Friday Night Fail: The Legend Continues

Sometimes I'll play a bad game, and I'll actually like it despite its obvious deficiencies and keep playing it (see Grabbed by the Ghoulies, Too Human, Bullet Witch, etc).
Other times I'll play one, suffering through the horror in the interest of easy achievement points (Bionicle).
Occasionally I'll play a bad game, legitimately not like it, put it down, and never go back (Battle Fantasia, Shadow of the Colossus).

Then there are times when I'll play something so bad that I don't just stop playing, but look for a way to get whatever time I invested into it back. Something so terrible that I regret ever putting into my machine in the first place.
Tonight's subject would be one of those games, a horror I unwittingly unleashed upon my eyes and brain, and a game that I rarely speak of for fear that mentioning its name will somehow cause other gamers to look upon me with disgust and spit at my feet as they pass.
Tonight's Friday Night Fail is... Two Worlds.

It is fair to say that I was really excited about this game. The marketing team did a great job building the title's momentum. They showed some really nice screenshots that looked a lot like an Elder Scrolls game, and even promised an open fantasy world like the one in Oblivion. They said there would be a rich single player adventure, but there would also be a full multiplayer experience as well. They made it sound like a cross between Diablo and Phantasy Star Online (in fact, I think various press outlets may have even used those exact examples), but (unlike Phantasy Star) would be completely free to play.
Really, how could anyone not get worked up with a description like that?

When you start Two Worlds, you are put into the shoes of a butt-ugly fantasy hero out to save his sister and save the world from "the taint". Now, I'm not sure how up on slang you are, but let's just say that they REALLY should have gone with a different world crisis.
Anyway, moving on from vague anatomical references, let's just say that the writing in Two Worlds brings bad to a new level. Because it is a fantasy game, the writers obviously felt that they needed to put in cheesy "medieval" terms (to make it more middle ages street, yo). I have no problem with the occasional "thou" or "doth", but it goes above and beyond even Shakespearean levels here. There was an entire conversation between the hero and his sister, and every line started with the word "forsooth", regardless of context.

Once you start playing, the game continues to fall apart. The controls are really bad, the combat is just silly (though the goblins make really funny noises when you hit them), and this "open fantasy world" they promised is just boring. In Obvivion you wanted to crest every hill to see what awaited you on the other side, but in Two Worlds you mostly didn't care.
A special mention to the act of riding a horse in Two Worlds. Now, I've never ridden a horse in real life, but I'm pretty sure that when you want to turn, you don't come to a complete stop, rotate 90 degrees, and then resume in another straight line.

I never even tried the online mode. I wanted to, because a solid multiplayer can often erase the sins of a shoddy solo game, but to be honest I couldn't find anybody to play with.

Overall, Two Worlds has no redeeming features that I can readily think of. The story was stupid, the graphics were sub-par, the "open world" was plain boring, and the controls were shoddy. The writing and voice acting brought cheese to a level thought impossible by mortal men, and if the multiplayer is half as bad as the single then I dodged a bullet by not being able to find another person to suffer through it with me.

In the end, what saddens me most about Two Worlds is that I wasted three hours of my life playing it, and I'll never see those 180 minutes again.

Another Brick in the Wall

"People exposed to media violence are less helpful to others in need because they are 'comfortably numb' to the pain and suffering of others, to borrow the title of a Pink Floyd song."

So says professor Brad Bushman of the University of Michigan. He, along with Iowa State University professor Craig Anderson, recently conducted a study that was published in the latest issue of Psychological Science. Bear in mind that both of these professors had previously published studies with negative findings about violent video games.

This latest study apparently shows that people who play violent video games are desensitized to real life violence and human suffering.

As explained in the publication:
320 college students played either a violent or a nonviolent video game for approximately 20 minutes. A few minutes later, they overheard a staged fight that ended with the "victim" sustaining a sprained ankle and groaning in pain.
People who had played a violent game took significantly longer to help the victim than those who played a nonviolent game---73 seconds compared to 16 seconds. People who had played a violent game were also less likely to notice and report the fight. And if they did report it, they judged it to be less serious than did those who had played a nonviolent game.

Obviously, as a gamer, I have some issue with this statement. I mean, did they take into account having to find a save point before going to help? C'mon, you can't just pause anywhere, or you totally risk throwing off your groove.
Seriously, though, it seems like there could be a different way of looking at this whole thing.
If I were out and about, and witnessed a fight, I don't think the first thing I'd do is jump right into the middle of an unknown and potentially dangerous situation. I'd assess the threat, and then go with whatever I felt was an appropriate response. The last thing I need it to have a knife pulled on me because I felt like defending some stranger.
That's not desensitization. That's called common sense, and the sad realization that the world is a fucked up place and anything can happen.
Hell, maybe playing violent games make us more wary of a potentially deadly situation and allow us the ability to think before we act.
Plus, they say that the test subjects who played the violent games were less likely to notice and report the fight. Sadly, I don't think that's so much "violent games" as it is "human nature" these days.
Also, did the fight happen in front of everyone? I mean, if I'm in a group of 320 people, and there's an altercation that 200 of them rush over to, I'm probably not going to jump in. Too many cooks or something like that. Or, if it was on a one-at-a-time basis, maybe the people who play the violent games saw through the act and figured something wasn't right. Hell, we see enough bad acting in our games, so we'd be the first to pick it out in real life.
They don't mention whether or not they tested non-gamers. How would someone who didn't play any games react to the fight?

The professors continues, just like an out of control freight train:
In the second study, the participants were 162 adult moviegoers. The researchers staged a minor emergency outside the theater... The researchers timed how long it took moviegoers to [help]... Participants who had just watched a violent movie took over 26 percent longer to help than either people going into the theater or people who had just watched a nonviolent movie.

They don't mention what movies they were watching. When they say "violent", do they mean a slasher flick or an action movie? When I've just seen a superhero film, I'm pretty sure I'm a superhero myself (because I am apparently an impressionable five year old), so I'd think that someone who just saw Iron Man would be more likely to jump in and help. Unless it took me 26 percent more time to get my cape out and my little eye mask on. Secret identity and all that.
Still, there's a lot absent from this publications. Did every person who had seen the violent movie take longer to respond? Are we dealing with an average? If we're just looking at an average calculation, then it is fair to assume that there were some non-violent test subjects who took longer to respond than others. I find it hard to believe that every single subject from one side responded within a certain time frame, and all of the others did so in a different one.
More likely, they took the numbers that best fit their goals and ran with them.
I don't really play what I'd consider "violent" video games. I've been plugging away in Eternal Sonata and playing retro games in Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection. If I were to see a fight outside of a movie theater or whatever, though, I don't think I'd jump right in. That may make me a bad person, which I freely accept, but it can't be said that it's the result of violent gaming. Unless Pokemon has had a more negative affect on me than I thought.

I think we should do an alternate study, one that could defend the playing of violent games. Here's how it would work:
150 test subjects played Left 4 Dead for one hour. Another 150 played Carnival Games.
A few minutes later, participants were attacked by a horde of bloodthirsty zombies.

People who had been playing the violent zombie game knew immediately what to do, and formed an effective defense strategy. It took the non-zombie game players 84 percent longer to react, at which point all of their brains were eaten by the shambling undead.

Now all we need is zombies, and 150 people willing to play Carnival Games.

Locked Out, a Resolution (of sorts)...

OK, I'm aware that this whole "daughter's gamertag" story has gone on way too long, so I'm going to wrap things up with this post. I intend to move on, but also want to close this particular case before going back to whatever it was I was doing here before.

When we left off, I had emailed Xbox support asking if there was any way they could completely delete her profile from the servers, thus allowing me to create a new profile with the same gamertag. They had misunderstood the question and offered an answer that didn't fit the question, so I replied with clarification. They replied back, asking me to call customer support (of course) and gave me a reference number.
So I called them tonight, reference number in hand, ready for another night of frustration and disappointment.
Surprisingly enough, I managed to get a very friendly and helpful support agent tonight. Of course, the fact that I'm surprised by this only hammers home the point I was trying to make when this madness all started, but we won't dwell on that right now.
Anyway, I got this really friendly guy, who kept apologizing for the frustration I was feeling over the whole matter, and managed to clear up a lot of the confusion surrounding this craziness.
He confirmed that the issue was, in fact, that my daughter's email address had never been used to sign into a Microsoft passport site online. It was her email address that was used originally, but passport accounts become inactive after 180 days, and once this happens anything associated with that account locks up.
Hence the fact that we couldn't access anything now. He did have me try a couple things, but was pretty sure that this was the issue. He took the time to explain it all to me, making sure that I understood before moving on (which I did from the start, but was so happy to find someone who was this helpful that I let him talk just to encourage this behavior), and then offered me a couple of resolutions.
The first one was, obviously, start a new account with a new gamertag. As I had already come this far, I said that I didn't want to go with that. He politely accepted this and moved onto the next option.
He said he would roll this up to his supervisor, who would take over the call. They would then turn it over to a different team, who would look over the case and call me to discuss it. It is this team that, if necessary, can delete the profile from their servers and allow me to start fresh with the same name on a new account.
I chose this option, so he put me on hold and explained everything to his supervisor (he also, for the record, came back on the line once to apologize for the wait but assure me that he would be back with me in a few minutes). When he came back on, he had a supervisor on the line, who took over the call.
The supervisor took some info from me, verified the details of the issue, and assured me that someone would call me within the next three to five business days to discuss the problem further, and come up with an acceptable resolution.
Both the original agent and the supervisor seemed to think that deleting the tag completely was the best option, but obviously said that the final decision would be up to the management person who would be contacting me.

