Rob Fahey on games, media, journalism and politics.
This lovely little video, which I found on Engadget, made me laugh out loud a couple of times while watching it. It’s worth a couple of minutes of your time, especially if you’re a fan of the Wii.
(A slightly more sobering way to look at is that these guys have put more genuine understanding of Wii gameplay ideas into a spoof video than quite a number of top-ten publishers have managed to date. Hmm.)
I’ve already talked about my own unfortunate experiences with the Xbox 360 hardware and Microsoft customer support at some length on this blog. This article I wrote for GamesIndustry.biz this week hopefully puts the whole matter into perspective a little more effectively, though; I’ve tried to view the whole affair dispassionately, rather than as an angry consumer, and even from that perspective I don’t think it looks great for Microsoft.
I got a phonecall this morning from someone pretty senior in UK game publishing, ranting about how he had exactly the same experience with his Xbox 360 just last night, and then came into work this morning to find my article in his inbox. He summed it up pretty well, though - we’ll go out and spend money, or buy new Xboxes, because we’re such sad game geeks that we can’t stand to be without one of the consoles. I guess that skews your perspective. I don’t think the average consumer would see things in the same light.
A brief news story on the BBC website earlier this week (sorry - their awful search means I can’t find the damned thing again) mentioned the construction of a new Evangelical church in the south of England, which will seat 8,000 people. By way of comparison, St Paul’s Cathedral in London seats 2,500.
This brought to my mind again a topic which I’ve been looking into with increasing concern in recent months - namely the quiet but extremely disturbing rise of American-style Evangelical Christianity in the UK.
Like most people, I suppose, I thought that the extreme wing of religious nutterdom was confined largely to America, and even then, mostly to the “flyover states”. It’s comforting to assume that for the most part, Christianity in Britain is the laissez-faire Church of England variety, composed largely of grandmothers, lapsed followers bulking up the numbers, and the occasional bishop shooting his mouth off. Even Catholicism in this country has forgotten how to make fire and left its brimstone at home. This is, all told, a Good Thing; although I was still horrified when Tony Blair announced happily that we invaded Iraq because his invisible friend told him it was the right thing to do, at least by and large our religious types indulge their habit in private.
I moved only a few hundred yards when I last moved house, into a nice split-level apartment on South Lambeth Road - but that few hundred yards was enough to put me within the catchment zone of a bizarre, and vastly active, Evangelical church, the likes of which I didn’t realise even existed over here. They meet every sunday and hold service after service in the function room of a local hotel - I reckon at least six to eight services each sunday are laid on, one after another, each one packed to the rafters. The attendees are predominantly black, but there are plenty of caucasians there too - and a little research shows that many Evangelical churches in this country are swelling their ranks with young, disaffected white kids.
This, frankly, scares the shit out of me - because the Evangelicals are in no way laissez-faire. Frankly, they’re not even live-and-let-live; their fires burn brightly and their stock of brimstone is always topped up. They are unapologetically political, and preach openly regarding how people should vote, or act, in a political sense. Naturally, a lot of what they believe politically is revolting to any secular, educated mind; everything from their social views (they’re not so keen on the gays, or abortion, and when you get down to it they’re not pushed on working mothers, rock music or books that aren’t the bible either) to their education policies (never mind evolution, they’re frankly not convinced that ANY of this science stuff is worthwhile) is basically anathema to everything Britain has accomplished as a largely secular society.
And of course, they all vote. They all lobby like hell; local MPs whose offices are near Evangelical groups reportedly get bagloads of mail from the Evangelists, vastly more than from secular groups, and we all know how much pressure extremist Christian groups like MediaWatch have brought to bear on national broadcasters in the past.
This, to my mind, is why athiests, humanists and secularists need to stop being so fucking apologetic for everything we believe - or more properly, don’t believe.
These churches didn’t spring from nowhere; they are funded, with incredibly deep pockets, by American churches which view their “mission” to Europe as crucial in stemming what they call the “rise of secularism” on our continent. (Of course, it would hurt them too much to simply call it the “waning of religion and superstition”, which is more accurate; athiesm and secularism doesn’t rise, as such, it is merely the logical default state that is left behind when you take away the invisible spacemen. More and more land is exposed when the tide goes out; you don’t talk about the “rise of land”, you talk about the ebb of the water.) They prey on the vulnerable, the unhappy, the superstitious, the weak, and the stupid; they tell them what to think, little of it particularly nice or tolerant, and then send them off to preach to others, to write letters, to vote.
They don’t believe in living and letting live, like our traditional churches do, to some extent at least - and take note; nasty developments like the Alpha Course in the Church of England symbolise an increasingly militaristic and evangelical trend even in our older forms of Christianity. Given any kind of influence over legislation and social policy, they would rush to create laws which impinge on the freedoms of non-believers to live their lives as they desire. Their strongest show of force to date was to contest the new legislation which completely outlaws discrimination against homosexuals - in other words, they were desperate to retain the ability to discriminate, to hurt, and to remove freedoms from a minority group outside their own religion. The kind of language they used to mobilise their followers to protest this new law made their true intent very clear; given half a chance, they would recriminalise homosexuality with one hand, while quickly drafting a new “Intelligent Design” centric science curriculum for your kids.
“It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.”
