The Xbox One Reveal in Stupid Sound Bites

Don Mattrick, President of Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft, probably wasn’t expecting such a poor reception when he revealed Xbox One to the world on Tuesday. Coverage of the system, and the event at which it was revealed, has been mostly negative so far. Plenty about Microsoft’s vision for the console, and the way it’s been communicated, deserves to be criticised. It’s largely the overblown and empty language used to introduce Xbox One that I plan to talk about here, and I want to point out that I’m reserving judgement on the console itself at least until E3. When you read the quotes below, remember that they were said by straight-faced men and women, without a hint of irony. On reflection, this may be the most impressive thing about the entire event.

Moments before unveiling Xbox One, Don Mattrick suggested that Microsoft could “[i]mprove a living room that has become too complex […] by harmonising your experiences”. This seems to mean using Xbox One to do multiple things at the same time, and on the same screen, so that they get in the way of one another. Yusuf Medhi wasn’t “harmonising” his experience when he demonstrated using voice commands to buy tickets for one movie whilst watching another. Surrendering yourself to a movie and busying yourself buying tickets fundamentally don’t go together. One is leisure, the other is admin, and we do the former to get away from the latter. Combing these activities isn’t harmony; it’s dissonance.

If I need to buy tickets whilst watching a movie, I want to do so on a separate screen to avoid interrupting my viewing, and I imagine most people feel the same. But like many features demonstrated at Tuesday’s event, Xbox One’s multitasking doesn’t appear to be a response to the needs of Microsoft’s audience. Instead, it looks like a desperate attempt to keep you looking at your TV screen – on which Microsoft wants to market things at you – instead of the one on your smartphone or tablet.

One thing Microsoft think will keep you looking at your TV is, well, TV. Much was made of Xbox One’s pointless ability to switch between live television and gameplay, and there’s both an NFL partnership and a Spielberg produced Halo TV series on the way. Indeed, Microsoft’s Entertainment and Digital Media President, Nancy Tellum, claims that “Xbox is about to become the next water cooler.” Clearly written by committee and selected for maximum sound bite potential, this ridiculous phrase gave me a good laugh. Of course, I’m familiar with the idea of water cooler chat, where employees gather around the aforementioned appliance to discuss their favourite TV shows. But the proverbial water cooler in the expression is what co-workers chat around, not about. Unless this is a stealth reveal of Xbox One’s ‘refreshment mode’, this was a laughably inappropriate line.

Games were barely mentioned until about half way through Tuesday’s event, when EA Sports Executive Vice President, Andrew Wilson, announced new entries in the FIFA, Madden, NBA Live and UFC franchises. Dredging up two of the most tired clichés in video games, Wilson claimed that these “revolutionary” titles would “blur the line between real and virtual”. Now there are plenty of “revolutionary” titles that have had profound effects on the way games are designed and played. But on the strength of the vague promises and gameplay free trailer shown at Tuesday’s event, there’s no evidence that any of EA Sports’ Xbox One titles will fall into this category. And as for claiming these games will “blur the line between real and virtual”, I would struggle to think of a game from the last 10 years with realistic art direction that hasn’t. This type of language is designed to fill time and sound important, rather than imparting any meaningful information.

Besides EA Sports’ titles, it was Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty: Ghosts that received the most attention. Activision Publishing Chief Executive Officer, Eric Hirschberg, had the following to say about it:

[E]veryone was expecting us to play it safe this year […] But we didn’t want to do the safe thing; we wanted to do the right thing, and that meant eliminating as many creative restrictions as possible so that our developers could create an entirely new Call of Duty for the next generation.

This lead into a video in which Infinity Ward Executive Producer Mark Rubin explains what happens when a company bravely refuses to “play it safe”:

One of the fascinating new additions to your squad is a dog. We’ve had dogs in Call of Duty before, but never like this. This is someone you really care about.

You’ve got to feel for that poor dog. Everyone knows “someone you really care about” is just a euphemism for “someone we’re planning to kill off”.

 

Marked for death (Picture: Yahoo)

But wait, there’s more. Lead Animator at Infinity Ward, Zach Volker, points out the studio is hard at work on other exciting new ideas:

So another feature […] is the slide. It allows you to […] get out of the line of fire […] in a really cool looking way.

Because heaven forbid you should look uncool whilst frantically diving out of harm’s way.

A slide isn’t a “feature”; it’s a move. Dogs aren’t “fascinating”; they’re dogs. If this is what first-person shooters look like after creators are done “eliminating as many creative restrictions as possible”, perhaps the genre is a spent force. If this is happens when a studio doesn’t “play it safe”, imagine what will happen in a couple of years when development costs balloon and they are forced to do just that in order to keep increasingly risk adverse shareholders happy. If you take Eric Hirschberg at his word, Infinity Ward are either holding a lot of exciting stuff for E3, or they're creatively bankrupt. 

And then there's the name. Already shortened to ‘Xbone’ by mischievous Twitter users, ‘Xbox One’ lacks the confidence and simplicity of naming the console ‘Xbox’, as was rumoured to be the plan. Presumably, it refers to Microsoft’s designs on being the ‘one’ box in people’s living rooms. But the affluent demographic Microsoft was clearly targeting at Tuesday’s event already have devices that do the things that Xbox One can do. Microsoft thinking they can muscle in on established markets with Xbox One stinks of a company being blinded by their success with the 360. I think this arrogance will prove to be their biggest problem. Near the start of Tuesday’s event, Don Mattrick bragged that Microsoft is “proud of [its] leadership position”. We all know what pride comes before.

@ludolinguist