Player One Podcast

I don’t think I’m alone in becoming increasingly frustrated with Xbox Live. I pay my 50 bucks (or rather, I watch the deals and buy discounted memberships off Amazon), but I don’t feel I’m getting enough out of it. I find myself actually gaming online less and less. In fact, having Netflix Instant Streaming has become one of the key reasons I’ve kept my Gold account. My frustration boils down to these:

1) I really don’t like to play with strangers because in general it’s not a great experience.

2) Sometimes my gaming taste and the tastes of people on my immediate friends list just don’t jive, so while I have 100 friends maybe only a small handful are playing the same game I am (Hydro Thunder Hurricane).

3) Unless I look at everyone on my friends list’s recent activity or are on when they’re on, I can’t easily see what everyone’s playing or what games we might share. I have to hunt that information, it’s not being fed to me.  It’s akin to Facebook being nothing more than a list of your friends and the only way you could find out what was going on with them was by clicking on their profiles or being online at the same time as they were. There’s just a feeling of minimal actual social interaction on XBL.

4) After the first week of a big game’s release, it’s tough to coordinate a time to play with friends. It’s just luck of the draw whether they’ll be on when you’re on so you can throw them an invite.

So I started thinking about features or things that could be added to the service that might change that for me. The list starts after the jump!

Organization

Ever since the New Xbox Experience was first released, Microsoft has been hard at work making it as big of a mess as possible. They’ve hacked it up into disparate pieces, diluting the front menus so that important functions are layers deep or too many clicks away. How many people, really, honestly, use that horrendous coverflow Friends area to sift through their friends list?

The other problem is that Microsoft has taken functions of the dash and made them their own apps, the most recent offender being Destination Arcade. It’s a bloated, largely unnecessary new frontend in a system that’s just not conducive to the app-style interface. While I can download game trailers from the game marketplace, I can’t watch them within the Xbox’s old Videos application. No, I have to spend 30 seconds starting up the Zune Video app. There are separate Facebook and Twitter apps that each look completely different (and neither very good). There’s a Last.fm app. There’s a Netflix app. There’s the Avatar Marketplace. There’s Halo Waypoint. There’s Game Room. There are separate stores for big music game franchises like Rock Band, Guitar Hero and Lips. And everything is lost within a morass of advertising-disguised-as-content and content-disguised-as-marketing and separate entry tabs for Spotlight and My Community and Inside Xbox. And none of those parts talk to any other part.

There has to be a better way.

Do a better job of packaging adver-content

Boot up your Xbox and on the very top level you’re presented with three separate tabs for sponsored and Microsoft-created adver-content (four if you haven’t elected to hide the “Welcome” row). You’ve got Inside Xbox, Spotlight and My Community, all of which contain various amount of video features and advertising. Why not combine these into one place, a curated collection of news and sponsored content that can be sorted in a logical way. Microsoft knows what games I have played, so they should show me content that will be most relevant to me. Turn it into a digital/TV magazine but separate it away from system functionality. Move the Twitter/Facebook stuff somewhere else – perhaps within a “system apps” area that has easy access to all of these secondary functions like Video (Netflix, Hulu, Zune, others?), Music (Last.fm, Pandora, more?), Social (Twitter, Facebook, pictures, video chat). Then you’ll have a place to add more functions later where it makes sense!

Game-level friends

I am not the normal Xbox Live user by any stretch. My friends list is perpetually at 100 and every couple months I have to purge so I can add some new people, especially if I’m playing a game the rest of my friends list isn’t. For instance – Hydro Thunder Hurricane just came out. While some people on my friends list are playing it, it’d be great to have a smaller, dedicated list of people that are “temp friends” that I can add just for that game. If I’m hanging around multiplayer and find a good group, maybe I don’t want to perma-friend them, but when I come back to Hydro Thunder, it’d be great if I could join up with them again or at least use them for competition in games my regular friends list is not playing. Such a list could top out at 20 and I wouldn’t be notified when they’re online like my real friends list; instead, I only see them/they only see me when I boot up Hydro Thunder Hurricane. Right now, the only way to really do that is try and use Recent Players to find people you think you played against days ago. It’s hit or miss.

