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Oh, to be William Shatner, eh? To live in some curved glass Malibu dream home with a sunken lounge (just guessing, but it feels right), those staircases which are only attached on one side, and an over-stuffed Victrola-cabinet-stroke-bar lavishly stocked with Disaronno and the very choicest Mantovani LPs. Could life get any better for The Shat? Wait! Here's Facebook, emailing about Mentions, a new celebrity-only app that allows the anointed to...to... well, maybe I don't know exactly what it does, but it must do something incredible, right? Mariah Carey's involved. 'Sign me up, Scotty!' says Shatner, his words echoing off the glass and the Disaronno, until silence descends and he's lost in reverie - back auditioning for TJ Hooker, perhaps, or performing Hamlet at a technical college in Winnipeg.Mentions is actually sort of interesting - and it's interesting, I think, purely because it's an app that most of us will never get to see or to use. It's like the fabled celeb-only Nando's card - always a bit of a strange one, this - that many conspiracy theorists postulate may allow the fabulously wealthy and beloved to dine for free in the kind of restaurant that usually makes you queue at the till to place your order. I'm not sure Mentions is truly even that brilliant. Setting aside Shatner's negative online review, there's the hollow echo of a Beckett production to it: a chat room largely filled with people who have guest-starred on Columbo. Then there's that old Groucho Marx zinger about never wanting to belong to a club that would have Ed Sheeran as a member. But who cares? This is an app you can't buy, and yet aren't apps meant to belong to that glorious class of things you can have any of for the right price?
The grim appeal of the exclusive isn't new to games, but taking it this far probably would be. Facebook's essentially just put in a poor door that we're all expected to shuffle in and out of knowing, just knowing, that we're tucked away by the bins while Shatner and Sheeran are screwing about in a marble lobby. They're probably collaborating on a song in there! Awful as this all is, and as much as it calls to mind the dizzying chinoed horror of an Elite Singles TV ad, in my darker moments it's made me hanker a little for more genuine customer-hating exclusivity in games. Not the pre-order exclusives which are always either too crap to worry about or so great that they'll eventually turn up as DLC, but honest-to-Betsy you'll never play this unless exclusivity, where the unfairness of it all only makes the thought of possession sweeter. We want what we can't have: it's a huge part of what makes us human. It got us to the moon. Isn't there a strange innate appeal to the idea of a game that almost nobody will get to play?
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