Game Theory - The Winner Of The Console Wars Is... KFC?!

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

Join former Game Theory Host MatPat as he breaks down exactly why KFC released a gaming console... Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick and Justin Kuiper Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Alex "Sedge" Sedgwick, Tyler Mascola and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

And with the KF Consul's patterned Chicken Chamber, you can keep your chicken hot and ready to eat between rounds of gaming. Wait, who in their right mind is going to want to eat fried chicken in between rounds of Call of Duty? Well, now, who wouldn't want to eat my delicious fried chicken as their gamer fuel of choice? Uh, anyone who doesn't want to have a wad of napkins next to their desk? I could not think of a greasier food than fried chicken. Well, come on now. Think of it as performance-enhancing finger lubrication. There's no way that works. My matchmaking rank doesn't lie.

Internet, welcome to food theory, is what I want to be saying, but nope, welcome to game theory. But how does gaming and KFC mix? Well, the two cross over a lot more than you'd think. For instance, back in 2015, they released Colonel Quest, a very real and very playable tribute to old school gaming, where you play as Colonel Sanders in a variety of mini-games like Baby Business. where your objective is to, quote,

catch as many babies as you can so the colonel won't get sued for malpractice. There was also courtroom brawl, where you play as a lawyer in a game where you experience the real trials and tribulations of the legal profession by caoing the client in under 30 seconds to earn a gold drumstick. This is a real game.

Someone in KFC's marketing department thought this was the best way to spend their money to get people to buy more fried chicken. And frankly, I couldn't be happier. They made the right call. They even made limited edition drumstick-shaped controllers to go with it. If old school beat-em-ups aren't your jam, no worries, KFC still has you covered. Head over to Steam for the low-low price of free, and you can download I Love You, Colonel Sanders,

a finger-licking good dating simulator. As for how to play these games, well, might I suggest the KFC branded controller for your Xbox Series X? And if you're a PC gamer, well, KFC's got you covered there too, with their fried chicken keyboard, mouse, and USB stick. mobile gamers out there. KFC hasn't forgotten you either. The gamers box 2.0 is a takeout box that doubles as a Bluetooth controller and dock for your phone. And of course, of course, how could we forget KFC's foray into the world of virtual reality? That's the right, gamers invest in a VR setup and you two can experience the hard way. A KFC themed escape room,

training demo? Either way, it's definitely a thing that is KFC branded that you can do in your VR headset. Just don't throw the chicken on the floor or else Colonel Sanders' laser beam eyes are going to intervene. And no, that is not a joke. That actually happens in the game. Heck, KFC could just rebrand itself as kind of funny content at this point. Now, admittedly, all of these are things that KFC has done for the memes, and for the marketing exposure. But all of them are also very real items that the company has actually made. So when KFC announced late last year that they were entering the console wars and challenging Sony and Microsoft with a console of their own, the KF console, I wasn't surprised. And I wasn't about to brush it off as a joke,

even if it was very clearly intended to be one, because you will presumably be able to buy and own this console. Honestly, I'm just hoping that KFC picks up the hint. We could definitely use a new editing computer, and more fried chicken, just saying. All right, so let's get down to the nitty gritty, shall we? Technically, this thing isn't really a console. If you dig into the specs, It's really more of a KFC branded gaming PC that's being built in partnership with a PC part company Cooler Master. But it does have one killer feature that sets it apart from your typical gaming PC. The patented chicken chamber. A chamber in your PC to keep your chicken warm.

And you know what? I'm here today to tell you that this thing, this unholy creation of self-aware marketing made in a modern capitalist dystopia, all to get you to buy more freaking fried chicken, This KF console with the chicken chamber, it's actually not as dumb as you might think. In fact, it's kind of brilliant. It might just have won the console wars. Step aside, PS5, the KF console, they just have gotten you beat.

I'm not even joking. I'm not. I wish, I wish I was. Stay tuned. You'll see what I'm talking about. According to Cooler Master, the chicken chamber keeps your food warm by utilizing the system's natural heat and airflow. PC and game console components, especially the CPU and graphics card, tend to generate a lot of heat. And a big part of any modern design is heat management.

This is usually done with fans to vent hot air out of the system to keep the components from overheating. The hot air is usually expelled through vents in the back, or, if you own an Xbox Series X, the vents on the top of the system. But the KF console instead expels the hot air into the chicken chamber, so that your PC can double as a mini-toaster oven. Now, that idea of using the excess heat, usually referred to as heat waste, to warm your food, might seem like it's a novel idea, but the crazy thing is that KFC isn't the first company to do this. In fact, the concept has been around in a consumer product since 1963, with more than 16 million homes making use of it. Ladies and gentlemen, may I remind you of the Easy Bake Oven.

Remember these pieces of junk? The kid-friendly ovens that had a tray large enough to quote-unquote cook four cookies at a time. each of the size of a quarter and coming with a pre-mixed dough packer that tasted like hardboard. Well, the entire idea behind the Easy Bake oven was using heat waste to cook. The reason it was kid friendly was because it had no built-in heating element. Instead, it had slots for incandescent light bulbs. Incandescent light bulbs, like the components in your PC, generate quite a bit of heat.

