Editor's Note: Get confused whenever you get ready to fire up one of your favorite multiplayer games or when you're trying to figure out if you have enough Xbox Live Points to buy the latest downloadable treat? Andrew Hiscock shares some of the things he feels are most confusing about games today. -Jason

Videogame players have a remarkable ability to decipher complicated phenomena. Take your average videogame website. If you can navigate IGN.com, you deserve an honorary degree in geography. These skills are developed in dealing with our chosen hobby. User interfaces, hardware connectivity, and even the very games we play have developed a new tier of problem solving for humanity.

Should the world at large ever take these skills seriously, they would find a readily available segment of the population ready to be air-traffic controllers, IT consultants, and mediators for Middle East peace talks. If you can figure out any of the phenomena listed below, you'll be able to impress any old professor of quantum mechanics.

Xbox 360 Backward Compatibility

Trying to discover whether an Xbox game can play on your Xbox 360 is like experiencing a Dan Brown novel, except worse (if that's even possible). Observe the segment of a chart that I yanked from Wikipedia.

There is stuff that people don't even know! Is Ultimate Spider-Man compatible in Japan? God only knows. We can put a man on the moon, but we can't figure this out?

PlayStation 3 Backward Compatibility

Speaking of which, Sony's backward compatibility trumps the laziness of Microsoft's initiative. I can understand someone saying, "Yeah, we wanted to do it, but we were making enough money and didn't want to waste our time." But I'll never understand why one would purposely go out of their way to make it confusing.

Does the 80GB PS3 have backward compatibility? Maybe? You don't do any favors by offering a near-identical SKU while the previous (software backward compatible) SKU still has the retail channels blocked.

The good thing: All PS3s are PS1 compatible. Which is great since Sony's made it redundant by selling PS1 games digitally. Double the PS1 games and no PS2 games? Wait, which ones play PS2 games again?

Xbox Live Points

Quick: What's 1,200 Xbox Live Points in real money? Did you have to think about it? If not, you've beaten Microsoft. This nonsensical conversion factor is designed to divorce your well-ingrained sense of money from your actual money. It's like asking what day Halo 3 launched on the French Republican Calendar (Quartidi, Vendemiaire 4, 216...if you were interested).

Games are usually priced where a bit of sensible math can do the trick, but when you pay $1.875 for 10 gamerpics.... Was that half penny spent for someone to sweep you across, Guv'nor?

WiiConnect24

Equally confusing is Nintendo's online initiative. Dubbed WiiConnect24, it offers the complete opposite. Yes, you are connected to the Internet 24 hours a day, but you can't actually do anything with it. On computers we call this an "Internet connection."

Once you do activate the feature, you can start playing games. First connect with friends using your impossible-to-find Wii Friend Code. Got that done? Perfect, because you'll never use it ever again (unless you like exchanging Miis), because each game has its own individual Friend Code!

Nintendo, however, decided to make it even better. Take Super Smash Bros. Brawl as an example. With the online mode, you can play against anyone else on Earth as long as they are not your friend. For that, you need Friend Codes.

PS3/PSP Connectivity

Not only is it not the easiest thing in the world to do, but it's also hard to get your mind around what you can do once it's done. You can play your PS3 games on your PSP. But you can also play PSP games with your PS3 Sixaxis. Can you play PS3 games on your PSP with your Sixaxis? The very complicated and non-user-friendly instructions about mating your Sony products can be found here and here.

Personally, I'm waiting for reverse remote play, so you can play PS3 games through your PSP using a Sixaxis, only to beam it back to your PS3 to play it on your television.

Mergers and Other Business

For anyone who follows videogame news, the past few years have been incredibly interesting. That is, if you have an MBA. Otherwise, you have absolutely no idea who owns whom and who is developing or publishing games.

Let me try to explain the current landscape. So...EA buys BioWare and sticks in Mythic. Bethesda buys id, but not really; it's actually the parent company ZeniMax (who the hell...?) that bought id. Bungie leaves Microsoft to make its own products, only to make two more Halo games. Activision and Vivendi get together but call the new company Activision Blizzard, whose branding appears nowhere. Activision drops Brütal Legend, which EA picks up, and then Activision is all like, "NOOOO!!!" Atari gets resurrected after selling everything they own, only to buy other properties. Midway was sold for the paltry sum of $100,000, only to declare Chapter 11 two months later. Square Enix buys Eidos, and Ubisoft and THQ are thinking about selling themselves.

And nobody can fucking figure out who can publish GoldenEye.

Yes. Videogames are recession-proof.

World of WarCraft

At this point in the MMO's life, we have to admit that there merely isn't a set of terms reserved for gameplay. With a subscriber count approaching 12 million, WOW's users have developed an honest-to-goodness dialect of the English language. According to this site, more than 1,300 terms specific to WOW exist, which outnumbers many full languages (albeit of the Taki Taki variety).

Observe (from the official forums): "...I've done enough WSG/AB to get exalted with at least 2 characters...only problem is, all of those WSG/AB have been on different characters, so the highest I have on anyone is Revered (except on my priest, who is Exalted...). Perhaps you could increase rep gains by 11 points per player kill, or increase rep gains per flag cap/resource tick x10...."

Pokémon EV Points

Here. See?

Getting into the Metal Gear Online

The beauty of modern online gaming is that it's so easy. Just sign up, connect, and have at it. Except when Metal Gear Online rolled out. Not only was your PSN account useless, but you also had to sign up twice, once with Konami, once with the game itself. Not only was this a bunch of nonsense, but the game couldn't even handle registration, instead bumping you to the PS3's Web browser to get it done.

I can only guess that this was a cruel but clever Kojima-esque postmodern commentary on something or another.

Tetra Master

Finally, I am going to leave the current gen behind and go back a few years.

The Final Fantasy games are known for not making sense. This is mostly the result of some fast and loose localization and design decisions that appeal to a Japanese audience, a culture that has developed independently from Westerners for...100,000 years or so? Since the '80s, videogames have gone a long way toward bridging this divide, but once we start to figure it out, they get their hands on collectible card games and start sticking them in games.

Final Fantasy 9's Tetra Master wasn't the first card game, but in my experience, it's definitely the most confusing (not that was able to I make sense of Final Fantasy 8's Triple Triad). It's a little bit like playing chess in binary while blindfolded and in need of a bathroom break (oh, and you've been castrated, too). In short, it's absolute gibberish designed to get you spending more time collecting useless shit. These dozens of wasted hours are then justified by the player as a "good" time, which then reinforces their decision to buy the next game.

Why???

Why are these things so confusing? Admittedly, the responsibility for each of these issues spans a whole gamut of blame: executives, publishers, developers, stock holders, and audience. Sometimes it's innocent idiocy. Other times, it's the second gunman on the grassy knoll. While I can't confirm whether they are dumb, playing dumb, or trying to trick you into buying stuff, I do have my suspicions.

So next time you encounter confusing stuff in videogames, just remember these suggestions and take a close look at what you're forced to do and whether you're being played. Maybe then you'll do something sensible and easy, like read a book, go for a walk, or come up with a Unified Field Theory for physics.

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