When I lived in NY in the mid 90’s a friend of mine worked for an interactive company who’s primary audience was kids, and because of this he was always interested in kids tv, games and things marketed to kids. That was his excuse anyway, and the reason he played an N64 as opposed to the playstation. One of the marketing innovations that he talked about that stuck in my head was Pokemon, he was absolutely enamored with what they had done and loved to talk about why Pokemon worked and why it was genius. Now apart from the obvious fact that Pokemon had a thinly disguised 30 minute infomercial that was designed to drive kids to “catch ‘em all”, my friend highlighted two aspects that were critical to Pokemons success: Collecting and Competition. It’s funny how those things showed up when I was at school, conkers anyone? Marbles?
Xbox live, as implemented on the new xbox 360 has has got some incredibly interesting concepts built into it and built into the new games that build upon the same basic concepts of conkers, marbles and Pokemon. One of the foundations of this “collection and competition” metaphor is the “achievements that are built into every xbox 360 game. Essentially “achievements” a point of comparison across games, achievements can be from finishing a level, or hitting a certain high score, or finding a secret.
Conspicuous Consumption - The gamer card
The gamer card is a signature that xbox live creates for you that helps share your gaming experience. It shows a cumulative point score from all your game achievements and your most recently played games. Sure it’s a community tool, but this is equivalent to the big bag of marbles you would carry around in school.
From the gamer card it is possible to click and dig deeper into a persons gaming experience, and if you are also a member of xbox live it enables you to compare your marbles with the other person using the “compare games” function. This can allow players to compare the total of games played, and also clicking down one level compare the achievements for an individual game.
Playability and Re-playability
Xbox live extended the life of video games beyond the couple of weeks it usually takes to beat a game. By playing online against humans makes a game a lot more enjoyable and challenging, lets say the AI is just better 
Take Halo 2 for instance, 2 years on and xbox live is still full of people playing it today when there are plenty more sophisticated games to play. With the addition of gamer cards, and achievements Microsoft has found another way to extend the life of games, now players are going through many games more than once to get all the “achievements” or to beat friends achievements.
Scratching the Surface of the Network
Microsoft has done many things right on Xbox Live, but they have a lot of room to grow if they really want to take advantage of this network.
Here’s some ideas for them:
- 100 friends isn’t enough - Xbox live caps your friends list at 100 for some reason
- Marketplace content should be “viral - there is a tonne of content “hidden” in the Xboxlive marketplace, and yet if you find something interesting there is no way to forward it or let your friends list know about it
(please forgive me for any crazy errors that are in this as i’m proofing it at 5am with too little sleep)
Very interesting article, i have to say I have been coming to your blog every now and then for the past few weeks and I am really diggin it. Some very interesting articles.
I posted a little of this article on my blog and included a link to your page. If you have a problem with that, let me know and I will delete it..I only really included the first paragraph and then pointed to your website..not that a whole lot of people are going to read it on my blog since I am pretty sure I am the only who views it
just thought it would be polite to tell you I posted a bit of this article on my blog is all.
Thanks so much Matt. I have no problem with you sharing my content as long as it’s attributed to me and links back to the original article. As for your readership, that will build slowly over time, the most important thing to do is to keep posting on a consistant basis. Once a week is fine, once a day is fine, just be consistant. I feel rather hypocritical saying this because I am certainly not the most consistant poster.
I really like what sharps barbershop did:
“updated on fridays” a very nice way to set expectations.