I just spent the last 10 minutes trying to sign into the Rockstar Social Club in order to play GTA:IV, getting increasingly frustrated that not only did the series of logins and passwords I tried not work, but Rockstar was unable to email me password reminders. I finally figured out that because I’ve never played online I never created an account.

Once upon a time all you had to remember was your computer password and email account. Now I’ve got logins for websites, games, game distribution platforms, consoles (that I don’t even own) and several games publishers. With all the possible combinations of logins and passwords anything that gets shelved for a couple of months is doomed to have a password guessing/resetting session when it gets picked up again. A simple bout of amnesia would kill an entire online life.