There's where this ends, at least for now. If anything amazing develops, I'll post some addendum or something, but I'm reasonably confident that we're on the tail end of everything now that the issue is working its way up the ranks.

The point I'd like to make, though, is that this all took a few phone calls and emails, and lots of frustration. Granted, I took it way further than most people would have, but the fact is that I think it should have been more effectively handled from the start.

Of course, our industry is hardly unique in the "poor customer service" area, especially lately. As a friend recently reminded me, it pretty much sucks everywhere now.
Walk into almost any store, and witness the generally unintelligent kids behind the counter ignore the customers and do just enough to not lose their jobs. Call most customer service lines, and get run around in circles before getting nowhere. Despite companies trying to hard to bring in and keep customers, they regularly hire people who seem hell-bent on driving them away.
I recently went into a game store and watched an employee eating a Pop-Tart while helping a customer!
So it sucks all over. I get that. I also understand that I'm a bit old-fashioned when it comes to customer service. I've been doing it for a long time, and have pretty clear views on what is acceptable and not, and sadly the rest of the world seems to have gone downhill while I held onto my now antiquated customer service ideals. So obviously that plays into this as well.

I just think that, in an industry as on the rise as gaming is, with so much press (both positive and negative), we need to be on the forefront of service as well as technology. We need to sway people who are on the fence, keep our customers coming back for more, and dazzle them not only with cutting edge graphics but with how we can help them when they have a question. I think that we need to set an example for other industries, show them that we're not just a hobby for the kiddies but a great business with a desire to help our customers.

I also think that I've beaten this horse quite enough for a while. So, tomorrow, back to making fun of random gaming news stories for a while!

Locked Out Presses On

When we last left our intrepid hero (which would, for the record, be me), I was pushing an issue way beyond the realm of normalcy.
Microsoft is unwilling or able to offer any sort of solution, and I'm unwilling to waver from my intention of keeping my daughter's gamertag intact.

I spent a while trolling forums for help and ideas, I posted a few questions onto the xbox.com forums in the hopes of finding a solution.
Here's what I've learned thus far:
The issue in question is a "design flaw", basically a glitch in the protection system. This was from an xbox ambassador on the site. He added that it was "very annoying".
I had someone suggest going to profile recovery and attempt to recover the gamertag. It will ask for an email address, and when you enter one in it will tell you if there is an associated gamertag tied to that address. So I did that. I put in my main addy first, the MS passport one, and a message popped up telling me that my gamertag was tied to that address. So I tried my two other addresses, as well as my daughter's, and in each case was told that there was no profile association. Bear in mind that a Microsoft support supervisor told me over the phone which email address was on her account (which was hers), but now the system was telling me that it was not. I also tried signing into xbox.com with her address (and all the others for fun), and chose "forgot password" for each. All of them came back stating that there was no such address on file.
One post gave a link to the blog of "Major Nelson", the voice of Xbox in many ways. It was here that I learned that there is a problem when you don't sign into xbox.com or another website that uses a Windows Live ID. The account can go dormant, and can prevent the user from recovering their gamertag as well as account management. He goes on to say that they are actively working on a solution. I'm not convinced that this is the same problem, at least not entirely (his post doesn't mention anything about child accounts), but it does sound close enough for me to keep an eye on any developments on that front. If a patch for the problem he describes also fixes the child account problem, then I call that a win across the board.

During the course of my forum research, I learned another small nugget of information that could help out.
Deleting a profile from a console, in the long run, does nothing. The gamertag stays in the system somewhere, and if anybody tries to use it they'll be told that it's already in use. This I know, it is not news, but what I learned next is.
It is possible to change a gamertag (I know this as well, as I have done it twice). It costs 800 MS points ($10), and you change it and that's all. What I did not know before, though, is that when you make that change, the old profile name is immediately "recycled" and available for use again by whoever claims it next.
I posted a question onto the Xbox forums, looking for confirmation on this, and did get a positive response. If you're changing a tag (instead of deleting), the old tag doesn't hang around.

This led me to a new course of action. I would change her gamertag to something random. I would then create a new profile for her (most likely putting her age in as 18 to avoid any of this in the future), using the original name. She'd lose her achievements, which she doesn't care about, but she would get to keep her gamertag.
I went onto her profile, and went to purchase enough points to pull this off. I may have mentioned previously that I had tried to put a credit card number onto her account, without success, but for some reason this time it worked. I added my card, and then went to buy some points.
However, I could not add points to her account. Because it is a child account, and they obviously don't want kids racking up crazy charges on their parents' cards, that feature is locked. I have no problem with this, but when I went into the family settings of the console to change this and unlock the download options, I ran into the same wall I have been from the beginning. When I try to access any features, it tells me that it "cannot connect to Xbox Live" when I'm already on freaking Xbox Live.
So I can't add points, so can't change the tag, so that blows my brilliant scheme out of the water.

I emailed Microsoft (apparently I never learn), asking them if they could delete the tag completely on their end, so I could then just remake the profile with the same name. I got a response, but I don't think they fully understood what I was asking. They basically told me that if I delete my profile, it stays in the system so I can retrieve it if I choose to do so at a later date.
I replied, trying to explain the situation better, and am waiting for a response.

I intend to call Microsoft again later tonight, to see if I can make any headway. I'll share the tale as it unfolds.

A Customer Service Tangent

I should point out that I have a bit of a "hair trigger" when it comes to customer service stuff. I have been in customer service for nearly twenty years now, in fields ranging from retail to hospitality to theme parks, so I have certain (and very high) expectations about how someone in customer service should act.
I hardly expect someone to be smarmy and uber-polite, following me around their store or anything like that, but I do expect a basic level of competence and personality. I also expect that, if there is a problem, that problem gets corrected in some reasonable fashion.
That being said, as much as I try to be understanding that someone is "just doing their job". I have been on that side of the counter, and have dealt with my fair share of jerks. For the most part I can get in and out of an establishment with little issue.
However, I am generally the last person you want to deal with if you happen to be in customer service and you do something I don't like. This is especially true over the phone, for some reason. Maybe it's a bit of the "anonymity breeds asshole-ity" thing from the girl gamer discussion last week, but for whatever reason I am way worse over the phone when things go wrong.
Either way, I am often the type of customer that I hated dealing with when I was in customer service. I had outrageously high expectations of my staff when I managed customer service teams, and these expectations were usually met, so I suppose I just expect everyone else to have those same expectations.

Generally, if something goes wrong, but there is some sort of effort put forth to correct the problem, I'll be OK.
For example, I recently had a minor issue in a clothing store. I ignored it, but went back about a month later and had the same issue, and in both cases the staff there just shrugged and didn't seem to care much about it. For the record, I would have been considerably more understanding if the staff seemed to give a rat's ass about the situation. I mean, they didn't even apologize about it, which is a cardinal sin.
So I emailed their corporate office, very politely, and explained that I didn't want to go back into that store if I was going to keep having issues. I got a prompt email response, apologizing and asking for my mailing address, and a few days later I got an apology letter and a 20% off coupon.
I feel that this is an acceptable outcome. Not just because of the coupon, but because there was prompt attention to the matter. The email response, as well as the follow-up letter, was very polite. They acknowledged the issue and why I was frustrated by it, offered a resolution, and I feel that the case is now closed.

I'm also, in some cases, willing to accept defeat if it is clear from the start that something cannot be done due to a technical issue or really firm policy that is in place for a specific reason.
I emailed Nintendo the other day, as an example.
See, my girlfriend and I recently broke up, and as such are no longer living together. I have a Wii, and she was using it a lot lately to play the new Animal Crossing game. So when we split, I tried to put her save file onto a memory card so she could transfer it eventually when she gets her own Wii.
Unfortunately, the save file won't move. Now, I had considered selling her my Wii (my daughter has one, so I can use hers, and all of my save files will transfer), but I have downloaded several games from the Virtual Console which are now stuck on my system's internal memory. These cannot be moved either, and I have dumped a fair amount of money into my retro gaming habit and have no desire to lose any of those games.
So I emailed Nintendo, briefly explained that I had been living with someone, we were sharing a Wii, but now we're going our separate ways and want to move either the Animal Crossing save or find a way to move/ redownload the Virtual Console games onto a new machine.
I got a quick response (I consider anything within 24 hours to be so). The support agent acknowledged that it seemed to be a very frustrating situation, apologized, but explained that there was no way to move an Animal Crossing save between devices and that Virtual Console games were also bound to the system they were downloaded to.
Again, acceptable. Not the answer I really wanted, but a clear answer. There was an apology, a bit of an attempt to acknowledge the frustration of the situation, and told me up front that there was no way to do what I was asking.

So why is this so different from the Microsoft situations?
Basically because, in the MS cases, there should be something to do about them.
With my daughter's gamertag issue in particular, I'm not trying to do anything outrageous. I am trying to access an account that I set up, utilize the features of said account within the acceptable parameters of its usage, and am meeting only with lose and fail as a result.
Add onto that the fact that their staff seems unable to help at all, which is only helping me to get seriously frustrated. None of the support agents have come out and stated that there is a "design flaw with the child accounts that have unfortunately caused a small number of them to lock up", or whatever other company line they want to feed people.
If they had, I'd probably still be fighting to get the issue fixed, but it would be a different fight. It would at least sound like they knew what they were talking about, and oddly that would make me feel a bit better about dealing with them.
The issue here is not only a "broken" system, but the lack of training evidenced by their staff.

