What are Game Consoles if not Small Robots?

[JoeBush]

Is a Nintendo DS, for example, a sort of robot? It has two eyes (screens), several fingers or feet (buttons), brains (cartridges), a mouth (speakers), a set of ears (the lil microphone on the front), and even like a little pen thing that comes out of it (the little pen thing that comes out of it). A robot, as defined by Joe in his forum post “What are Game Consoles if not Small Robots?”, is like a machine that does people things. Our game machines do many things that people also do. Dreamcasts and XBOX 360s seem to cry out in pain every time their disc drive moves. The GameCube opens a mouth to accept a disc, much in the same way that people open their mouths to accept a variety of snacks and treats. The PlayStation Portable requires a proprietary memory stick format for storage, similar to the way that I only speak English and French and thus can only store information in those proprietary formats.

I see many a similarity between consoles (small robots) and us (people), so why aren’t we considering consoles to be small robots?

[futureperf]

The first console to be a little robot was the sega dreamcast, because it was the first console to do the most human thing: talk with its friends over the internet

[Highwire]

I feel all of this has been covered pretty extensively in Philip K. Dick’s seminal Do Androids Dreamcast of Electric Sheep?

[kcin]

dreamcast is android. “its thinkign” - sega, about the dreamcast (an android that thinks)

[Hartnote]

The Game and Watch was a sort of proto-robot. It doesn’t actually “compute” anything, but is moreso the soul of a man trapped in a plastic tomb.

[How92]