While I fully recognise the irony of this quote’s invocation of God, I think it’s still supremely relevant. Our society became secular slowly, through a basic change in attitudes as a result of a shift in our culture; it was not a directed change, and it has produced no organisations, no leaders, and no champions. It is, indeed, indolent; and Evangelicalism is very, very active. I’m not saying we need leaders, or organisations; but perhaps we need some champions, and perhaps every athiest, everyone who believes in secularism and everyone who enjoys the rights won in the last fifty years, has an obligation to become a champion in their own sense. At the very least, perhaps, it’s worth writing to your MP every now and then - just to let them know that you’re there, and that you’re watching, and that you’re voting. Because remember - the happy clappy guys down the road are definitely doing so. And if our inaction lets them win, we’ll all lose a very great deal.
(A good article about the rise of English Evangelical churches, written from the “other side” - i.e. an American evangelical - can be found here.)
One of the very first posts I made on this blog was about my Xbox 360 console - which had chosen to give up the ghost in full-scale, three flashing red lights fashion. For the uninitiated, three flashing red lights means that the console has, in effect, bricked itself; there is no known user intervention that can fix this condition. It’s a dead console, an ex-console, de-fucking-ceased.
(In this specific instance, the 360 bricked itself after applying a Microsoft firmware update which was required to continue using Xbox Live - great testing there, guys!)
Today, I finally actually took some proper steps to get this sorted out. It had been lurking at the back of my mind for a couple of months that I really ought to call Microsoft and get them to repair the bloody thing - although granted, the utter drought of games for the system (since Crackdown, anyway) meant that it wasn’t exactly a top priority.
So, I rang Xbox Customer Support this morning, at 9am on the dot. I listened to the crap hold music, and then I spoke to a young lady who was the most singularly unhelpful person I have ever dealt with in customer service since… Well, since the last time I had to call Barclays, but who’s counting, eh?
The long and the short of it; my Xbox 360 Core System, which I bought last year to replace my fucked Premium system, is out of warranty. As such, Microsoft wants me to pay an extra 85 quid, on top of the money I have already paid, to make this system work again. Naturally, I objected to this on a very fundamental level - to which the company line is, oh, but we’ll give you another 12 month warranty once you’ve paid your 85 quid! Jesus, thanks guys! That’s just great! And given that this system failed almost exactly 12 months after purchase, I guess the new one will too - so this is what, an 85 pound subscription to keep my bloody machine working from year to year?
Now, as I explained politely to the young lady on the phone, this isn’t actually how things work in Europe, or in the UK. Microsoft, being an arrogant swaggering cunt of an American company, is under the impression that its warranty is the be all and end all of its obligations to its customers - that may be true across the Atlantic, where citizens tend to be rather less protected from the whims of business, but in pinko commie liberal Europe, it’s most certainly not true.
Our consumer laws are clear as crystal on this matter; Microsoft sold me a product which would be fully expected, given the price and the firm’s own statements on lifespan, to work for several years. It packed in after 12 months; most notably, it packed in due to the company’s own firmware update (which is arguably an entirely new product which the company has forced onto me, and which should come with its own warranty). This represents a product which was most clearly not fit for the purpose intended, and under consumer law, it’s up to Microsoft to provide a remedy to this - i.e., to fix my damned console.
I explained all of this, as politely as I could muster (which is pretty polite when I’m in dealing-with-customer-services mode), said that I most certainly was not going to pay an extra 85 quid for this flaw to be repaired, and that I expected Microsoft to act up to its responsibilities under UK and EU consumer law.
Miss Unhelpful on the phone proceeded to act utterly dumbfounded, like she’d never heard such a ludicrous idea before in her life.
“Well, let me ask you, what do you want me to do for you?” came the astonishing question. Simple answer - I expected Microsoft to repair my console for me and not to try and charge this ridiculous fee.
No chance. She erected a brick wall right there and then - it was company policy, it was in the warranty… I explained that their company policy was completely overruled by the law in this case. There’s not a damn thing you can write in a warranty which removes a consumer’s basic rights under law. She continued to parrot the fact that it’s company policy, and that I’d get an extra 12 month warranty if I just paid the 85 quid.
At this point it became clear that I was wasting my time. I took a reference number from them (oh, to add insult to injury, it became clear at this point that Microsoft also expects me to package up the console and arrange myself for it to be posted back to them, at my expense - charming!) and hung up. As usual in companies like this, it was painfully clear that not only was the woman on the phone not actually interested in helping me, but even if she was, she didn’t have the authority to waive the fee - which essentially means that she was completely useless. (Oh, and a request to speak to her manager was met with another barrage of stuff about how I’d get another 12 month warranty - sigh!)
So I’m left with a bricked Xbox 360 - I guess I can add it to the pile with the OTHER bricked Xbox 360 in the corner - and a company which expects me to pay the guts of a hundred quid to repair their shoddy, low-quality product.
The Xbox 360 is unquestionably the most poorly manufactured console ever launched; the failure rate for the system is absolutely ridiculous, and all of the early claims that it was “in line” with the rate for previous systems have now disappeared as it becomes clear just how untrue that is. I’ve heard figures from Microsoft staff which suggest that the fail rate is running at around 30%, which is an order of magnitude higher than anything we saw on the Xbox or the PS2. Under the circumstances, the only thing which could rescue Microsoft’s reputation, in my eyes, would be to have a helpful, friendly and efficient repairs service. Instead, they have an unhelpful, sarcastic customer service representative trying to gouge me for the repair costs.
In summary - don’t buy an Xbox 360. At least not until they fix this nonsense. And if you’re considering your next-gen options (which right now means that you have more money than sense, since neither console is actually worth investing in yet), and weighing up the PS3 and 360, I invite you to add 85 quid to the Xbox 360 price tag, since that’s what it will almost inevitably cost you to repair the machine, and to consider the hassle involved in sending it back…
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