When I worked for a theme park (I won't say which, but know that my "boss" was a large mouse), one fact was hammered into us throughout our training: A customer will only remember the worst part of their experience.
Basically, let's say you have a family who come down to the park. It's their first time there, they've been saving for years, and they're all excited. They check into their hotel without problems, hit the rides, and everything is going great. They're having fun, sending cheesy "wish you were here" postcards to the neighbors, and taking pics of the kids in front of everything.
Then, on the last day of their trip, they have a bad experience. A bad meal at a restaurant, maybe. They complain, don't get the attention or resolution they feel is appropriate, and leave the restaurant upset.
When they get home, and all their friends are asking about the trip, the first story these people will tell is about the bad experience. Every fun moment that happened before and after is nullified by the one sour moment. This is really important, so I am going to state it again:
The first thing they will tell anybody, no matter how much fun they had before and after that meal, will be about how bad that one experience was!
They may eventually talk about of the fun stuff, and show way too many pictures of the husband/ dad in bermuda shorts, but the first thing that came out of their mouths will be the negative.
This spreads bad word-of-mouth, and also has a habit of snowballing and picking up other bad experiences. Let's say they tell a neighbor about the bad meal. That neighbor, who may have had a bad experience at the park several years earlier, suddenly remembers it and shares that story. Now we have bad compounded onto bad.
To be fair, though, bad experiences are going to happen. No matter how hard you try, it is impossible to please everybody all of the time. Sooner or later someone is going to get upset, regardless of where the fault lies, and what happens next separates good customer service from bad.
Continuing with our "bad meal at a theme park" example, let's say that this family complained about whatever had upset them. The employee attempts to help them, grabs a supervisor for support, and they come to an amicable resolution. Maybe they comp the meal, or offer a free dessert, or whatever they need to do to make the people leave happy.
That's one thing you learn, wherever you're servicing customers: Never let them leave upset.
So now this family is pleased with the resolution, and when they go home they're not still fuming about the problem. They may mention it, but will also clarify with "they took really good care of us" or some other explanation. This only furthers the good word-of-mouth: If there's a problem, it gets quickly and effectively resolved.

This basic customer service fact carries over into any industry, regardless of whether a rodent is in charge or not.

Which brings us to our industry, and specifically the issue I'm having with Microsoft.
I'm pretty pissed about this whole thing, no matter how trivial it may seem to some. So despite the fact that I'm a huge 360 fanboy and have logged countless of hours playing their games and will no doubt continue to do so, this one experience is clouding everything right now. I'm telling people about it, I'm actually playing my 360 considerably less than normal lately, and right now the bad is seriously outweighing the good.
Truth is, though, I'm a gamer, and the need to play games on my favorite system will eventually win out over anything. If I don't get a resolution, there will definitely be a sore spot, but I'm too hardcore to give up over much of anything.
What if I wasn't a hardcore gamer, though? What if I was just an average person who had heard good things about the console and had picked one up for the family? Say we played some games, had a good casual time, but then something negative happened (like, say, the kids being unable to do anything with their profiles and the parents' passwords not working). We call the manufacturer, get run around in circles for an hour, and end up with no resolution and not even a decent apology for the issue.
What happens when someone at work asks how we're liking the new machine? Would I start saying how much we love playing Blue Dragon or something? No. I'll immediately launch into how pissed I am about the problem we've been having. My judgement is clouded, I may have just talked someone out of buying one, and in the end nobody wins.

Our industry, comparatively, is still very young. We're still dealing with a lot of pressure from politicians and "family" groups, our audience is still expanding at an amazing rate, and despite all of our strides forward we still have a long way to go.
We should be going out of our way to offer the best service possible in every possible situation. Not only will we retain those already gaming, but it is those people who are going to help us sell more consoles and more games, and help us move forward in every respect. There are still a lot of people out there who casually play but don't really understand the machines, new people with questions, and if we can't help them they're going to get frustrated and move on.
The more people we scare away, the closer we get to being a bunch of geeky 18-24 year old guys playing games in our parents' basements again. It's taken us a long time to work out of that image (and, some would argue, we're not there yet), so the last thing we want is to take several giant steps back.
By not being willing or able to help our gamers, new and old, casual and hardcore, that's what we're risking.


Anyway, in the next post, the thrilling saga of the locked-up child profile continues!

Locked Out, Continued

And so, our saga continues:

After finding no help with actual customer service people I turned to our faithful friend, the interweb. I hit up Microsoft's xbox.com site first, but nothing there offered much help. There was a lot of stuff about promoting a child account when they turn 18, but not much about how to access an account that is apparently locked out.
Then I started surfing the forums for help, as well as Googling different versions of the problem to see what popped up. I spent a while perusing posts from a variety of different sources (I do enjoy a good forum hunt from time to time), but didn't really find any concrete help. A lot of it was minors bitching about the fact that they can't access anything without their parents' permission. Some of it was kids that had turned 18 but were still having issues with their tag. Not much really pertained to my issue, and what I did find offered no clear resolution.

So I decided to post my own question, directly onto xbox.com's forums. I briefly explained the issue in their tech support area, and waited for a response.
I actually did get one, though it wasn't what I wanted to hear. Apparently there is some design flaw in the protection system that is causing this, and from what I now understand I am not the first to come across it.
As an aside, "design flaw" is often code for "we really have no idea and don't want to bother trying to fix it".
Either way, I'm now up against a "design flaw" that is preventing my daughter from doing much with her gamertag.

Which leaves us with:
A) Wait until she's 18 to do anything.
B) Start a whole new profile/ gamertag for her. This means that she loses her achievements (not a big deal to her), as well as the tag she has (which sort of matches mine, which is all so disgustingly cutesy) which she really likes.
Not to mention, that option smacks of stupid as well, because if I start another child account for her there's no guarantee I won't be going through this all again if the "design flaw" strikes again. I could just fake her age and put her in as 18. For the record, that completely undermines the whole point of a child account in the first place.

I did come across another poster on the forums who was dealing with almost the exact same issue, so we compared notes. She had talked to customer support as well, and after about an hour they admitted to her that they really had no way to fix this. It was a glitch in the system that affected a "small number" of child accounts, wherein it just locks it up and doesn't allow anybody to do anything with it. She had decided to give up then, and just make a new profile for her child, with no intention of even putting it online at all.
I, however, fully intend to push the issue further. I know that I can just make a new profile, even get the gamertag almost identical with the use of variant spellings or l33t, but I've never been accused of knowing when to quit. Plus, I think that this is something that can and should be corrected, so I intend to see it through until it is or I admit defeat.

Given the amount of child accounts that are probably out there, and the fact that Microsoft (as well as the others) do a lot to promote their consoles as "family friendly", you'd think that there would be more work put into these "design flaws". My daughter is already frustrated with the fact that she can't accept her own mother's friend request, so she just gave up on it and went back to playing Wii instead.
So good job, MS, you may have just lost a supporter. I'm pretty angry at the whole thing myself, and am much less likely to recommend a 360 to any friend that wants to play with their kids.

A doom-and-gloom outlook, of course, but I'm trying to think like a layman and not a gamer here. If someone who was reasonably new to the hobby was dealing with this, would they have given up already?
Of course, there is always the possibility that a layman also wouldn't care about this nearly as much as I do.

Tune in later for the next installment of this amazing tale.

The Service Files: Locked Out

So here's a fun issue:
A while back, I set up a gamertag on my Xbox 360 for my daughter (who is now 12), a Silver Live profile on my console. She played a bit here and there, just dabbling with the LEGO games and such mostly, but now she's starting to get more into the whole thing.
Her mom just got a 360, and sent our daughter a friend request. I then signed onto her profile to accept it, and here's where all the stupid started.
See, when setting up an account for a child, the parent must put in some of their own information to verify and protect. As a parent, I have little issue with this. It asked me my email address and prompted the creation of a password, which I obviously entered where appropriate. I did everything asked to get this profile up and running.

So now we're trying to accept a friend request, and we get an error message telling us that there's some Windows Live ID error. It then asks for a password to continue, which I obviously then entered. Then I get a message telling me that it's invalid.
I know what my password is, but for both shits and giggles I proceeded to enter every password I could think of that I have ever used in my life (including my freaking ATM pin code), on the tiniest remote chance that I had my mental wires crossed. Bear in mind that I intentionally only use a couple passwords to insure that stuff like this won't happen, so there's no way that this particular situation would be something completely random.
Anyway, nothing. I kept getting the same error message.
Then I emailed Xbox customer support. I don't know why I bother with emailing them. I've done it before, for other issues, and the response I always get is to call customer support on their 800 number. Really, I'm unsure as to why they even offer an email address at all, if the response is always going to be "call us".
You wouldn't think that I'd have to explain to Microsoft, masters of the websauce, that the reason we email these things is so that WE DON'T HAVE TO CALL!

