Arbitrary tasks randomly assigned by people who hate us.

There's a terrific poem by, I think, Ogden Nash, which describes a visit to a totally ineffable, and ineffably French, restaurant. You ask for the menu, they bring you bread rolls. You ask for the wine list, they bring you a menu and some oysters. Throw the shells onto the floor, that's what the floor is for. You ask for the bill, they bring you another menu. Throw the menu onto the floor, walk swiftly out of the door, that's what the door is for.

This is, roughly, how I feel about Games for Windows Live. I wanted to play Broken Steel. Not a huge ambition. The most obvious way I could imagine that this would work would be that, just as I did Fallout 3, I would download it from Steam. Why, after all, would you sell a game on Steam and not the expansion pack? Why, realistically, would you not sell anything you could on Steam? A mechanism that might as well have been designed to prove the long tail hypothesis, which lives to demonstrate that when every single person who would pay full price has done so, there is a relief battalion at half price and another at half again.

But no. Only available through Games for Windows Live. So, one download service lying on top of another. This was already not going to end well.

Another form to fill out, another set of credit card details shared. Now, despite having failed to install Windows Genuine Advantage, surely Microsoft owned enough of me that I could be on my way. But no.

I have at this point downloaded not the game but the game downloader. I have created a gamer card. I have followed a process that needs numbered instructions. Can I buy the game? No. I have to buy 1000 points, and then spend 800 of them on the game. Leaving me with an unspendable 200 points on a service I didn't want to use in the first place. This is like a download service's evil twin.

Once I'd puzzled out how to activate Windows Live (or possible Live! oh God oh God) in the game, I was perturbed to find that the saved games over which I had reached level 20 and finished the game, thus necessitating buying the expansion pack in the first place, had disappeared. Gone, and never called me mother. After a period of head-scratching, it turned out that activating Live(!) changed the save game location - you could have level 20 or the expansion pack but not both. While working out where I would have to move the saves to have then visible to Windows Live, I realised that I could probably just move the data files for Broken Steel where they would have landed from a disc installation and not have to interact with Live(!!!) again.

I think GFWL(!!!) believes that I would not do this, because I want to take advantage of its facilities. There is a world in which this is the case. If I wanted to combine my console and my PC gaming experience, for some reason. If I wanted to play... Shadowrun. If I wanted to play Shadowrun with XBox players. If I wanted to play a game with a button combo for teabagging. Cross-platform. That would be a world in which they would be bang on the money.