD panel in the kitchen dining area and a 42 inch in the downstairs small room they called the ‘games room’.
There wasn’t a large screen TV in the living room at all, clearly the market research had casual TV being watched in the kitchen and serious TV in the games room on the big screen.

The advantage of the games room was the viewer was sitting at an ideal distance from the large HD screen and getting a good eyeful of pixels. The downside was one screen with various family members clamouring for ‘their viewing time’ at the same time.

I remember thinking that this was the end of the idea that ‘home cinema’ was available to the middle classes. Previously home cinema had just been an attractive selling point to a niche market consisting of film buffs, media types and the ‘over 40’ Lexus drivers. Now the beloved HD screen was part of a ‘walk in’ arcade machine where cinematic pace and beauty was competing with the garish visuals computer games.

But in the space of a few short years the idea of a ‘games room’ is now under threat.

A new name and use of the spare living room came to my attention during a recent visit to show homes in Australia. Surveying some plans for houses to be built in early 2009 I was surprised to see the ‘games room’ gone replaced with the ‘media room’.

I asked the sales exec what happens in a ‘media room’ and she said that it was the place for games, TV and Internet. Quite a busy room with just one screen!

But I don’t see this room quite being used in the way the designers and marketeers hope. Games and Internet devices are becoming smaller and more mobile. Wireless Internet enables the kids with laptops to roam the house. Portable games are outselling console and games are being fine tuned for consoles at the expense of working well on PCs.

The creator of the Unreal series of games and Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney says “Consoles have definitely left PC games behind”. It’s clear that playing games on a PC is becoming uncool for the younger generation.

So if the PC is not needed for games will a PC be dedicated just to Internet use in the ‘Media Room’? No, the media room is more likely to become a charging cupboard and storeroom for the detritus of designer black bits and pieces that come with games computers and PDAs. Anyway do we want to watch pixelated ‘fuzz’ from YouTube on a 42 inch HD screen?

Although game play on the big screen is more engaging, portables are more popular. This frees up the big screen in the small room somewhat and leaves us with the possibility of the small living room being returned to use for movies and TV.

It seems that each generation wants to define the room by the activity. In reverse chronological order we have ‘Media Room’, ‘Games Room’, ‘Home Cinema’, ‘Lounge’, ‘Sitting Room’ and ‘Drawing Room’. The Victorians called the main living room a drawing room because previously the rooms use was for women to ‘withdraw to’ after dinner, leaving the men to savour port and cigars. Meanwhile the working class cooked and slept in one room. Times have changed.

The origin of the word media is from ‘medium’ – yes the spiritualist, crystal ball toting entertainers who conjure connections with departed spirits. Derived from the Latin ‘medium’. Media was Latin plural of medium.

So the term ‘Media Room’ for all its connotations of a room full of unsavoury paparazzi and journos awaiting a press handout, has the right entomological credentials ‘making connections with spirits’. It’s what the entertainment business is all about.