Whatever your feelings are about Nintendo’s friend codes, the one thing I have never had to worry about with any of Nintendo’s online games is running out of room to add people. I can hop onto NeoGAF, go into the thread for X game, and basically add anyone and everyone and it doesn’t touch my Wii Address Book.

Deeper profile

You really can’t tell that much about a player from an Xbox Live profile, though the foundation is certainly there for something that could be a lot more useful. You have your Gamer “Zone” where you can choose from Recreation, Pro, Family and Underground. Those…aren’t particularly used. The definitions are ambiguous at best and I don’t think there are any games that let you matchmake within those designations. So what are they for? To tell someone looking at your profile what kind of gamer you are? Then why not go deeper – let people see what genres I like, see not only my most recently played games but my favorite games on the Xbox 360. Let me specify a current status like “Looking for people to play Hydro Thunder Hurricane with/against.”

Better matching / suggested friends

Part of the idea behind a deeper profile is to make it easier to find people worth playing with. Another way of doing that is a variation of Suggested Friends on Facebook or suggested connections on the professional networking site Linked In. Linked In’s system may even be a better way to look at this because they actually tell you how many steps removed you are (2nd/3rd level connections) and how many connections you share. Already, the way you’re most likely to find friends on XBL is through people you’re already friends with. But it’s impossible to do that effectively. You can view someone else’s friends list but it’s not quick, you can’t find a list of friends less than 3 steps removed who are playing Blur without going through every person on someone’s list.

The other idea here is to allow friends to vote you up or recommend you to others. This adds another dimension to the existing Reputation stat that is also not really used at all. If you can select 5 “top friends” or your favorite people to play online with, then it’s going to be all the easier for everyone to find those worth playing with. This could factor nicely into the five-star Reputation stat that is also pretty useless at the moment.

A social feed

When Destination Arcade was first unveiled one of the screenshots showed off a newsfeed of sorts. It was really product-centric, not user-centric, just showing what your friends have recently purchased or recommended. But when you think about how many game-centric social networks already feed to Facebook and Twitter (Raptr, Giant Bomb, GamerDNA, etc.), one that lives on Xbox Live and is specifically made to share game statuses with friends could be really awesome.

What kinds of things would I want to see in this feed? I’d like to be able to see when a friend purchases an XBL game (or how many friends have purchased the same game). I imagine such a story on that feed would read something like “CanadianStewy and 4 other friends bought Carcasonne.” I could click Carcasonne and be shown additional options like Buy, Download Trial, see friends leaderboards/achievements, and hide future purchase notifications for this game.

Or let’s say someone on my friends list has edged ahead of me on an in-game leaderboard? That shows up in the feed too (perhaps as a taunt sent by a friend who just beat me). Most games use a fairly universal system for displaying/sorting leaderboards so allow me to view that without even launching the game to see how badly I’m being beaten in a particular level. While I think Farmville and Facebook games in general use publishing to the feed a little too much sometimes, since XBL is a game-centric social network anyway I really wouldn’t mind seeing those kind of stories. In fact it might encourage me to go back and play a game that a friend’s playing.

The other major component that would take this to the next level is the ability to view this either through XBL or on the web. So even though I’m at work and not playing Hydro Thunder Hurricane, I can see when someone beats my time in Seoul Stream – and perhaps even comment on that status to steal even more features from Facebook.

A key to this would be making it easy to manage what you see in the feed and what gets left out.

Better management of DLC

This is a big pet peeve of mine since I’m big into the music games. Music games have HUNDREDS of pieces of DLC including song packs, and you cannot easily browse content for those and determine what you’ve already bought.

Currently, if I’m browsing the store and land on a track pack where I already own or more songs from it looks no different than DLC I haven’t bought. It’s deceptively easy to rebuy something in that circumstance, and as DLC packs get more and more common and song packs come out AFTER individual songs have been available, it’s going to be even easier to make that mistake. So borrow an interface tweak from iTunes – the podcast/TV episode/movie half-played icon. And show me what in that pack I’ve already bought and maybe offer me a discount to complete the pack.

