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On 4th April 2013, Adam Orth, a creative director at Microsoft Game Studios, walked through the front door of his home in Seattle and turned off his mobile phone. It was, he recalls, an "entirely ordinary day". Orth was, at the time, researching uses for the second generation of the Kinect camera, which Microsoft planned, when the time came, to sell with every Xbox One unit. One experiment, for example, facilitated live polling during a Presidential debate. The camera would distinguish between multiple individuals as they watched the TV in a room and, from hand gestures, could poll reactions and collate the results across Xbox Live. Orth was unusually outspoken on social media for someone who worked at an organisation that requires its spokespeople to maintain an dogged level of inoffensive corporate decorum. A few hours earlier, for example, Orth tweeted a defence of Microsoft's requirement that its forthcoming Xbox One would need to be connected to the internet in order to play games. "Sorry, I don't get the drama around having an 'always on' console," Orth wrote. "Every device now is 'always on.' That's the world we live in."
Manveer Heir, a friend of Orth's, who works as a game designer on BioWare's Mass Effect series, replied: "Did you learn nothing from Diablo 3 or Sim City? You know some people's internet goes out right? 'Deal with it' is a shitty reason." When Orth countered that electricity can sometime fail too, Heir replied, "You've lived in LA, SF, Seattle... very connected places. Try living in Janesville, WI or Blacksburg, VA." Orth's final response would upend his life. "Why on earth would I live there?"
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