Oh, say it ain’t so!

Without giving too many details about my age… ( ok I was in a grunge band and I saw “the Goonies” in a movie theatre ) I want to say a few words about Gaming. And no, I don’t mean blackjack or pulling the one armed bandit. I mean good old fashioned video games. I started in my youth with the family Atari 2600 console – my dad was awesome at “River Raid” by the way – and graduated to the Nintendo. Because we were, and I am, not made of money, it took a while to move up to the Playstation, and I had a Playstation 2 (still have) for over a decade. It’s only in the past few years I purchased an Xbox 360. It also took until about 2 years ago for me to subscribe to the LIVE feature….so me and 1 other person could kill Zombies together.

Enter the news of last week about the nature of Microsoft’s next gaming platform, the 720, or Durango, or whatever it will be called. Holy Big Brother, Batman! It’s like George Orwell teamed up with MicroSoft to expedite the apocalypse. I read about the exciting new “always on, always online” feature, the standard Kinnect device – without which the unit will not work – and the upgraded mic and electronic eye. Not only will this version of H.A.L. be able to map the room ( a feature that already exists ), it will be able to recognize your face, your voice, even how many people are in the room. That last one is great because now it will probably charge content by head count.

So let me understand this Mr. Gates…… You want a constantly powered device, that is constantly communicating with it’s host, that knows me, my family, my face, my voice, the dimensions of my den, what’s in it, etc…. Wow. Either these are the end times indeed or Billy is about to have his gaming platform commit Seppuku (look it up).

You see, peeps like me will not give a global corporation run by one of our elite oligarchs the ability to see me scratch myself in my boxers while virtually killing the undead. Not only that, but if I smoke a doob will the Stormtroopers kick in my door? Will my bad joke about a bomb in my undies end up with Janet Napolitano (when not napping) and her DHS barging through my door like Grimace at McDonald’s?

Here’s the Rub-a-Dub. I want to choose my own ads, my own preferences, and pick when I’m online, damnit! I want to do and say as I please in my home, I want to rent a movie and show it to as many folks as I can fit in my den. I already feel like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas looking up at the sky thinking every whirly bird is zooming in on my runny nose to see if it’s cocaine induced. I don’t want ads for Obama’s AmeriKa (comrade). I don’t want the global Microsoft/McDonalds/Facebook/Federal Reserve/IMF/Bohemian Grove FREAKS to know when I took a dump. And sell me the right supplement, anti-diarrheal, french fried money market account that could help me pinch it off just right.

So please……

Stop playing games with my game playing. And stay the hell out of my life and my home. Cause if that’s the new frontier, I’m going back to my Atari.