Shouldn't be all that surprising considering the entire way those light bulbs work is by heating a tungsten filament inside of them until it becomes hot enough to glow. And instead of just letting that heat float off into the universe, pushing us that much closer to our own inevitable heat death, the oven instead used it to, you know, cook, kind of. If you remember these things, well, you might be one of the last generations to have grown up with them because they're now discontinued

on account of modern light bulbs being too efficient. It's true. While classic incandescent light bulbs would generate a ton of heat waste, modern fluorescent, and LED bulbs are just way more efficient. That's great for the environment, but bad for Hasbro's life. of easy-bake ovens. Anyway, with that little history lesson over, the takeaway here is that KFC's chicken chamber is already a proven concept. If 200 watt incandescent bulbs are enough to serve as a heating component for your easy bake, then a gaming PC with a 650 watt power supply definitely

can. Now that 650 watt power supply isn't 100% confirmed, but it's the best estimate we have for what a PC like this would need. We can also confirm this by looking at other master cooler pre-built systems with the same specs. Of course, this leaves open a question. Out of all of the power that the PC consumes, how much heat waste is actually getting generated. Just like we saw with the Easy Bake oven, if the system gets too efficient, well, our hot chicken is gonna be more like a cold turkey. So place your bets, friends, if the PC is consuming like we estimated 650 watts, how much of that is actually gonna get converted to heat? Go ahead, take a guess. 20%, 50%, the answer is, drum roll please. Almost all of it. One thing you might remember from science class is the first,

law of thermodynamics, which states that energy is never lost, it only changes form. And basically that means every bit of energy that gets fed into your computer's components will eventually get converted to heat energy. That's why it shouldn't be any surprise that the CPU and GPU of your computer, which are the parts that use the most power, are also the parts that generate the most heat. The only energy that doesn't get converted into heat is the energy that takes other forms, like the kinetic energy of the moving parts of the fan, or the radiant energy from any fancy lighting system that you might have in there. In fact, the KF console is actually way more efficient than the Easy Bake oven,

because that was powered by bulbs that were converting a lot of their power into light instead of heat. Now compare that to the KF console, where over 99% of the power that it consumes eventually gets converted to heat. In short, this PC is capable of effectively functioning like a 650 watt oven. For comparison, a toaster oven typically uses about 1,200 watts. So the KF console is doing half that. Sure, this KF console might take a bit longer to heat up your frozen pizza rolls, but it will get the job done. Plus, they market this as something to keep your food hot,

which is something that it is more than adequate at. I mean, the heating lamps that they use in fast food restaurants to keep your food warm are usually only 250 watts. So if there was any doubt in your mind that the KF console could, as advertised, keep your chicken hot and ready to eat, worry no more, friends. It is more than up to the task. But that's only half the equation here. Because the entire point of the KF console's chicken chamber is that it serves as a heating system for the food,

while also serving as a cooling system for the PC itself. After all, the reason you want the PC to draw heat away from the CPU and GPU is to keep it from overheating. That means that, in an ideal world, our food should be absorbing as much of the heat as possible. The more heat the food absorbs, the less heat is left to leak out of the chicken chamber and back into the system. Our chicken chamber essentially has to work as a heat sink. If it doesn't, the computer is gonna fry itself. So how good of a heat sink is fried chicken? What we're looking for is something with high,

isobaric, volumetric heat capacity, which is just a measure of how much heat a substance is capable of absorbing. Luckily, this is the kind of thing that's been printed in the tables of hundreds of material science textbooks. You, of course, saved the book from that metallurgy class that you took to fill freshman science requirements, didn't ya? No? Just me? Well, luckily, I got you covered. Ranking substances by isobaric volumetric heat capacity. At the top of the list is water. Good old H2. Oh yeah! Shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Water is one of the most common coolants used in power plants around the world.

Maybe even your computer has itself a water cooled system. After water come metals like steel, iron, beryllium, and copper, all of which are pretty commonly used metals in computer heat sinks. Following these metals is liquid ammonia, which, um, isn't very practical for our purposes, considering that ammonia is that ammonia is, a gas at room temperature. But right after that is animal tissue. The Wikipedia version of this table notes animal tissue, parentheses, including human, which, well, very true, is also a very strange thing to point out. Anyway, all of this is great news for the KF console, because animal tissue in the context of a kitchen is better known as meat. As it turns out, meat has an incredibly high specific heat capacity, thereby making it great at absorbing heat waste.

Not quite as good as water, but pretty dang close, being 88% as effective. So, if you're the ultimate tryhard gamer who wants to min-max the optimal chicken chamber heat sink, the answer is to put in some water. And if you're willing to make some concessions for the sake of flavor, maybe add a flavor packet in there to make some broth or soup or something. But you're almost just as good using the KF console's patented chicken chamber exactly as they've advertised it, for keeping your chicken hot and ready

and your computer cool and performance optimized. Who knew that a console idea that seemed like it was just for the memes could actually produce a cooling solution that is, literally and figuratively, pretty dang cool? Can't see? Can I have a console now, please? But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Food theory?

Either way, bon appetit.