Let users schedule game events

One of the things about hosting a podcast that I’ve really enjoyed are game nights, where we gather a group of listeners off our messageboards to play a particular game. But scheduling that can be difficult. What would make that a whole bunch easier is if Xbox Live had a way to create a game event and invite everyone on your friends list that owns that particular game to join you.

Let’s say I want to create a Blur game night. I set up the event within XBL – the time, # of players wanted, whether to invite everyone or just certain people, if I want to open it up to my game-centric friends (mentioned above), if I wanted to have a co-host/co-planner, etc. Then that event gets published out to the newsfeed. My friends can accept/reject/hide future event invites for this game/me. Like a meeting request in Outlook or Entourage (a Microsoft product!) in the days leading up to the event I can see who RSVP’d yes/no or alter the date/time/settings. If I update something, all participants see an update in their feed.

But the fun stuff happens at game time. Not only would I get a reminder but anyone who said they wanted to join would as well. In that notification XBL would ask if I wanted to set up a party chat session then it would automatically invite those who RSVP’d into it, then into the game session. As invitees log into XBL as the event is going on, the system would automatically invite them too.

Let’s say for some reason I can’t make it to the event I set up, I could alter the settings over the web (so I could do it on my iPhone) or designate someone else as the host or leave the event “dormant” so one of the other participants could start the event but invite me if I was just running late.

Better Achievement tracking

Games like Blur and Beatles Rock Band have something similar to what I’m thinking of here. Both games have a sort of in-game tally where you can go through the achievement list and see what % away you’ve gotten to getting them. For instance, if I have to get a 350-note streak on Ticket to Ride and I’ve only been able to do 300, it shows me through a status bar that I’m really close to getting this.

Basically, let me sort achievements within games by % complete and let me sort my games list by amount of achievements I’m closest to getting. This would require a rethink of the system, but it would encourage way more achievement-mining within games I already own.

Stop ignoring Indie Games

Part of it is giving the Indies program more visibility and there’s really only one way to do it. Give Indie Games developers the tools to add achievements, but switched off until the community/critics/Microsoft itself deems a game editorially worhty. I look at the list of new Indies releases and there’s barely anything that looks appealing. But on the flip side there’s some really, really great stuff in there by developers like Arkedo with Jump! or Ancient with Mamotte Knight. Those games deserve to rise above the fart machine and massage apps and ocean screensavers and get some real attention. And nothing gets attention like nerd points. Without achievements they also don’t show up on my or my friends’ gamercards – crucial exposure if anyone’s going to pay attention to Indies.

Already, flash game portals like Newgrounds and Kongregate have a similar system where the community has a hand in deciding which games get their achievements switched on. That model seems to work, and hopefully just the visibility of being a game with achievements could mean the Indies catalog would get a lot more quality stuff.

Give some hope for those games with dead communities

As much as I’m sure Microsoft would hate to admit it, there are many XBLA games where the community is dead. There’s no one playing. Or, rather, there isn’t a critical mass of players at one time to keep things going. For instance, I love Jetpac Refuelled. Great game. No one is playing that game anymore. The chances of me booting up that game and finding someone to play against is nil. But if I was online and if I knew someone else was out there that wanted to play it, I *might* join them.

Already, when you use Quick Match in a game, the game hunts for lobbies. When it doesn’t find one many games allow you to create one. Well change that up and when a Quick Match turns up no results, allow me to create a room OR do a larger search for potential players. The game then expands the pool to people who are online and X steps away (either geographically or by circles of friends) that might be interested in playing and pings them with an invite. Maybe it’s “let’s play now” or sending an invite to a longer list of potential players at a specified time but SOME WAY to keep that community alive.

That’s the list so far! I could probably have come up with more things to mention but I’ll leave it here for now. I almost miss the old blades. Almost. Those could have been improved upon too (check this post at The Fanboys Lunchcast).

Chris Johnston Video Games xbox live