I’ve got two TVs in our living room. This isn’t for ramshackle picture in picture–I don’t even have cable–it’s because I am part of a modern family.
My partner and I both play video games. We also like to play video games together. For us, the Scott Pilgrim brawler (with the music cranked up) and a few beers is a good night in. Borderlands, Mass Effect, and Fallout, created a glee for shotgunning people in the face in my partner that made revisiting some Gears of War 2 horde mode a source of much entertainment.
The particular set up for us to play three player horde mode, with system link, in the same house led to our first transgressive living room. Two TVs was wrong, but it felt so right. Gears of War 3 came out and we continued to enjoy our set up, especially since friends could also join over Xbox Live. For our non-nuclear unit, it was the golden age of multiplayer.
Then the Mass Effect demo dropped with included MP. While I know we might be in the minority, we found it, and still do, a pretty enjoyable experience. But we hit a hiccup: we couldn’t split screen the multiplayer. There is no couch multiplayer for Mass Effect 3.
So we did what any reasonable modern family with disposable income would do: we bought a second Xbox. And honestly? There’s no going back. Couch co-op is not a guarantee anymore. Xbox Live has done wonders for online console gaming, but it has made a local co-op a second priority in some instances. There are enough games that do not support local coop, and even more that do not support both local and online at the same time.
Our second Xbox came with Fable 3, which is yay! but it also introduced us to the problems of owning two Xboxes. DRM is a real pain in the ass. I’d like to bold that sentence for emphasis. We would go to play our Fable 3 campaign on one machine and be told that we couldn’t use the DLC, even though, you know, the code was in the box sitting on top of the machine. Without that DLC, you cannot load a saved game. We quickly encounter some debilitating DLC conflicts. Necessarily, I became an expert in DRM for Xbox Live. If you need a primer, allow me:
When you buy or activate DLC, it gets assigned to two things: the Xbox it was purchased on and your Gamertag. Anyone can access the DLC on the original Xbox, and the gamertag can access it anywhere, as long as it’s signed into Live. Usually this shouldn’t pose too much of a problem, because anyone on your Xbox could use the DLC, and if you go over to a friend’s, you could download it and play it while you’re there.
But when you have two Xboxes in one house, and two people, each with gamertags, buying DLC, things get fucked fast.
For example: I purchased TellTale’s Walking Dead Episode 1. I enjoyed it a great deal. When episode 2 came out, Meg thought she would be a kind and thoughtful spouse and purchase it for me. This was apparently not the Microsoft-endorsed thing to do. Months later, I still haven’t been able to actually play the second episode. I have to either buy it again, or play it on another system. Which is dumb.
So to make things simpler, we thought we’d buy a Family Gold account and unify our tags. This did not make things simpler.
We set the account up under Meg, then gave me all the permissions that any adult would want on his game console, and went about our gaming business. That was until one day when I went to purchase something from Live and realized that, from Xbox LIVE’s persepctive, I was not an adult at all. I could not add points to my account. This wasn’t a setting in our family account. Nope, only one member of the family can add points to their account. If I want points to buy something, Meg has to give me an allowance. I’m not joking, that is the word in the interface. An allowance.
I am glad it’s her and not me giving the other an allowance. If Xbox made me give Meg an allowance, there might be more unpacking of the implications/assumptions bound to that relationship. As it is, Xbox is lucky Meg is the parent in our relantionship.
So, let me explain the process that I go through when I want to buy something from Xbox Live.
Context: Meg’s Xbox is the new version, so black, and mine is the old white one.
Prerequisite: Have both gamertags saved on a USB stick. This allows you to log in to any Xbox without transferring your gamertag or recovering it from Live.
1. Log in to black Xbox with Meg’s gamertag.
2. Go into Family Settings.
3. SELECT GRANT ALLOWANCE.
4. Instead of using the default payment options, because I don’t want to charge her credit card, I select my credit card from the list of her payment methods.
5. Purchase a number of points.
Info: You can add 500 points or in 1000 point increments.
6. After the points have been added to Meg’s account, I grant them to my account.
Additional info: You can only grant points in increments of 400. Thanks for the convenience.
Remember: Most DLC on Xbox Live is in neither 500 or 400 point increments. I know what’s happening here, Microsoft.
7. I then sign in to my account on the black Xbox, purchase what I wanted and download it.
Result: Now, the DLC is available on Meg’s Xbox so that she can play it if she wants.
8. Turn off the black Xbox, and then log in to the white Xbox with my account and download/transfer whatever I bought.
Result: I can play the DLC on my Xbox, and Meg can play it on her Xbox.
Please note: She cannot play the DLC on my Xbox.
Final context: If Meg buys something, she is the adult so she can just buy it, but she has to buy it on the white Xbox so that I can play it, and she plays it on her Xbox.
Now, to some extent I’m exploiting the system to get DLC on two machines, but it’s the only convenient way to optimize DLC availability on both machines when we load a saved game. I mean, if we were to buy a game from the store, we would be able to play it on either machine, whether we were connected to Live or not. I don’t feel like I’m cheating.
While this might seem like an article that’s just a fringe user complaining about something no user really likes, what I want to point out is that while Meg and I are somewhat unusual in that we both have Xboxes and buy content, we aren’t that unusual, and certainly will not be unusual as gaming moves into the future. The understanding of how the DRM works, and how to manage it (somewhat) effectively is kind of complicated. Way too complicated for a typical user. As the new wave of consoles approaches, and possibly a new distribution method, this DRM stuff needs to get more sophisticated. I shouldn’t have to set up charts to figure out what DLC is on what machine, especially when we are on a family account that actually restricts my ability to purchase DLC.
We’re a modern family, geared towards gaming. We’re publishers’ target market – and if we’re not, we will be soon. They need to start thinking ahead.