Anyway, I called, and proceeded to spend over an hour wasting my time. After talking to a support agent and a supervisor, I finally hung up in disgust at the uselessness of it all.
First, I had to try to get across what I was trying to do. This should be simple: "I am trying to gain access to my daughter's Live profile". Unfortunately, this took a bit longer to explain, and with a lot more words (none of them profane at this point in time). The agent decided to have me remove my hard drive and memory cards and perform a system reset, which essentially clears out and restores the system settings to factory default. I knew before we even started that this was not the right road to go down in reference to my actual issue, but I humored the kid and did what he asked. At the end, I had nothing to show for our efforts except the fact that I now had to put all my settings back to the way I like them.
We then went into the "family settings" area of the console. We monkeyed around in there for a bit, with no resolution for our troubles.
While he was sounding confused, I was also working on my own, going into various menus and such in the hopes of figuring it out. I made my way to the profile's account settings, and here's where things got even more fun. It's important to note here that I was signed into Xbox Live while doing this. There is an option to "change Windows Live ID", which looked promising. When I hit it, though, a message came up stating that I "could not connect to Live", though as I mentioned I was on Live when this happened.
I suspect that this is some form of lockout so that kids can't go in and change the settings themselves. I have no problem with that. I have a bit of an issue with the fact that I figured that reasoning out and the Microsoft support agent didn't, but we won't go into a rant (again) about how useless customer service people generally are.
I also tried to go into my profile, which is in a fashion linked to hers. It gives me the option to change family settings, and then brings up the option to choose her profile. One would assume that this means I can now change the settings for that particular profile. Instead, it signs me out and signs her in, then proceeds to tell me that I can't continue because she's not signed onto Xbox Live. Which, as I have mentioned, she is.
So after almost an hour of going around in circles, I finally asked what email address was on her profile, though I was pretty sure I knew the answer. Not sure why I thought that might help in some way, but I was grasping at straws by this point.
Bear in mind that, by this point, I had given the agent: my name, her name, our address, my phone number, my gamertag, her gamertag, my email address, her email address, and everything else short of our blood types. So when I asked him what the email address was, he told me that he couldn't give that out without verification, due to security concerns.
I'm all for safety and security, especially where my kid is concerned, but that was a bit over the top.
So he suggested that I add my credit card to her account while we were talking. Then he could bring up her profile on his end, see my credit card number, and that would work for verification. Never mind the fact that I could have entered really any card number, so even if I was somehow some loony trying to hack this profile, I don't know what adding something at this point would have solved.
Still, trying to humor the underpaid and undertrained support kid, so I went to enter my card in. Of course, it didn't let me do so. Maybe because it's a child account and they don't want kids putting their daddy's credit card in? Maybe because it's the same card that I have tied to my own profile? Who knows. He certainly didn't. Either way, this went nowhere.
Finally I got put in touch with a supervisor, who was not only unhelpful but had the personality of a cabbage. Really, that's beside the point: If he's helpful, and basically polite, I don't care if he's monotonous, but since I have a 20 year customer service background, I guess I expect a little more. Just me being picky.
I spent about fifteen minutes or so with him, accomplishing next to nothing. He did confirm that the email address I used was my daughter's (which I knew already), but couldn't do anything in terms of resetting the password or helping me fix her profile in any way.
Finally, I hung up before I finally snapped and started insulting his entire family in a very foul-mouthed rage.
The call clocked in at about an hour and ten minutes, and by the end I was exactly where I started, except way more pissed off.

By now I was tired, had been working on the issue for a couple of hours (I had been trying all sorts of things on my own before calling Microsoft, most of which they had me repeat over the course of the call anyway), and felt like I was beating my head against a wall, so I decided to call it quits for the nights.

It was my hope that, with a fresh head and maybe some new ideas, I could tackle the issue again the next day.

Our next installment will share how far that optimism got me...

The Service Files, Part Two

I'd like to share a story, the birth of my realization that customer service in this industry quite often sucks.
It is important to note that the issue I had with Microsoft has been corrected, not only on a personal level (as the story will explain), but as it is a problem that a lot of people have had they have gone ahead and put out a real solution to the problem. I applaud them for that, but it doesn't escape two basic facts:
1) This is something that probably should have been anticipated from the start. While it is impossible to cover every base before release, a better (and quicker) solution could have presented itself if some foresight had been used.
2) My problem with all of this is only partly the actual technical issue. A lot of my annoyance is due to the "service" to which I was subjected while trying to correct said issue.

It started in August of 2006. My first 360 had finally suffered its red-ringed death, as so many of its launch day siblings had. As I had purchased a warranty directly through the store from which I bought the console, I felt no need to send it back to Microsoft for repair and instead just brought it into the store and exchanged the machine for a brand new one.
Now, I need to share some relevant information before I continue. There were three separate profiles on my console: mine, my daughter's, and my girlfriend's. Over the course of the several months leading up to the machine's demise, I had downloaded a rather insane amount of arcade games. One of the cool features of the downloads was that anyone on that console had access to the downloads from their own profile. So, I had downloaded Bejeweled 2 from mine, but my girlfriend could play it with her own profile.

So I exchanged my console, got my new one, and hooked it all up. What I quickly found out was that now mine was the only profile that could access any of the downloaded games (the other profiles simply saw them as trial versions), and that I could only play them if I was connected to Live. If I was having internet issues, for example, none of the games would appear as anything other than the free trial versions.
I called Microsoft customer support to try to figure this all out. The part about me having to be online to play the games wasn't a huge deal, as I was usually connected, but the fact that the other profiles were now denied access to the downloads was pretty upsetting.
The first person I spoke to was little to no help. He kept telling me that if I had sent my console to them instead of exchanging it at the store, there wouldn't have been a problem. I finally had to very clearly explain that I had not done that, and that there was no way to go back and change that fact, so we may as well just move on from there. His answer to the problem was just to have the other players use my profile if they wanted to play an arcade game.
As a customer, I didn't like that answer. I had bought these games with the understanding that anybody with a profile on my system would have access to them. Now I was being told that this was not the case, simply because the system broke and I didn't send it in.

Over the course of the next few months, I called back repeatedly and spoke to a bunch of different support agents. What I noticed was a few key problems:
*) Despite them taking your name and info, and giving you a reference number for the problem, they apparently take no information concerning the problem itself, as every time I called and spoke to someone new, I had to completely explain the entire problem again. This not only frustrated me no end, but it also meant that they wanted to go through the same basic troubleshooting sequence again and again. At some point I stopped doing what they asked, but just gave them an "OK" after each step to indicate that I had.
*) The answers sometimes varied wildly. Some would really try to do a bunch of useless things in an attempt to solve the issue, others would basically tell me I was screwed. While this may be in part a personality thing, as we were dealing with different people each time, it does tie into what I am about to reveal next.

What I learned over the course of the next few months was that, when buying anything from Xbox Live, it records the serial number of the machine to which it was downloaded. This is basically a security feature, a sort of anti-piracy step put in place to make sure that people aren't sharing games.
Example: If there was no such system in place, and I downloaded Pac-Man to a memory card, there would be nothing stopping me from circulating that card to all of my friends. They could then copy the file to their hard drives, and they'd all be getting the game for free off of just one initial download. With this serial number binding system, though, it insures that everybody has to buy their own copy of the game.
I actually have no real problem with that. I understand business, understand sales and making money and such, so don't really consider it a sin to make sure people aren't sharing games. My issue was that I had bought the games, did nothing wrong (it was the console that failed, and all I was guilty of was exchanging it at the store and not sending it in), and now my purchases weren't working exactly as promised.
My other issue was that not everybody on that end knew this answer. If, from the first day, I had been told about the security feature, I might have been more understanding. I may have still pushed for a resolution, but at least I would have had some knowledge on the basic problem we were facing. Instead I got different answers from different people, some really trying to help when the fact is that their help was useless because of the serial number lockout system in place. I would expect them to know that from the start.
How hard is it to train your customer support staff to have the same answers? I'll admit, I've never had to run a crew of more than 10-12 people, but I always managed to keep everyone on the same page. If there was some critical info that needed sharing, it happened, and that way any customer that came in with that particular question got the same basic answer every time.
It just gave me the impression that, not only were Microsoft's support staff themselves fairly useless, but their entire support system and training was a joke.

I kept pressing the issue, fighting the good fight as it were, and it wasn't until about six months later that I finally made some real headway.
It was finally determined that they were going to refund the points I had spent, so that I could repurchase the games. They sent it through supervisors and the legal department and all, but finally opted to help me out. They had me create a whole new profile, online with a Silver Live account. If I had just redownloaded the games from my own profile, it wouldn't have changed anything (plus, I had tried that myself before my initial call, and had retried it several times with different agents as part of the troubleshooting protocols), so I had to make a new profile and they were going to put the points into that account. Then I could download the games from there, and they would work across all profiles.
I created said account, and called them as instructed, and to give me the points back they were giving me codes over the phone that I was entering into my console. Unfortunately, three of the four codes didn't work, so I had to wait another week for them to call me back with new codes.

For the record, after they subtracted a couple of gamertag changes (800 points each), Zune music downloads (I have both accounts linked), and some other random downloads that weren't covered, they still refunded me nearly 9,ooo points.
I download a lot of arcade games...

So, in the end, I got what I wanted. I deleted the games from my console, downloaded them fresh from the new profile (OK, I didn't bother with the ones that weren't that good to begin with, and bought myself some new titles in the process), and once again everybody could use them.
It should be noted that this was a big issue, not only for me, but apparently for a lot of people. I had been surfing forums during the ordeal, looking for answers, and found a lot of people in a similar boat. I was more determined to get a resolution through support than a lot of them, but I was hardly the only one dealing with the download licensing issue.

The problem has now been fixed, for the most part. If you change consoles for any reason, you can go onto xbox.com and do a license transfer, which carries over any download licenses to the new serial number. You then have to delete and redownload everything (which takes a while when you have over thirty arcade games spread across two profiles, by the way), but it can be done. There are some caveats, such as it only being able to be done once per year, but it's a fix either way.

The basic theme here, I hope, is that a simple problem was seriously acerbated by a shoddy support system. Had the staff been more knowledgeable about the issue, there could have been a resolution earlier, or at least I would have felt better if I had gotten some real answers as to what the problem really was.

If I wasn't so determined, or wasn't the type not to let this sort of setback completely kill gaming as a whole for me, what would I have thought? Would your average casual person have seen it through, or given up in disgust? Then again, would a "layperson" have cared that they might have to share a profile in the first place?

Sadly, this was not the last time I would go up against Microsoft customer support, as we will learn throughout this week...

