Podcast Plus – Known Unknowns

Podcast Plus is written by the co-host of the Ready Up podcast, and aims to further discuss big or little things that come up in the conversation.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

The above quote is from Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense. It was widely ridiculed as being a stupid thing to say, in fact, journalists at the press conference actually laughed as he said it, but it makes an odd amount of sense. In the last podcast, we thoroughly dissected the Xbox One reveal, and what we realised was that there were an awful lot of known unknowns, and no doubt a few unknown unknowns, although, obviously, we didn’t know that we didn’t know about them at the time.

One of the biggest things that we don’t know, but that we do know that we don’t know, is what Microsoft have planned for second hand games, and this has become a huge issue across the internet as gamers struggle to find coherent answers to the simple question of “Can I play second hand games on my Xbox One?”. Of course, unlike Rumsfeld’s huge military machine, in this situation there is at least one entity that has all the information, that is to say, Microsoft themselves have all the known knowns. Seeing the furore brewing across the internet, Microsoft sent out their own top military man, Major Nelson, to make a statement to put people’s minds at ease:

We know there is some confusion around used games on Xbox One and wanted to provide a bit of clarification on exactly what we’ve confirmed today. While there have been many potential scenarios discussed, today we have only confirmed that we designed Xbox One to enable our customers to trade in and resell games at retail. Beyond that, we have not confirmed any specific scenarios. Another piece of clarification around playing games at a friend’s house – should you choose to play your game at your friend’s house, there is no fee to play that game while you are signed in to your profile.

Well, that clears that up then. Of course, saying there is “no fee” “while you are signed in to your profile”, immediately implies that there is a fee if you aren’t. What is frustrating is the fact that everyone knows that someone, or more likely, many people at Microsoft, know the answers to our questions, but they simply aren’t saying. Why is this?

It’s natural to assume that the reason they don’t want to say is simply because we won’t like the answer, which leads to more ill feeling and the cycle continues. One thing is for sure, they’ll have to tell us all sooner or later, and we can all make up our minds to either buy One, or not.

Except for this one last quote, from Microsoft’s Phil Spencer:

“The super core guys, they will buy everything,” he added. “They will buy all devices”

That quote upset a few people too, me included, but in my case only because he was exactly right. Still, I doubt I’ll be dwelling on it too much as I pick up my day One console and fire into some (new) games. Or maybe watch some bloody television.