I was five years old, it was the christmas of 1991, when I received the present that I had been bugging my parents about. My neighbors had one. I wanted one. That big box under the tree was a Super Nintendo. I couldn't wait to have my own copy of Super Mario World. The SNES was the cutting edge of gaming technology, even if I couldn't have told you that at the time.

Fast forward a couple of years and I'm in third grade, and everybody I know has either an SNES or it's only real competition, the Sega Genesis. I very clearly remember talking with my friends at lunch in school about the pros and cons of either console, and it was always a rather civil (especially for grade-school kids) conversation. It would be like:

"Yeah I really like my Super Nintendo but Sega's got Sonic and the good version of Mortal Kombat."

"I know, I really like it but love coming to your house to play Street Fighter and Mario."

You see, whatever console you had, if your friend had the other, that was just another reason to look forward to going to his house. If another friend had the same console, you would just swap games back and forth so you got to play as many as possible.

This continued until the Playstation and N64 started to hit their respective strides, when I was in junior high. People were starting to become a little more defensive. At least one person would always make some bold statement like, "Playstation has better graphics and better games." Which would be followed by N64 owners defending their turf.

Next console generation, the Xbox ushers in a new competitor, so now home the video game console war is now officially a three legged race. (The Saturn was never a factor, and the Dreamcast was another flash-in-the-pan.)

I was then in high school. The Gamecube and Xbox launch my freshmen year mere days apart. The much vaunted PS2 had been out for a year but only the lucky few had one before it's competitors launched. Afterward, the supply finally started to meet the demand.

After the new car smell wore off a bit, people were really excited about two games, GTA III and Halo. It was cool to have either. If you had one you were jealous of your friend who had the other. Kinda like when we were all back in elementary school talking about our SNESs and Segas. Both Xbox and PS2 owners were united in there abusing of the Gamecube. (that stupid purple console, it's for little kids).

Later in my high school, when i was a senior in 2004, the debate had heated considerably and inexplicably. It made sense to me at the time, it only seemed natural. Now it seems silly. Maybe it was because of the launch of the online service for both consoles in the years prior. These console internet virgins were finally dipping their feet into the world wide web. Now if you wanted to play with your friends, you needed the same console so you could play online. What was once a "You have one and I have the other, let's share" had become, "You need this one if you want to play with me, 'cause I'm not leaving the house just to play games anymore." The debate was really heating up over the internet. Maybe it had been hot all the time but I really noticed it now.

Fast forward to the present. I'm now 21. Again, new consoles. The Wii is tearing up the charts but the debate lies still between Sony and Microsoft, since everybody's mom and girlfriend has a Wii anyway. The debate is just plain ridiculous. Fanboys are constantly waving the flag of the console they chose. I was moments ago reading a feature about the price points of Microsoft's external memory options, and the comment thread below was literally on fire. Just about every piece of news on GameSpot is like this, especially one regarding one console specifically. Why?

I don't want people to stop flaming, it's half the reason I log onto GameSpot in the first place. It's just plain entertaining. I've intentionally started flame wars myself, I think they're hysterical. I'm just wondering what causes them. How come the conversation was more civilized when I was in grade school? Is it because we're spending our own money instead of our parent's now? Is it purely because of the insanity of the internet?

I'm very interested in your opinion if you're reading this. I've left out telling you all the consoles I owned except the very first one in order to make this as neutral as possible. I do this in the hope that this comment thread doesn't turn into a flame war itself.

P.S. If you are older than me, and were in high school or college for a previous generation, the the 16-bit era, or the PS1-N64 era, would you mind sharing how it was for you then? Were the fanboys just as bad as they are now?