In the early days of console gaming, gameplay was king. The graphics were nothing to write home about (even in that era.) Anyone who bragged about their ATARI 2600 was bragging about what GAMES they had, not how cool the graphics were-many were just happy they had a console at all. Those with a large collection of games had lots of friends. Most games of that era were the same game at level 1 as they were at level 100--just faster versions of the same challenge that had less margin for error and required JEDI hand-eye coordination. The gaming industry has changed a LOT since those early days, and one of the biggest paradigm shifts is one that I call, dangling the carrot.

Dangling the carrot is a technique game publishers use to quantify how many hours of gameplay you will get out of a title. They withhold features of the game and to force you to earn them through hours of gameplay-in many cases these features can only be unlocked in single-player mode. The game publishers argue that this means that if you were to play the game from start to finish (at least once) that you would be guaranteed at least xx amount of hours of gameplay--in theory this adds "value" and proponents would argue that it makes the game worth more to the gamer, and helps to justify the steep sticker price. By withholding features they argue they are inspiring you to want to keep playing the game so that you feel both a sense of accomplishment and as though you got your moneys worth. This paradigm is further encouraged by Microsoft’s Achievement Points system which rewards players for unlocking achievements, in most cases, through many hours of gameplay or through accomplishing difficult feats in-game. While all this "theory" does to a degree serve these purposes, keep in mind that the only technique game developers relied upon to keep you playing their games in the early days was superior GAMEPLAY. The emphasis was on making simple games that could be played over and over again and still be fun-even when dusted off and re-released decades later. Because the development process now focuses on these additional variables to essentially force you to play the game for a specific amount of time if you want access to many of its features, in many cases gameplay suffers--or the only reason people keep playing a game is because they are obsessed with getting all the Achievement Points, or because the want to finish, or play the game through to its conclusion-to see how the story plays out-not necessarily because they enjoy playing it. The reality for many is that they either don't have time to play a story driven game from start to finish, or even if genuinely enjoy playing it to the end, they probably don't want to play the story over again. Once you are done with the story, you have to hope online play remains enjoyable if you expect to get long-term enjoyment from your investment.

Perhaps the biggest problem this paradigm creates is that it neglects and disenfranchises the multiplayer-only gamer. If you are not a gamer who generally enjoys, or has time to play games in single-player mode, then this "carrot dangling" presents a HUGE dilemma. Imagine you are not a teenager or recently unemployed (I know that is hard to imagine right now) but please work with me here. Maybe you do not have countless hours of FREE time on your hands, but you enjoy playing the occasional video game with friends, and you just dropped roughly $65-70 USD (after taxes) on a racing game. You plan on inviting three of your friends over after work to race with you (throwing in a little trash-talking and friendly competition.) When you pop the new racing game into your console, you discover that you have only a few choices of cars (most of the faster, cooler cars are locked and unavailable.) Then you RTFM, only to find out that the COOLEST ones can only be unlocked by playing the game in SINGLE PLAYER for countless hours that you do not have to spare. Your only hope now is that you can find a "cheat code" online that unlocks those extra cars or guns, or level maps you want to play with your friends. IN most cases, the end result is that you are now angry that you just dropped $70 on a game that forces you to race your friends in the same cars you all drive to work everyday. You don’t care that more cars can be unlocked in single player, nor do you care how many achievement points you can get--you JUST WANT TO RACE.

Another huge problem with this paradigm reveals itself if you want to insure that you are the only one racking up points on YOUR gamertag. For example, a group of friends are coming over to play Guitar Hero or Rock Band offline, but you don't want to sign-in with your gamertag-because you don't want your friends to get the achievements for you-or mess up your stats. If you sign in with a local gamertag and start Guitar Hero II or III you will only be able to play the first 5 songs at any difficulty until you have played for hours to unlock them all. Maybe you only wanted to play certain songs...and not suffer through the ones you hate...in the end nobody wants to play-either because they get tired of trying to get past the first five songs or they don't like the choices. You may say, but there are some games that allow you to unlock features through co-op gameplay including Guitar Hero--and that’s fine, but it still doesn’t solve a fundamental problem. Let’s say you have a foursome who just got Rock Band and want to start jamming together-so you form a band, and start playing-but you suck. This means you keep must playing the same five songs until you want to strike someone nearby-and all the songs you thought would be fun to sing are at the higher levels that you may NEVER get to-especially if you play as poorly as I do.

Deciding on a gamertag isn’t easy. You don’t want your tag to be lame, and many of your first ideas may already be in use or not permitted by Microsoft. So you get creative-you spell words with special characters or add letters or numbers to the beginning or end of the desired tag. In my case, I reflected on past heated deathmatch sessions with my college roommate, and chose to make my gamertag a derivative of a creative expletive I used on my roommate-who was kicking my ass in Half Life at the time. In the heat of battle, I combined a four letter word followed by the word monkey. I knew this four letter word attached to monkey wouldn’t fly on Xbox Live, so I created a spoonerism of that by swapping the first letter of the four letter word with the first letter of monkey to arrive at my tag. I also made some other spelling modifications so the end result was phonetically in line with the original, non-politically correct creation. I was striving for a tag that would please me, the all-ages gaming public, and Microsoft. The tag I created was not a word you can find in the dictionary, nor were any parts of the final creation. Most adults could probably figure out what the tag was, but it is highly unlikely a child I might be playing UNO with online would figure it out (yes, I play UNO-there I said it.) I even had an occasion to call Xbox Live support (for a RARE red-ring-of-death incident) and the guy I spoke with of course asked for my gamertag--which I spelled out, and without saying what he thought the original words may have been out loud (because he could get fired for using the four letter word in question on the phone with a customer) he just said, I like spoonerisms. That was the polite way of saying he knew what my gamertag was an homage to. It also bears mentioning that I never verbally informed people of the fact it was indeed a spoonerism--and many didn’t tumble on its root word origins. Quite a few fellow gamers even mispronounced the tag. I don’t want to reveal the original tag, since it was banned recently by Microsoft, because I was able to make very slight modifications that made the gamertag rename wizard happy, while preserving the original tag within the changes.

The bottom line is that my gamertag, a made up word, was banned by Microsoft even though it did NOT contain any words that could be found in any dictionary. It appears that Microsoft is now banning made up words that have no definition or meaning in any language because someone could construct words they find offensive by rearranging or swapping the letters of my gamertag. All in the name of protecting the young gamers on LIVE? I think it goes without saying that verbal exchanges in LIVE games are usually much more graphic and offensive than any gamertag could ever dream to be. Ironically, my tag got banned on the very same weekend GayGamer got banned. Microsoft claimed the GayGamer tag was banned because of its sexual nature - never mind that the word Gay can also be defined as happily excited or bright and lively and by those definitions, all Xbox Live gamers could be described as GAY--except of course when they are suffering from the infamous red ring of death.