The Service Files, Part One

The industry likes to proudly state how many new gamers are being brought into the fold every day. With the explosion of casual gaming, and other factors, people who may have never held a controller in their life are now messing around with the hobby.
I've discussed in the past how I think the hardcore gamers might be holding back the industry, and I've also suggested that the technology in today's gaming machines have gone beyond the manufacturers' abilities to produce without an absurdly high risk of failure. Now, though (and for the next several days), I'm going to discuss something else that is hurting our industry and preventing it from taking much-needed leaps forward.
The issue on the table is customer service.

As I've just said, there are a lot of new gamers coming into the fold, and there are already millions of us out there who have been playing for a long time.
As the machines get more complex, and the various services (such as online play and download marketplaces) get more involved, people are naturally going to come up against issues. While a hardcore gamer may be able to figure some out on their own (perhaps more than a gaming "noob" can), there will be more and more instances where they could find themselves needing to call a customer/ tech support line.
What happens next can very well sway a person's feelings not only on the manufacturer and their machine, but the industry in general.

I'm going to try and explain that better with an example: Let's say that a young man decides to get into gaming. He hasn't really played much since the Sega Genesis he had when he was a kid, but a bunch of his friends play online with a new machine and he wants to join in. He goes out, buys a console and a game, and brings it home.
Everything is fine for a little while, but something goes wrong and his system stops working. He tries some of the basic troubleshooting options in the manual (making him the only person on the planet to actually read a manual, so the example isn't totally in step with reality), and even hops online to see if there's an easy answer. Eventually, he is forced to call the customer support line.
If he gets perfect service, they help him with his questions and find a suitable answer, then everything is peachy and he goes back to gaming. He may even mention to his buddies that he had an issue but tech support was awesome and fixed the problem.
The other possibility is that he doesn't get that great experience, but gets run around in circles and just gets frustrated with the entire experience. This not only sours himself on the machine, but the company that produced it and is now giving him a headache over the phone, and may even color his perception on the entire gaming industry as a whole. Deciding that the annoyance isn't worth it, he could just abandon the hobby and move on to something that doesn't require such obnoxious phone conversations.

Maybe an extreme example, but certainly possible. I've had to call customer support more than once, and generally want to slam my head against a wall each time.
I can figure a lot out on my own. I've owned just about every game machine out there, and I've certainly picked up a few things along the way. We've reached the point, though, where sometimes the issue is just beyond any basic knowledge or common gaming sense that a hardcore gamer may have learned over the years.
Also, as a hardcore gamer, I'm hardly going to let a bad customer service experience dampen my need to play. It has, however, gotten me extremely frustrated to the point where I just haven't touched the machine in question for a few days.
Which got me thinking, if someone didn't have the hardcore drive, could that frustration cause them to give up entirely?
I mean, I've stopped shopping in stores that have really pissed me off for one reason or another. I'll avoid a product or something if I had a bad experience, and I know that there are lots of people who do the same thing, so is it too much to assume that the same sensibility applies to the gaming industry?

Part of the issue is, and I hate to throw this out there, the manufacturers aren't hiring gamers to be their tech support people.
In most cases, the person on the other end of the phone is simply reading off of a screen. You tell them what the issue is, they plug that in, and they basically read you what pops up. You can do much the same by going onto that company's support site and entering in the problem yourself. As they gain some experience, they may be able to pick up on things here and there, but the fact is that many of them know only what their monitor tells them.
I once had to call a tech support line with an issue with my console, and was chatting with the guy on and off while we waited for his computer to catch up with us. I had explained that I sold the consoles for a living (at the time), and had already run through all of the basic troubleshooting techniques that I offer to my customers. He then mentioned that I may know more about the machine then he does, since he doesn't own one and hasn't really played one much.
I'll pause here for a second to let that one sink in.

OK, back with me? The person I was asking for help had no practical hands-on training with the machine he was trying to help me fix. To some people, that may not be a big deal, but for me it's pretty huge. There is only so much that an online help manual is going to tell him, and quite often it's that extra bit of experience that makes the difference between success and failure. Do you want your mechanic reading about engines from a book as he fixes your car, because he doesn't own one and has never really driven?
So experience is a big problem. I'm not saying that they should only hire people that own their console, but offer some training classes or regular certifications. Put a few systems in the goddamn break room or something.

Another glaring problem is the technical aspects of some problems. I have run up against issues that, after tons of work, we still couldn't fix simply because of a "design flaw" or other glitch that prevented a resolution.
The last thing a person wants to hear is that their issue can't be resolved because the manufacturer screwed up.


Over the course of the next... however long this goes on... I'm going to keep talking about this. I'm actually going to share some real technical issues I've had, and what (if anything) happened when I called tech support. One of the issues is still ongoing, so we're going to get a play-by-play as the saga unfolds.

It should be noted: It is not my intention to take sides here, and I'm not trying to say that one manufacturer sucks or anything like that. However, a lot of this is going to be aimed squarely at Microsoft. This is simply because I play my 360 more than anything else, and have had to call them more than once. I don't really play my Sony systems much, and have never called them for anything (I'll ask around, though, to see if I can get any information on their service system, or maybe I'll just make up a problem with my PSP and give them a buzz).
I have only had to call Nintendo once, when my DS was having issues connecting to Wi-Fi, but they were amazingly friendly and competent and solved the issue right over the phone. I know, though, from being acquianted with a few of their sales reps, that Nintendo really works to give their employees product knowledge, so that certainly helps.

Let's see where this grand adventure takes us, shall we?

DSi

Nintendo has finally announced that the next version of the DS handheld, the DSi, is due to be released (in America) on April 5th for a price of $170.
The system has been out in Japan for a little while now, and has done well in the way that Nintendo products (and new tech toys in general) do in Japan.

So what's so different? The system is a little smaller and lighter than the existing Lite model, but the screens are bigger. It has a camera on the outside, as well as one aimed inward to capture the user's image. There are all sorts of tools to play with the pictures: warping, recoloring, drawing, and such, and it has been said that some games will incorporate the cameras in some fashion (while the DSi will play all existing DS games, it has been announced that there will be DSi specific titles as well).
They dropped the GBA slot, which is a mixed blessing to me. I never really used it, but at the same time I liked having it there for those random times when I want to play Pinball of the Dead on a train or something. Honestly, I probably won't miss it too much (it's not like I don't have 3 different GBAs floating around here), but any time a feature is "dropped" it causes a moment of consternation. It does mean that anybody wanting to transfer Pokemon from Ruby, Sapphire, or Emerald into Diamond, Pearl, or Platinum are going to have to stick with a regular DS or Lite as the GBA slot is required for that task. There will be a few other games, Guitar Hero comes to mind, that won't play on the DSi at all due to the lack of GBA slot.
Anyway, they instead add a slot for an SD memory card. This will be used for music, as the unit is a music player (which does nothing for me). It will also allow the saving of photos, and will tie into the other big feature of the DSi: downloadable games.
The DSi will feature a download service from which you can purchase games and save them right to the unit. What shows up on the service, and how it all actually works out, remains to be seen. They did say that a version of Brain Age will be on there, but haven't really said much else.
There are a lot of minor upgrades to the whole affair that are pretty cool. You'll be able to change the brightness of the screen on the fly, without having to go back to the main menu. You can now access the main menu without turning off the system and turning it back on, and you can change cartridges without shutting the system down. Just little bells and whistles that streamline the DS experience, but are definitely welcomed.

I really don't need one. I have perfectly serviceable DS Lite, a limited edition gold Zelda one (that I traded my perfectly serviceable black one in and then paid an extra amount for, and I have no intention of trading the DS towards the DSi). I don't have a job, so I really shouldn't be thinking about shelling out money for anything like that right now. I mean, I can trade some games in towards it (which I hate to do, because trade values at Gamestop are crap), which will offer a bit of help but will hardly come close to paying it off.
Plus, while they've announced a lot for it, there's a lot they haven't said. What sort of games will be on the download service? What "DSi specific" titles will hit shelves?
Really, aside from some minor upgrades and some future potential, what makes me need this?
Nothing, outside of the fact that I am a gamer and I need the new toy. I like the geeky street cred that comes from having the newest and shiniest. I am a Nintendo fan, especially where their handhelds are concerned, and I believe in that future potential.
I keep telling myself (and others) that I can always cancel the reservation. This is just to guarantee that I can get one if things turn around, I mantain, and if things still suck by the release date I can always just get my deposit back and wait until my situation is better.
Of course, once the system is released, and I see it, I pretty much know that I'm going to need it. I'll be hugging it to me in the store, glaring suspiciously at people around me and telling them to stay away from myyy preciousssss. There could very well be biting.
There really is no clear way to explain it. If you're a gamer, you already understand. If you're not, then just look upon those of us that will be buying the DSi day one and pity us for our madness.

Obviously, I knew that the DSi would eventually hit our shores. I mean, aside from the fact that Nintendo said it would back when it was released overseas, even if they hadn't everyone knew that we would one day see it here.
Nintendo had, though, hinted that it was a ways away, and I was actually speculating an early Autumn release. With no new hardware slated for the holiday season, it seemed like the perfect opportunity for Nintendo to release the system and sell a quadrillion units and have a big shortage and people flipping out accusing them of hoarding them to increase demand and all that.
So a holiday release seemed likely to me, and I occasionally glanced at the Japanese hands-on reports but really wasn't paying it too much mind. I knew I wanted one, knew I'd own one eventually, but figured I had a fair amount of time.

