You Ungrateful Little Ba*****!

It happens to us all every so often. A relative, or friend, or friend of a relative, or relative of a friend, or summat along those lines asks you to help them ‘set up’ their new console.

On this occasion it was actually a proper profile and gamertag for a new Xbox Live Gold account for their 10-year old son. They’d done the important things like setting up parental controls and all that kind of stuff but not being interested in gaming at all, they had no real concept of gamerscore, gamertag multi-player access or any of that other COOL stuff which we like Live for.

Their poor kid had the default Gamertag which the system had generated – something like “ImportSynergy759” or crap like that – so that was the first thing I changed. He’s been using the profile itself for a while and has amassed a few achievements so he wanted to keep those in place, obviously, but was totally confused about being ‘online’.

“Does this mean I can’t play on my own?” was the first question. Which on reflection is actually quite reasonable from someone who doesn’t know, when you think about it.

“Do I have to play with other people?” was another. I was immediately able to relate my personal experiences which is that I rarely play in online multi but that it’s nice to have the option to be able to.

“What else does it do?” Now, this was the one which led to my thought processes leading to this post. I started to take our young recruit through the other aspects of Live only to have the current stock phrase (did we have these stock responses when we were that age?) levelled at anything I showed.

“That’s a bit boring!”

GAH! Do you have any concept of how cool this actually is? Do you have any idea of what life was like BEFORE this magic, and it is magic, was available to use all for a few shekels per month? Do you have any clue of the truly awesome technologies that there are underneath all of this stuff?

Of course the answer is no. Okay, he was being a bit of a scrote and I let him know this by ‘leaving him to it’ and walking out. But, here’s the thing, the generation gap is shrinking.

We’re used to having a generational gap of around twenty years and using that as our measure of change. We talk about our parent’s generation and our grandparent’s generation. Now though, we’re seeing technological generations being measured in less than ten years – in some cases as low as five – and today’s kids have no memory of a time before broadband internet, before touch-screen smartphones and before 3rd generation consoles. Now I know that to some of our readership and even to some of my colleagues here at Ready Up I actually fall into the ‘my parents’ generation’ bucket but the times, they ARE a-changing and they’re changing at pace. I work and live with technology and very much enjoy sitting on the leading, and sometimes bleeding, edge. But the perspective that I have over what we see now versus what I first saw when my eyes were opened to gaming at home, through Defender on the BBC Micro, is significant and I’m very pleased I have it.

I’m always stunned at the possibilities which open up year on year and month on month through the technologies we see, Kinect, Move, Thunderbolt, high-speed broadband and everything else which comes along. It’d be nice to be able to transplant some of that perspective into today’s tech-generation but I’ve a feeling that it’d simply be “a bit boring”.

Little Ba*****s!