There was some rejoicing on the pages of this very organ not long ago, when Sony won a court case against a Playstation chipping firm, and it finally seemed like at least one aspect of the murky grey areas surrounding gaming had been cleared up once and for all.

Of course, it couldn’t last, and a recent judgement in Australia in favour of chippers has thrown the entire argument back into the melting pot and caused much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. The Man On The Street, on the other hand, couldn’t be happier.

For far too many years now, the videogames industry, and videogames retailers, have been the undisputed World Champions of Boneheadedly Shooting Yourself In The Foot Over And Over Again. Even the most ardent anti-drugs sticklers, for example, have come to realise that you can never win a “war on drugs”. The very nature of drugs is such that having authority figures trying to stamp down on them simply makes them – and the lifestyle surrounding them – all the more glamorous and attractive to people who might otherwise never have been interested. The only way to reduce the problems of drugs is to win the hearts and minds of your target audience, and you don’t do that by coming across like a particuarly obnoxious headmaster with a steel rod up his arse and a cane in each hand.

And so it is, on a marginally less dramatic scale, with chipping videogames consoles. We’re constantly being told that we live in a global marketplace. The fact is used as an excuse for longer work hours, worse pay and ever-shrinking labour rights, because hey, if you won’t do it there’s always some poor schmuck in Malaysia who will, right? It’s not unreasonable, then, for the public to think “Well, if it works one way, at least it has to work the other too, so I can buy my consumer products wherever I get the best deal and whenever I want them instead of waiting for some late, shoddy PAL version that’s 50% more expensive for no good reason.” And yet, when customers try to exercise their rights as global consumers, they’re made to feel like evil criminals by a cloth-brained industry determined to be its own worst enemy, absolutely hell-bent on creating a them-and-us mentality, and seemingly driven by an overwhelming desire to force people who actually want to buy legitimate software, into the arms of pirates and bootleggers.

Because let’s face it, if you make someone go to a dodgy market-stall geezer to get his console chipped because he wants to play a Japanese import of the latest Mario or Gran Turismo game rather than wait six months or more for a crappy overpriced UK version, you’re asking a hell of a lot of them to then turn a blind eye to the tables full of brand-new games at £2 a pop that the dodgy geezer will also be offering. People, it’s been conclusively proved by science, are only human. You’ve taken a dedicated, early-adopting, money-spending gamer who simply wanted to buy legitimate software, but was frustrated in that desire by the industry’s control-freakery and retail’s pious buttoned-up prudishness, and delivered them gift-wrapped to the pirates. What are you, fucking stupid or something?

Whenever The Man On The Street wanders into any of his local independent game retailers, the thing he’s most often struck by (other than flying coffee mugs) is the utter pointlessness of most of them, the complete lack of any palpable difference between them and a branch of Electronics Boutique or even Dixons. (“We’re better informed”, cry the indies. How much “information” do you think people need or want about the latest FIFA, exactly?) It didn’t used to be that way. Local indies used to have a point to their existence. They used to be friendly to hardcore gamers, selling import adaptors and Japanese/US software, rather than treating anyone who wanted such things as a potential criminal and sending them off to the market stalls with a flea in their ear.

Maybe, just maybe, it might be an idea to think about making independent game stores friendly places to hardcore gamers again, instead of forlornly trying to compete against impossible odds by doing the same thing as the chains only with worse margins. (Frankly, with EB’s no-quibble 10-day return policy, The Man On The Street wouldn’t dream of risking buying a new game from an indie instead for the sake of possibly saving two quid, and he can’t imagine why anyone else in possession of their marbles would either.) These people, these gamers, *want to give you their money*. It’s long been a mystery to this reporter why so many of you seem so resolutely determined to turn them away. Still, you’re all making such colossal fortunes, I must be wrong, eh?

The Man On The Street hasn’t written a bone-crushingly tedious show-preview article in his life, and he isn’t about to start now.