Then Nintendo comes out and drops the April bombshell. The release is less than 2 months away! Ods Bodkins!
As soon as I read (on Tuesday) about the release date, I texted a friend at a game store to see if they had heard anything. She confirmed later that the store would be taking reservations starting on Thursday. So that day I rushed in and plunked down my $25 to hold a black DSi.
I had assumed that there would be some huge rush for them, that I had to get my reservation in quickly to avoid missing out. I've been through plenty of system launches, I know that as soon as they hit allotment (and most systems have a very specific number) they'll cut it off.
As of the end of that day, the only reservations were myself and the friend that had supplied the info. We stopped by another local store later that night, and the person there remarked that she had totally forgotten about the system and such until we mentioned it. They had gotten no reservations at all as of that point in time.
It'll probably pick up. I'm sure there will be more reservations, and I'm sure as more people get wind of it the popularity will snowball. Plus, there are a lot more people out there like me than we care to admit, so I seriously doubt that on April 5th my friend and I will be the only ones there to pick up our new toys.
It got me thinking, though: what if it doesn't sell? I mean, we're in one of the worst economic situations the country has ever seen. People are scaling back on everything, so is the average human going to shell out $170 on a new toy, especially when it's only (for all intents and purposes) an incremental upgrade of an existing device that is substantially less expensive? Plus, a lot of parents aren't going to really think that the DSi is worth the extra money for their kids, since a lot of the new features (downloads and such) seem geared towards an older audience. Nintendo has stated that the DSi is not replacing the DS, and that they will coexist peacefully to allow people a choice, but how long that lasts remains to be seen.
Releasing the unit now seems pretty risky. Of course, there will be early adopters, gamer/ tech geeks who need the newest and shiniest, Nintendo diehards that will buy anything they put out, but the average person is going to probably wait and see. Nintendo is going to have to do a hell of a job convincing people that the extra features are worth the extra $40.
What concerns me is a potential scenario in which the DSi itself is blamed for its poor sales, if it really doesn't do as well as Nintendo and retailers hope it will. Given the economic crisis, the fact that it's just an upgrade and not a whole new system, and the fact that we're really nowhere near a gift-giving holiday (which may cause people to wait on purchasing, especially when coupled with financial concerns), the DSi has a real potential to not sell as much as expected early on. If that happens, then retailers and game companies need to look at all the facts involved.
Otherwise, the DSi could be branded a "failure". Support won't be as strong, and could even peter out entirely. Those of us who rushed to buy one could get burned by a rapid price drop, or even see the downloads and such completely dry up (risks that any early adopter accepts).
When Tomb Raider: Underworld came out last year, it did so in a tough holiday season. There were some really high profile titles to compete with, and the fact is that with finances being what they are people didn't have as much money to buy as many games with. So Eidos announced soon after that the game (which I bought, and thought was solid overall) sold below expectations, and the entire franchise needs to be overhauled as a result.
I'm just fearing that Nintendo could find themselves in a similar situation with the DSi. They could expect to sell a certain number, and for all sorts of random reasons it could fall short and everyone could see it as failing.
Granted, Nintendo is rolling in big piles of money, so if anybody could "wait it out" and support the unit in the hopes of an improvement when things get better and/ or around the holiday buying season, it'd be them. Plus, this gives them plenty of time to get past the early adopter rush so they can focus on getting enough out there for the holidays, and time to convince people that they need one.

Time will tell, I guess.

All I know is, despite my arguments that I "might not pick it up", I fully expect that I'll be playing my shiny new DSi come April 5th.

Friday Night Fail Strikes Back

This week's fail is going to be a little different. Instead of focusing on one particular game deserving of ridicule, I'm going to actually look at a series that has gone way off the steady road of quality it had been running on for so long. This particular series started out strong, made a name for itself and became a premier franchise for the company that released it, but has since fallen from grace in a manner like few others.
That series is Sonic the Hedgehog.
It actually pains me to say that, given that I've been a huge Sonic fan since the "blue blur" first raced onto the Sega Genesis. I played each subsequent game, firmly on Sega's side during the days when Sonic was competing with a certain Italian plumber. Each 16-bit iteration was a little bit better, adding new features to the series, and it certainly seemed like Sonic could do no wrong.
The culmination of the side-scrolling games was Sonic CD for the Sega CD, arguably the best entry in the series (you could travel through freaking time!), but from there things began to rapidly run downhill, for Sega then brought the world Sonic 3D Blast.
This was not a good game. They took away what Sonic was known for, his speed, and dropped him into an isometric world where he had to run around looking for little bird things. Really, the less said about this silly idea, the better. The Saturn era also brought us Sonic R, a racing game. You'd think that a racing game in a series known for speed would actually be OK. You would, sadly, be very wrong.
The Dreamcast brought with it what was, for the most part, a decent game. Sonic Adventure had its moments, but it also made some pretty serious missteps. The parts featuring the hedgehog himself were cool, and really showed what Sonic could do in 3D. Unfortunately, Sega chose to add a whole bunch of new characters in an attempt to... I don't know, actually. All I know is that in one level, I'm racing through 3D loops at high speed as Sonic, and then I have to fucking fish as an overweight cat.
I'll openly admit that I was a little enamored by the whole Chao thing. Find an egg, raise a little monster thing, feed it and breed it to create a better monster thing and then race it to earn medals. It was also a cool use for the Dreamcast VMU, turning the little device into a virtual pet of sorts. I carried that damn thing around with me everywhere. Because I am, in fact, really lame at times.
Ultimately, Sonic Adventure showed not only some real promise, what a Sonic game could really be in the new generation, but it also showed some serious cracks in the blue armor of the series.
What Sega did next was take a hammer to their flagship franchise and turn those cracks into full-blown breaks. Sonic Adventure 2 was more of the same: a few moments of brilliance when you were running as Sonic, but mostly failure when playing as anybody else. They also continued to add more characters to the mythos for some reason, which only furthered to muck up what wasn't exactly a deep storyline to begin with. We didn't want backstories and emotions and all that crap: we wanted a blue hedgehog that ran really fast and saved little woodland creatures from killer robots, but Sega apparently felt the need to try and turn it all into something else.
What came next was an almost spectacular series of failures. Sonic Heroes and Sonic Riders further drove the hedgehog's reputation into the dirt. Remakes of the Dreamcast games were released, which really did nothing useful for anybody involved. Shadow the Hedgehog branched off into a game best left unmentioned, for even speaking its name can awaken denizens of the underworld bent on our destruction.
It's sad when the best thing to come out of the PS2/ GC/ Xbox generation is a compilation disc of the old Genesis titles.

Then we came to the "next generation", and with it a rebirth for the franchise, simply titled Sonic the Hedgehog. We were promised a new experience that was going to revitalize the series.
As a huge Sonic fan, I was very excited. The screenshots were gorgeous, and interviews with those involved made it sound like they really wanted to restore the hedgehog to his former glory.
Well... the opening cinematic was pretty, once you get past the whole pseudo-bestiality thing where Sonic saves a human princess and all. The game went seriously downhill once you actually had to play it, though. Poor controls, poor gameplay, poor execution overall. I have really nothing good to say about it, which as a Sonic fan really pains me to say. I tried to like it, tried to look past the flaws, but there were just way too many to ignore.
For the Wii, we had Sonic and the Secret Rings, where the hedgehog and his cronies played out their version of Arabian Nights. I was actually entertained by this, thought it was a little different from the norm, but unfortunately the gameplay continued the same old level of suck the series had reached. This was another one that I really tried to like, spent way more time with than most sane people would have, but ultimately poor controls and poor design choices rendered this one nigh unplayable as well.

By this point (actually well before this point), proclaiming yourself a "Sonic fan" was not gamer cool, but you did get some really great looks of sympathy.

We recently got Sonic Unleashed, which keeps the same level of mediocrity the series has held to over the last several years. The Sonic sections are pretty cool, fast and pretty and everything you'd expect from a next generation Sonic game. The experience is hampered not only by poorly executed "town" areas where you have to walk around talking to people, but the gimmick of this game is that Sonic becomes a "werehog", a meaner and hairier version of himself. When playing as this atrocity, the game destroys any potential it may have had with substandard brawler levels where you push the same attack button a bunch of times to beat up the same couple of enemies over and over again.

I should say that it is not all fail these days. The GBA games were always decent. The DS entries, Sonic Rush and Sonic Rush Adventure hearken back to the side scrolling speedy goodness from days past. It has also been proven that the blue blur and his friends can jump genres with some success, as evidenced by the suprisingly good Sonic Chronicles RPG for the DS. Of course, when you have Bioware at the reins, you could make an RPG of a Chinese restaurant menu and it'd probably be decent.

So now we stand at the bottom of a big hole. Way up above we can barely see the sunlight, see the days when Sonic the Hedgehog had a series of great games, but with each entry over the last several years Sega has dug further down into the ground.

What Sega needs to do is take a page out of Capcom's book, and put out a new "retro" game like Mega Man 9. They also need to drop most of the other characters that have diluted the series, get back to Sonic and maybe a few friends (I never had an issue with Tails and Knuckles, for the most part), and figure out that the more they try to add to the games the more they kill what made them so popular in the first place.

You also don't make a character, then suddenly change his name on a whim, especially when that name is way less cool in every possible way. It's Dr. ROBOTNIK, people, not Dr. fucking Eggman.

Girl Gamer Week: The epic conclusion!

So we've reached the last day of our Girl Gamer Week at The Grumbly Gamer.

We've heard from several girl gamers, as well as guys, to get their thoughts on the matter. Obviously, since I was pretty much only asking gamers, the answers were pretty one-sided. I'd like to ask people who aren't gamers what they think of girls that game, so if I get the chance to do so I will definitely post their thoughts.
Still, one thing becomes clear from the people I've talked to: they just want to game, regardless of their own gender or that of the ones they play with.
So why do we still face a separation when it comes to gaming?

