Yes, this may seem like a strange picture, but it’s alright. We’ll get to it. The picture is of us (and some friends) having lunch, but it’ll tie back into the progression of consoles, gaming, and technology. It’ll just take a moment.

I had a thought tonight, when I heard that Yakuza 3 would be localized for Western audiences. Basically, it went something like this:

“Oh. Cool. Maybe I should go back and finish Yakuza (the PS2 version). Well… I dunno. I’ve got a lot of other stuff to play, and while that game started off okay, the graphics really don’t hold up, and the constant load times and lousy control… nah. I’ll play something else.”

Seriously, that was my internal monologue, almost verbatim. But the thing is, those are the kinds of things that keep me from going back and playing some older games. Things like long loading times, which on modern consoles have largely been mitigated, or corded controllers, or lousy 3D graphics (2D graphics often hold up surprisingly well even today, as long as the resolution’s sufficient)… most of these are problems that modern consoles solve, and it makes going back and playing older games sometimes quite difficult.

But the biggest thing – and the reason my time playing console games has taken a radical nosedive over the last six months or so is even more profound:

Connectivity.

I *love* Xbox Live. Love it. It’s the best thing to have happened to console gaming in … maybe ever. I play with friends who live across the country. Some friends who I wouldn’t otherwise be able to keep in touch with, some friends who I’ve never met before in person. I’ve reconnected with relatives who I can’t speak with, due to language barriers, by playing games together.

The social impact of having games as a shared experience is immeasurable. It gives you something to do together. It gives you something to talk about – and from those beginnings, you start talking about other things. You learn about the person through interaction, and you develop a relationship through those shared experiences.

And yet, over the last few months, my time spent on Live has dwindled. Why? Because I have my iPhone and Pre. And those devices present a new layer to the advancement that is connectivity. And that’s ubiquity. With Tweetdeck, with Google Reader, with IM and text messaging, I’m more potentially connected than I’ve ever been *all the time*.

And so if I want to know what my friends in Detroit are doing – people that I met first years ago on a messageboard, and only met in person for the first time earlier this year – I hop on to Twitter. If I want to know what my friends find interesting, Google Reader’s shared items is enough to start a conversation. Having this sort of low-grade, ubiquitous connectivity changes my relationship with people dramatically.

But at the same time, it’s the shared experiences that create the stories – those memories of things that you remember doing *together* that really stick with you.Which brings us back to that photo above. I remember this lunch. I remember the food, I remember talking with everyone here, and more, they remember it, too. It’s not just a 140 character blurb about watering plants. It was something we all did together.

And that’s one of the things that’s been the most satisfying about playing Word Ace – the ability to do something with friends, wherever you are, whenever you want. I can hop on at any time of the day, and there’s someone playing. There’s a good chance someone on my friend list is playing. I’ve hopped online at 1am to find that friends of mine are getting in that one last game before bed that ends up lasting an hour and a half.

Maybe it’s my friends from Detroit, maybe it’s people from one of the boards I’ve posted to – in the span of a few games, I feel like I’ve made a few more acquaintances, and over the coming months, years, who knows how many of them will turn into friendships?

And so it’s in that combination that we have something genuinely new – connectivity and ubiquity together – a way to play with your friends, wherever you are, whenever you want. You no longer have to be tethered to your living room to have the kind of rich, social interaction. You can play with an old college friend halfway around the world while you’re in the park with your dog.

And so when I sit down to think about something like playing an old PS2 game, I realize that progress has made that game… old. There’s something missing there. And tonight, I fired up Halo 3 for the first time in a long time – and had a blast – and there was something missing there, too.

It’s that sense of being connected *anywhere* – whenever, wherever – that was missing. Once you’ve experienced the future, it’s hard to go back. Let’s go forward, instead.