blog.thebigreason

High Maintainance Fun

I’ve been waiting two years to justify the purchase of an XBox 360, and justice finally came last Wednesday. Most of my friends have been killing each other on XBox live for years, and have urged me to jump on the band wagon at nearly every opportunity. Being the only breadwinner in a four-person family, it just wasn’t an easy thing to work in. But a year of working multiple jobs has paid off … almost.

The XBox brand has problems. Problems besides the regular issues that cause pretty much every XBox to eventually break down and require factory repairs. This is a summary of what I have run into thus far.

Monetary And Emotional Costs

This is if you opt for hard wiring the thing to your router. You see, I’m one of those people who doesn’t keep their main computer and network router in direct proximity to the TV. There is an XBox wireless network adapter available for $100. I opted for the drill some holes in the floor and crawl under the house setup.

I expected all the nickel and diming, and it played a big roll in the reason I waited so long to take the plunge. Not everyone has the willpower to play the waiting game, though. And I’d be willing to bet a few of those people find it easier to risk a few heated arguments down the road than disclose all those costs to their significant other.

I’m using regular batteries in my controller at the moment, and this is probably the first time my wife is learning that I have spent a total of $490 on XBox and gear.

The typical XBox setup requires ~$500 and a significant amount of guilt and/or frustration. Microsoft probably can’t do much about the retail price of their machine, but they could significantly reduce the emotional roadblocks with a smarter package. Say, a package where the warranty is already active on the machine, XBox gold membership is included, built-in wi-fi, and a battery with recharger is included with every controller. Give it a nice round price, maybe put in a donate part of your purchase to the Gates foundation for good measure, and market it in a wife friendly way.

Simplicity is golden. Which brings me to the next trial that stands in the way of my fun:

What The Hell Is Going On Here?

I was able to figure out the concept of gamer profiles and how the dashboard works in relation to the games and stuff. It doesn’t make complete sense to me yet, but I know how to put in a game and fire it up. XBox Live, on the other hand … I have yet to get it working. I spent about three hours with it yesterday and eventually learned that the whole XBox live network is having internal problems. Most likely due to everyone getting an XBox for Christmas.

I suppose that’s understandable, but the fact that it took me three hours to realize this is pretty messed up. Before anyone plays the n00b card, let me make a case for usability—a thing that I have built my entire career on.

Years ago, my good friend floatingfoam floated me an “extra XBox” he had laying around. I immediately hooked up my XBox Live account, but quickly found that my gaming schedule didn’t jive with any of my buddies. I also have a fairly significant social phobia of speaking with people I don’t know. Playing video games with people I don’t know is about as appealing to me as getting into a minor car accident. I also found it a huge pain in the ass hook up the Ethernet cable from across the room every single time I fired up the machine, so I let my XBox Live account expire. This proved to complicate things quite a bit when I tried to log into my account from the 360.

I realized that I needed to reactivate my account and put in a new credit card number to turn it back on. What I didn’t realize is that you can’t do this from the XBox 360. At least not in anyway that is remotely obvious. Searching the online documentation told me that I not only needed to reactivate my account, but also migrate the account AND “link” it to my Windows LIVE account.

I gave it a few tries, but gave up after some complications with the reactivation process (that I’d rather not get into right now). I figured if there was going to be that much work involved, it would be easier to just make a new gamer tag. Perhaps it was easier, but actually getting the gamertag hooked up to my Windows LIVE account on the XBox was a cruel experiment in just how blind with frustration you can make a staunch usability geek, like myself.

After about ten tries, I figured out the most efficient sequence of menu options to select to get me to the screens that would allow me to enter my gamertag, log into my Windows LIVE account and link them together. At this point, I was well over the two hour mark of trying to make the whole thing work, when I began to see this message:

I was able to get through various stages of the process before seeing this message and then starting over. I figured it was due to high traffic, so I tried at various times throughout the day, until a friend pointed out that they were having system wide trouble all week. After a little digging around on xbox.com, I finally found that XBox Live was specifically having problems linking Windows LIVE accounts to gamertags and a few other things related to new accounts.

I had to get three hours into the process to find out that it just wasn’t going to happen. I have a long list of usability suggestions for the XBox team, but I’m simply too tired of this issue to continue dwelling on it. So far the XBox 360 experience has been a big disappointment. I did manage to play a few games over the past few days, but none if them were worth the $500 and all the frustration. I’ve waited this long, so it would be stupid of me not to stick it out until I can get on XBox Live and try it out for a few weeks, but I’m very close to the point of packing the whole thing up and getting my money back.

My wife and I ordered a new iMac yesterday that we are really excited about. I’m looking forward to actually having fun setting something up.