Joystiq (and in a few hours every site on the internet) has five new poorly shot videos from Microsoft’s closed “Friends and Family” beta that a seemingly independently wealthy individual has captured and placed on the Youtube. I’ll get to my impressions of the videos in a moment, but first, why does this keep happening? I just participated in two Microsoft betas, one for Windows Live (which I’m not sure if I can talk about yet), and one for Shadowrun (which both Chuf and I have talked about a couple of times), and in both, the agreements signed are pretty clear: talk about this before we say you can, and your reproductive organs belong to us. It’s phrased in a more flowery, legally binding manner to be sure, but that’s the gist of it. Being that I’m just a consumer to Microsoft, should they reserve that kind of language for me should I speak out of turn about the NDA covered goodness (or badness, as the case may be) that I’m seeing early, I can hardly conceive of the horrors that threaten a Microsoft employee talking about a closed beta to their most important product this year shy of Vista. I would think unemployment would be the easiest of the consequences the mighty M$ might bring to bear.
So given these truths that at least I hold to be self evident, what are these people thinking when they not only put the videos up on a public sharing service like Youtube, but fail to take even the most rudimentarily effective precaution against hiding the gamertag they had to register their name under to sign up for the beta. The responsible party for these videos tried, kind of, to hide his gamertag, but we are shown repeatedly closeups of areas that very clearly show it, as to tape paper over his entire television screen, rather than the strip he covered might make his sniper rifle ownage hard to pull off I guess. Why is being seen as elite on Youtube so important? That’s like trying to win popularity contests on Myspace by showing your spare tire; people will laugh and point, and some might even enjoy it in a sick way, but no one’s going to remember your name once the pictures are down, or in this case, when Bungie’s flaming ninjas swarm out and let fly with the DMCA takedown notices (which are quite effective when they aren’t being aimed at a DRM encryption key). And when your boss at Microsoft calls you into his office to fire you for being an idiot that couldn’t keep a secret about a video game, what do you tell people?
Look, I know secrets about games, and not just from the two aforementioned betas. And man, I’ll tell you, knowing juicy shit about video games that you know people will either be really excited for, or will froth at the mouth in rage about, and not being able to publish it on your video game site is hard. Really hard. And somehow I’ve managed not to get anyone fired, least of all myself. Do you think saying “I got fired for Youtube videos of the game hundreds of thousands of people were going to be playing 10 days later” is going to get you laid or something?
There are a lot of theories out there that claim that as a society, we are progressively more fixated on documenting that we were places and showing it to people than we are on actually enjoying the places we go. Think about the aunts or uncles or grandparents you have that have enormous slide shows of their vacations, or even about the huge numbers of vanity pictures and images of drunken parties that all look the same that people have in their Flickr or Myspace albums. If we’re at this point with video games, where the value of the game is in playing it, and people are more fixated on telling people that they’re playing it than pwning n00bs, we’re in a troubling place in our media saturated society. Then again, one of the most anticipated parts of Halo 3 is the replay save feature, which lets you record your games and view them from any angle.
This world is going to hell, clearly.
As far as my impressions of the videos go, from what little can be seen in them, things look promising. For one thing, it looks like the starting kit, or at least one option, is the battle rifle and the assault rifle, which is genius. I was one of the players who quickly grew tired of getting dual SMG’ed and eventually stopped playing. I felt a tingle of that old excitement that surfaced during those Halo and Halo 2 parties a couple of years ago. The beta remains increasingly eagerly awaited.
-Aegies