The story of the videogame console is, and always has been, a simple one: a magical little box of plastic that hooks up to a television set and wondrously delivers interactive content. This has been the secret to its success for nearly 40 years – how it banished PC gaming to a walled-off ghetto and replicated its success in miniature with the handheld market.

Microsoft changed all that. Not that the company (fully) intended to, and not that it happened all at once. When the mega-corporation decided to throw its hat into the pitfighting ring that most gamers unofficially refer to as the console wars, it decided it needed to have a target audience and a dedicated means of reaching them. Xbox Live became both the medium and the message: a games- and broadband-only online network that would feature hardcore gamers every hour of every day fighting to the death, with the occasional bout of downloadable content thrown in for good measure.

The future had finally touched the console system, and it was glorious.

In order to erect that sublime future, Microsoft included a built-in hard drive in every single Xbox, a revolutionary and expensive venture. By this point in time, consoles were already starting to slowly ingest small amounts of multimedia functionality, thanks mostly to the advent of the CD as the gaming medium of choice and the arrival of Sony, a company keen on interbreeding its various product lines – but the arrival of the HDD as a standard component kick-started the multimedia drift into overdrive. The PlayStation 2 featured audio CD playback; the Xbox allowed users to burn their music onto their systems and listen to them whenever they wanted, even during gameplay.

The biggest impact such copious amounts of dedicated memory made was, unsurprisingly, on Xbox Live itself. Small bits of downloadable content evolved into the Games Marketplace, a huge and hugely organized arena of demos, add-on levels, and costume packs. An Arcade sprouted up next to it, delivering small gaming experiences – both old and new – at smaller price points. Eventually, as the Xbox transformed into the Xbox 360, a Video and Music Marketplace were added. So, too, was a whole new round of multimedia expansion – Netflix, Facebook, Last.fm, even ESPN, all made possible by a massive online infrastructure, which was, in turn, all made possible by the now-ubiquitous tiny hardware component. It is as if the Age of the Cartridge, introduced by Fairchild and mastered by Nintendo, jumped straight to the Age of the Hard Drive.

And it is here that the paradox starts (and, no, this is not in reference to MS abruptly doing an about-face and removing the HDD as a standard requirement for every single system it manufactured). As Microsoft crammed more and more services and potentialities into its singular device, it did so with the expectation that it would appeal to an ever-larger and more diversified audience; while online gaming was still geared towards Dick, Jane could occasionally get in on the Xbox action by pursuing her movie queue or sampling music streams. The all-in-one-magical-box mentality that had defined and sustained the console was starting to fray at the edges; the Age of the Hard Drive was quickly transforming into the Age of the Fractured Audience.

It is a nascent age that looks to be both pilfered and perfected, somewhat surprisingly, by Sony. Several months ago, the company updated the PS3 to output both games and movies in stereoscopic 3D. Several weeks ago, it added motion control functionality in the form of the PlayStation Move, a Wii remote-esque peripheral. In between was the debut of PlayStation Plus, a rewards program of sorts that has a $50 entry fee – all of which is not to mention the pre-existent possibilities offered by the PlayStation Network and the PlayStation Portable. To say that Sony has embraced the strategy of a multimedia blitzkrieg is an understatement in the extreme.

But there is a fundamental difference between Sony’s and Microsoft’s approach to such “expanded content”: whereas the latter still intends each new service or ability, from the inclusion of Avatars to the addition of Facebook support, to be utilized by the core user, there is no way Sony could possibly expect even the hardest of hardcore gamer to simply do everything that the PS3 now offers. This is not a vertical progression, consistent along the y axis and (slightly) expanding along the x; it is a lateral one that has few, if any, overlapping audiences. And this is precisely the key to the PlayStation Paradigm, the hallmark and harbinger of the Age of the Fractured Audience – the single-audience console has now been replaced by the multi-audience entertainment box, a magical device that wondrously delivers all sorts of entirely different content to entirely different users. Sony is banking its entire future on the proposition that different demographics will stick primarily, if not exclusively, to different functionalities, just as modern moviegoers tend to stick to just one or two different genres (and all of them emanating from Hollywood).

Whether this will be the future as opposed to a future – and whether it will, indeed, be glorious – remains to be seen.

Most likely in 2D.

Marc N. Kleinhenz is features editor for TotalPlayStation.com, where he has also written about PlayStation saturation. You can find his most recent fiction, a 12-page experimental webcomic entitled Immaterial Material Culture, here.