Here's a theory: A lot starts from the perception that gaming is the hobby of 18-24 year old males, one that was fostered back when gaming was young and the industry still has been unable to shake off. When it games were seen as toys for boys, lots of marketing and design choices went into impressing that particular demographic. Now there were all sorts of people who saw these ads, saw the boys on TV playing games with spaceships and monsters, and assumed that games were nothing to concern themselves with.
Those people are now grown up, have kids of their own, but that vision of little boys playing their NES is still somewhere in their heads. So they're not about to let their little girls play those games.

It's not just gaming, of course. A lot of people out there, parents or otherwise, see a clear difference between "boy toys" and "girl toys". It's the army men vs. baby dolls thing in a more modern sense. So now that old-fashioned sensibility has just been transferred to video games.

Now we're in an industry that caters to every possible taste. If you want to blast aliens with a partner online, or curl up on the couch with crossword puzzles, there are games out there for those and every whim in between. Gaming has been opened up to more age groups, demographics, and lifestyles than ever before. My grandmother is playing Wii Sports with the old folks in her senior community, for crying out loud!
So part of the problem is simply shaking off the "old ways" of looking at the genders, which has so little to do with games when you get right down to it. People need to realize that their kids can do whatever they want, clear the cobwebs of 50's Americana out of their brains, and then maybe we can take a big step forward.
The forced stereotype extends beyond gaming, of course. As I've been writing this, I've been half watching a TV show. A female character walked into a comic book store to warn a sales clerk of people that were hunting him. As soon as she walked in, he looked confused, and made repeated comments about a cute blonde being in the comic book store (he suspected she was a stripper sent by a friend). So even in other mediums, the writing serves only to point out that the "geek" interests are not "girl" interests.

The next issue to face would be gamers themselves. As we've seen over the course of the week, some people are just fine with gamers of any gender. I've talked to tons of girl gamers, and lots of guys who are fine with girl gamers. So the problem isn't with any of them.
Unfortunately, there is a problem with a lot of gamers out there. As we've heard, girls often get way more abuse online than other guys do for no other reason then gender.
The weird thing is, I don't think that the issue has anything to do with the games. I also doubt that many of these jerks would ever dare to say anything like that when actually in front of a girl. Anonymity breeds idiocy. When you're hiding behind nothing but a gamertag and an avatar, nobody knows who and what you are, and sadly too many people use this opportunity to be total assholes. I think that most of these people would never say such things if they were face-to-face with someone, but in the online space some sort of stupid takes hold and makes them vomit words.
Of course, some people are just jerks through and through, so they're certainly not helping matters. I'd suspect that the true misogynists are a fairly minor percentage of gamers, though.

What can be done about this?
Obviously, if someone feels harassed or insulted online, regardless of gender, they should report the abuse to someone in charge of the service. While it may only seem like a stopgap measure (actual bannings seem rare, and determined people always find a way back online under a different guise), it should still be done. Even if it deters one person from continuing to be an asshole, it's one less that everyone else has to deal with.
A lot of the stuff we learned in the schoolyard about dealing with bullies holds true in the online space. Ignore them, or leave and find another game.
Another step, quite simply, is patience. As the current generation of gamers grows up, a lot of the old ways of thinking will simply fade away. It's only a matter of time before we see a president from the digital generation, see our contemporaries become heads of corporations. Eventually the people playing games will be the ones making the decisions, and that can only be a good thing. As games gain even more acceptance, and stop being the "black sheep" of the entertainment world (something that movies and music had to go through as well), then hopefully a lot of the negatives surrounding the industry will fade away. This will hopefully not only help the gender issues surrounding gaming, but a lot of the political crap and public outcries as well.
Another way to help would be the games themselves. As has come up frequently this week, many games still feature the rugged and testosterone-sweating protagonists and the scantily clad busty women who fawn all over them. Even in games that feature a choice of male or female character, the girl is often the "fast, but weaker" one or the token healer/ spellcaster.
There are, of course, exceptions that hopefully can become the rule. Fable 2 and Mass Effect both allow you to create a male or female character, and the game and story stays the same regardless of how you choose. Left 4 Dead has a female team member with the exact same skill set as the males. There are games like Rock Band that have universal appeal across gender and ages. There is a whole new segment of the industry, casual gaming, that offers up fun experiences without the need for a male or female division.
In so many ways, we're leaping forward and breaking down barriers. Games are played by millions of people, across every gender and race and way of life. From moms sitting and playing solitaire on their PCs to hardcore gamers blasting through a rumble pit in Halo 3, games are becoming a part of every day life.
Yet, in other ways, we're still just a bunch of teenage boys in the basement huddled around a game system while the world outside considers us socially deficient geeks.

One thing that I found interesting over the course of the week was that the subject of girl gamer clans came up a few times. The girls that mentioned it seemed pretty negative about them, saying that they only served to further the line between the sexes by making a big deal about the fact that it was a "girl team".

Unfortunately, I don't think that there's no magical answer to the issue. A lot of the sexism in gaming extends far beyond the industry itself, and the way people see "boy" activities and "girl" activities. We need to break that wall, and make people understand that games are something that everyone can enjoy, before we can take our next step forward into full gaming equality.
We need to offer even more choices in gaming. Not only in the different genres and ideas, but choices within the games themselves. Wherever able, we need to offer a choice of characters, so people aren't turned off by playing someone of a different gender. Of course, there will be instances where this is impossible: Tomb Raider is known for its female protagonist, and Halo 3 is of course all about Master Chief, but there are plenty of opportunities to allow a gender choice that aren't being utilized. Developers need to understand that there is a much broader audience out there, and act accordingly.
There needs to be more advertisement, as suggested in the answers from our test subjects, that caters to girls as well as guys. Even if a TV commercial shows a girl sitting on the couch playing Gears of War with a guy, the image goes a long way. The marketing departments need to broaden their demographic.
Gamers need to understand that they have a lot of power. If someone is being a jerk online, report them. The more complaints one person gets, the closer they get to being banned. Maybe even try boycotting a game for a while if it has an unusually high number of sexist/ racist assholes. If thousands of people suddenly stopped playing Halo 3 online for a week, and made it clear as to why, then maybe someone would step up and work harder to monitor and eliminate the people making the experience uncomfortable.

As a hardcore gamer, and as a parent of a young gamer girl, I hope our industry grows out of this. I see her play games, though, and I know that her friends do as well. I've never heard her say anything about boys in her class talking trash to her for playing. In fact, I think it impresses most of them.
So maybe we all just have to stand aside, and let the next generation lead us. Maybe our children can help us grow up a little.

Though, as a side note, there are laughs to be had now and again. As my friend Walter put it, "I find that I enjoy when a girl comes into an online game. It makes most men so pissy when they get killed by a female."

Girl Gamer Week: Wednesday

So here we are again.
I have been focusing on the fact that the answers we've gotten so far do not show any serious gender imbalance, that gamers generally have similar answers regardless of who they are or what they play.
There's something else, of course: the answers themselves. What gamers, both male and female, think about the whole issue. So today we're looking less at "which is the guy and which is the girl", and just asking two more people what they think about the entire brouhaha (haHA!) that is the gender issue in gaming.
I'm cutting out some of the questions, as well, focusing less on who they are and more on their opinions on the matter. So instead of a question-and-answer format like I've been doing this week, I'm just offering two more test subjects the chance to be heard and posting their thoughts. I did let them go nuts, though, saying as much or as little as they wanted.

First we have Miss Yummy Gamorah (http://missgamorah.blogspot.com): girl, gamer, cosplayer, currently working as an executive assistant.
I consider My gaming tastes to be ...erratic. There's a lot of things that drive me to play a game, sometimes i really like the way the costumes and characters look, other times it's a hint of being an assassin or being able to be evil. I love story, and my first love and joy is role-playing games, they are the center of my gaming world. The Final Fantasy series has influenced my tastes and interests in so many ways. I love platformers like Jak and Daxter, and I enjoy a good side scroller with an rpg twist like Odin sphere or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I also can't resist a strange and wacky dating sim (Brooktown High or Feel the Magic) and I love me some weird stuff like katamari damacy, and I also enjoy rhythm games.
I think that the gaming industry has opened up a little bit more with the next gen systems and even a little in the past with the PS2 and Gamecube. Nintendo is asexual in orientation and will always be universally acceptable. Guys and gals alike can enjoy there games, animal crossing has a great following with the male demographic though it's seen as a "girl game".
I think that in the end we're all just people. I think its more of "let's make a really good shooter" now instead of "let's make a shooter that men are going to want to play". Obviously there are exceptions to everything. Gears of War just has that look to it that its very much about testosterone. I'm sure girls out there play it, I'm just not sure the developers had us in mind when they set it up.
Gamers are gamers, despite gender. I think there a lot of idiots on both sides of the sexes out there right now that aren't helping us blur the gender line in gaming.
Why should gender matter in a clan, guild, or whatever? Why not just screen for the best gamers, not the best girls or the best guys? Let's face it, your rep goes up if you kill someone else be them female, male, owl, or other.
I've got a lot of stories, working in retail, such as a woman who asked all sorts of questions about games and then said something like "Wow, you know a lot about this stuff for a girl". It goes to show that there shouldn't be lines between genders in video games, because there's already lines between gamers and all the rest of people. When other woman are surprised that the there are girls that play video games, or they're looking to buy a Barbie princess game for their daughter just because she's a girl, that says to me that they are obviously only hurting the situation. These are the same women that would freak out if someone said sports are for boys and baking cookies are for girls.
Who ever thought we'd have to burn our bras for our 360s?
I think the most interesting thing about it all is that even the stereotype for girls who play games is changing, while I'm a gamer it doesn't even make me a tomboy anymore. I can have my pink DS adorned with flowers in its pink carrying case. The old ideal that any girl who plays video games and D&D must be overweight, not attractive, and have nasty hair is now laughable.
I get my hair done, I've had my nails done regularly in the past, and I usually make a habit of tanning for a few months every year.When I hit the mall I'm not only hitting every clothing and shoe store but inevitably I'll be at the video game stores too. I'll have my video games, and accessorize them too, thank you.
Just cause I'm kicking your ass doesn't mean I can't look hot while doing it.

