"She's the community bicycle, baby. Everybody's had a ride." - Austin Powers
A couple of blogs ago, Pengwenn and I were discussing spare consoles and she had mentioned that she might send one to Ghengis as a temporary measure to get him back online until he had the opportunity to get one for himself. I was thinking about kicking in financially for that so that she wouldn't have to bear the whole cost of it. I knew that I had a spare console or two lying around as do some of our other friends. With the high mortality rate of the Xbox 360 and the increasingly long waits to get repaired units back, keeping a spare one these days just makes sense. But it made me start thinking about another idea: The community console.
The concept is simple: Whoever needs it would get it and then they would send it on to the next person when they need it. Beamer and I have been trading games for about 1 1/2 years now, and that has gone well. In our case, it has saved us each some money and it had given us the chance to play games that we might not have otherwise tried if we had to pay big bucks for them. We would be simply extending this idea to the console itself.
Like any new idea, there are plenty issues that would have to be worked out. Who wants to be involved? Who pays for the initial one? If we all chip in, how does the money get collected? Who looks after it? What happens if it breaks down? Do the shipping costs make it prohibitive? The answer to all of these questions is the same: I don't know. We'd have to work it out. But it was just an idea and I thought I'd throw it out there. It works for games. Einstein once said that "If at first an idea does not seem totally absurd, it will never work". How absurd is this? You be the judge.
Yeah, and who's going to keep track of who has the console? And once someone has it why would they want to buy their own when they just got one for free? A bunch of us were talking about this when we first migrated to a 360. We were thinking about chipping in for a 360 for Big Gamer from Battlefront. Nothing materialized from that unfortunately. And I never did anything about it because I think Genghis's stuborn pride would get in the way of accepting that big a gift from someone....even as a loaner.
ReplyDeleteThe game exchange idea sounds like a good one. I have games I'm not playing now that I'm sure someone would like to try out. And I know there are some games I would have liked to try for free prior to wasting money on them. But the trade in value made up for some of that.
You're more than welcome to join in on the game exchange.
ReplyDeleteI'd have put out a few bucks to get Big Gamer online. Even when the 360s were $500 it's not much to spread that around. I miss playing with him. I keep him on my friends list in the hopes he will return one day.