Now we go onto Ryan's thoughts, an office manager with a political science degree.
The resurgence of Casual Gaming has allowed for a separate focus in the industry. We still see gritty titles like GTA IV doing well, but more family friendly games are getting attention thanks to the success of the Wii.
I think there is a difference between boy gamers and girl gamers, but boys and girls grow up, so I think adult games are less focused on appealing to one gender of another.
For me, multiplayer is everything. If I can play the game with my friends and have a blast I will play the game for months on end. I will say that I feel bad for girl gamers. The abuse they take online is brutal.
I think to an extent people just need to realize video games are sport, people play them for fun, and sometimes people get emotional. What we cannot accept is hate, and people should always report users who say such useless things.

So, have we learned anything yet, or am I just using other people's opinions to fill in space on the blog?
I did find that, overall, the girls had a lot more to say on the subject that the guys. Perhaps that's because they feel that they have to prove more? Do the guys just not really understand what it's like, because they haven't really been on the receiving end of gaming discrimination? They obviously have an opinion on the matter, as we saw, but the opinions may not be as detailed simply because we've never really had to deal with what girl gamers have to deal with.
Or maybe the girls just took some extra time helping me out with this.

I'd like to thank all of my "test subjects" this week. Tomorrow I'm going to wrap things up, see if we can't find some answers and maybe make the gaming world a better place.

Girl Gamer Week: Tuesday

So we're continuing with Girl Gamer Week here at Grumbly's.
As I had (hopefully) shown in Monday's post, there really isn't some huge difference between the answers of a male gamer and female gamer. Both had likes and dislikes, coherent and intelligent answers to game-related questions, and overall the thoughts did not show the division between genders that many people (and game companies) still seem to see.
As promised, today we're delving further into our case study, but with a new twist. I asked the questions to another female and another male gamer, but this time I'm not going to state ahead of time which is which. To further prove that there is no difference, that a gamer's answers to these questions really has nothing to do with chromosomes, I'm going to ask the question and then list both answers without identity.
If there really is some big division between the genders in gaming, then it'll become clear here. If not, then we'll just have gamers answering gaming questions, and nothing more than that.

1) Age, and current school situation as well as major or degree.
*) 20 years old, majoring in Criminal Justice in a 5 year program at Northeastern University. I currently work as an assistant manager in a video game store.
*) 29, A.S liberal arts, currently enrolled in B.S Geology and Earth Science @ BSC

2) How long have you been playing games, and if there is a defining moment that started your interest in the hobby.
*) I've been playing about 16 years. Duck Hunt is probably the start.
*) I've been gaming since the Atari 2600 :)

3) What systems do you currently own? Which do you mostly play?
*) I own a NES, SNES, Genesis, N64, Gamecube, PS1, PS2, Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii, GBA, and DS. I mostly play my Xbox 360.
*) I pretty much play Xbox 360 and PC.

4) What games/ genres do you play? You can be as vague or specific as you want. Tell me a particular game that you love, or just go with the general genres if you'd prefer.
*) It seems to be a toss up between shooters and RPGs. I was very much into the Final Fantasy series as well as the old PSone titles like Chrono Cross and Legend of Dragoon when I was younger. However since Halo: Combat Evolved was released, I've been more into the shooters such as the newer Halos, Gears, and the Call of Duty games. My ultimate love though is Zelda. The number of times I've beaten Ocarina of Time has got to be somewhere in the double digits; I could probably play it in my sleep. I also like fighting games (Soul Calibur/DOA) and action/adventure/RPG hybrids like KOTOR and Mass Effect.
*) I play most genres but really enjoy shooters and sports. RTS and hack-and- slash games are fun too. Starcraft, Diablo, Battletoads, Halo, Gears, Rainbow Six Vegas, and Final Fantasy 2,3,7 (the American numbers) are my all time faves but the list could go on for hours!

5) Do you feel that most games are geared towards that male 18-30 demographic that has been the stereotype for so long, or do you think that the next generation has brought a more open approach to gaming?
*) Generally speaking, yes, most of the games on today's systems seem to be geared toward the male gaming community but Nintendo specifically seems to be doing more to have more games that are geared toward both genders, as well as all ages.
*) I definitely think this generation has opened up the gamer spectrum. The Frag Dolls are a perfect example. I think that the explosion in extreme sports and a higher acceptance of female athletes have helped grow the "gamer" term because they pretty much go hand and hand.

Here I'm going to stop the anonymous answers, only because what was said on the remainder of the questions eliminates any question as to who is who. Rather than chop up their answers to make them vague, I want to keep their thoughts and ideas intact as much as possible.
So, any clue as to who is who? At any point was there a clear realization as to which answer came from which gender?
For the record, all of the first answers were from Michelle, and all of the second ones were from Will.
As a side note, Michelle can not only easily wipe the floor with me in just about any game we've played against each other, but she had to help me through Halo 3. Relevant only to show how sad I am when it comes to shooters, I suppose.

6) Do you even think that there's a line anymore between "guy gamer/ girl gamer" or are we reaching a point where it's just "gamer"?
Michelle) In regards to the people I associate myself with, no there isn't much of line. Outside of that sphere, though, yes the line still exists. I can't count the number of friends requests I've received online because whoever I'm playing with has just realized that I am a girl. It's still at the point where people are shocked that a girl can actually play a game on her own, though it has gotten substantially better. Honestly, I don't think the "Female Only" clans work to erase this line either. While these clans provide a sense of unity among female gamers, the point of being a gamer is to be able to interact on a certain skill level with other gamers. Pulling a "No Boys Allowed" approach is not going to help this integration of females into the gaming community.
Will) Definitely just gamer.

7) If/ when you play online, do you feel that you're singled out/ ridiculed/ given an extra hard time because you're a girl? Are there certain games/ genres that are better or worse in terms of gender acceptance?
Michelle) Fucking Halo. Halo 2 had some of the worst experiences for me as both a female gamer, and a gamer in general. I can still recall a Team Slayer match I was in where a member of the opposing team insisted that I should be in the kitchen making food for someone as opposed to playing the game. It was a comment made seriously as well, which really pissed me off. I've also been called a myriad of names that I really don't wish to repeat, and I've heard a plethora of racial slurs directed at other players for no reason. It gets so stupid. In another match of Halo 2, I had the other team refusing to kill me because they were too busy trying to hit on me. I've never ran into an issue when playing Gears of War online, though. Overall, MMORPGs seem to be the most conducive to female players. In my brief loss of life and soul while playing WoW I never heard of an issue regarding a female player, nor have I encountered any while playing Phantasy Star Online and Phantasy Star Universe. I do not throw around insults unless a player has deserved such treatment, if I discover that there's another girl playing on either my or the opposing team I will go out of my way to go after her. If she can take it and give it back, all the power to her. I just can't stand the ones that are simply playing because their boyfriend is making them and then get all whiny and complain that "OMG they're being soooo mean to meeeee make it stopppppppp." I guess there's also some degree of pride in being the only girl on the team. If you're familiar with Red vs. Blue, think of the scene in which Tex discovers that Blue Team has been assigned another girl to their squad.
That's my reaction. I'm a bad person.
Will) I'm not a girl but as an observer I feel that line of ridicule is getting thinner by the day.

8) Here's where you just get to tell me anything that you feel about this subject. Specific story that you feel is relevant? General apathy on the whole affair, anger at the stereotypes, or other feelings?
Michelle) I feel a general apathy toward the whole affair. While certain incidents (as mentioned above) will make me consider going on a homicidal rampage, if someone doubts my skill and proficiency at a game I'm more than happy to wipe the floor with their bullet-ridden corpse. I know what I'm doing and I know how to play my game and if someone doesn't want to someone doesn't want to believe that, it's their problem.
Though it does get difficult at work when someone asks, "What game would you recommend for my daughter?" because I'm a girl and must know that, and the only thought going through my head is "Mmm headshot...".
Will) All in all I feel that there shouldn't be any stereotypes towards girl gamers. Game creators sometimes have a girl demographic in mind but seeing first hand what more and more girls are buying and playing online they might want to switch gears in their marketing a bit. For example: Instead of showing just a bunch of guys playing Gears of War or RB6 Vegas together, they should throw some girls in there also. I mean lets face it, if you compare a Wii commercial to a 360/PS3 commercial, you are gonna see a hell of a lot more girls in the Wii commercial even though the 360 slogan is "Jump in" (meaning everyone). Don't get me wrong, I love both the Wii and 360, but both Sony and Microsoft should take a page out of Nintendo's marketing book...and likewise Nintendo can take a page out of Microsoft's mature/online game book.

So there we have it. Two different genders, different people, but it would seem that the answers are pretty interchangeable in a lot of ways. If I "sterilized" the answers completely, removing any indication of gender, and then never revealed who said what, I don't believe that anybody would be able to point to one set and say "Oh yes, that is obviously a female gamer".
Which means, as I have been hoping to point out, that there isn't any magical "guy gamer" and "girl gamer" thoughts when it comes to games and gaming in general.
Of course, I'm asking hardcore gamers across the board, but if I asked a casual male and casual female the same questions, I'm confident that the end result would be pretty much the same.

In the next post I'm just going to "open the floor" to a few people. I asked these same question to several gamers, and I'm going to go through and put up the best responses to different questions. Sort of a "gamer on the street" type thing, where we just toss a bunch of different opinions into the mix.