thoughthead

In Part 1 I talked about the media and A/V related dashboard features MS should consider implementing into the Xbox 360 dashboard. Today I’m going to discuss the next five features in my list all dealing with the Xbox Live community, and how gamers connect…

IMPROVING COMMUNITY ACCESS

6. Friends list organization
If you’re like me then you’ve got a pretty beefy friends list. It’s rare that I pop online and see any less then 8 or 10 other people on as well. According to MS the average Xbox Live gamer has 35 people on their friends list. The list can get rather cumbersome and I often find myself scratching my head at certain names in my list trying to remember how I met them and why I exchanged a friend invite with them. With MS supposedly expanding the friends list capabilities to include MSN Messager contacts in the impending spring update the problem of organization is only going to get worse.

There are lots of good examples of how to manage a friends list. Applications like Trillian and gAIM offer the ability to rename contacts, group them how you see fit and discretely setup alerts and other features on a friend by friend or group by group basis. I’d love to tag certain friends on my list as part of a PGR3 group, meaning it’s a friend I met while playing PGR3. I’d also love the ability to rename a contact to the name they use in the internet forum where I met them, that way I don’t have to keep mental notes about who uses which name where. It would also be nice to turn on login notification for some member and turn it off for others. Sometime I find the alerts annoying, but that the same time I’m waiting for a specific person to pop online. That kind of control over my friends list would do a lot to help me keep track of who’s who. It would also encourage me to let my friends list grow rather then keeping it small enough that I can easily keep track of things in my head.

7. Built in Clan Support
Friends list organization is OK, and would be a good step towards the fairly well refined world of PC messaging applications. However, in the game world it would be nice to have something a little different. There’s no good reason that Clan support shouldn’t be built right into the dashboard, or rather built right into Xbox live and manged through the dashboard. Since Halo on the Xbox 1 the popularity of clans in the console world has risen enormously. Most clans even go as far as to have all their members rename their gamertags with the clan prefix so that people know which clan they’re a part of.

I propose the ability to have a clan profile in addition to a normal gamer profile. This profile would have it’s own “clan list” like a friends list but only including the names of the other clan members. After logging into your main account you would choose a clan account to log into (if you wanted to log into a clan account at all). This would also allow you to belong to multiple clans. So if you belonged to a Halo 2 clan and a different Gears of War clan you could do that. Anyone could start a clan, the person who starts a clan chooses the clan name, motto, and the prefix that would appear before the name of any member logged into the clan. The Clan leader would also be the only person who could send out clan invites. Perhaps they would even have the ability to transfer ownership to another member.

By building this right into the Xbox Live service it would allow game developers to much more easily integrate clan support into their games. If this sort of thing was available at the console’s launch we might have actually had clan support in Gears of War. Also having this built in would allow developers the ability to offer clan based leaderboards and possibly even clan based achievements in their games. Not to mention clans could be limited to Gold subscribers only; another thing that MS could do to help make the price of Gold look that much sweeter then their Silver service.

8. Improved Text and Voice Chat
Next to Achievements one of my favorite Xbox Live features is the constant connectivity provided, I can shoot off and receive quick messages any time I want, check who’s online and what they’re doing, etc. Unfortunately, unless you’re participating in voice chat in a game lobby, talking on Xbox Live is the digital equivalent of two tin cans and a string. Text messaging is particularly crippled, it’s got the slow and clumsy interaction of an email, with the limited controls of an Instant Message. It’s pretty much the worst of both worlds. Not to mention I’m constantly hitting the limit of the text message window (I’m verbose and I rant, I know).

It would be nice to be able to send longer messages, store messages away in an archive for later viewing, or mark a message as “unread” after I’ve read it, to remind me to read it again later. A more live chat would be nice too, the ability to carry on a quick IM style back and forth instead of being stuck in message purgatory with what is essentially a mini-email system. Here’s hoping that the integration of MSN contacts comes with it a more refined text based chat system. Oh and would it kill them to let me use the number pad on my USB keyboard?

Voice chat is another concern. outside of a game you’re limited to talking to one person at a time. Whenever MS is hit with this question they always bring up bandwidth and the fact that in game you’re all connecting to a central voice chat server, but out of game you connect direct and there isn’t enough bandwidth to connect to more then one person. That makes technical sense, but I don’t really care about pseudo-technical limitations. As someone who pays an annual fee for my Xbox Live service, I don’t see why they can’t use some of that cash to setup some servers that allow at least paying members the ability to chat with multiple people outside of a game. Rumor has it that this might, maybe, if we’re lucky, appear in with the spring update. I really hope it does because I’m tired of playing Chinese whispers with my friends switching voice channels whenever we’re trying to decide which game to play. Once again it’s another feature they could offer to help make the step up from Silver look less shallow.

9. Leaderboards
Leaderboards are one of the big features advertised with Xbox Live, but forwhatever reason it’s a huge pain to view them. Every game displays them differently with different controls, some are missing features, some don’t track right, some you can’t filter, some are hard to read… I thought the whole point of Xbox Live and the 360′s dashboard/guide system was to provide a unified service and a unified interface to common game elements? This really seems like a glaring oversight to me. Right along with achievements you should be able to view the various leaderboards for a particular game, right in the dashboard, without the need for the game disc.

I know it’s possible, I know this because they have a vague implementation of this in the Xbox Live Arcade. If the overwhelming popularity of the achievement system is any indication then promoting gamer metrics is a good way to excite that community further. Leaderboards can be just as interesting as achievements but they’re often overlooked because they’re not as integrated into the system as they could be. Making them accessible in the dashboard and on Xbox.com, and using a unified system for viewing and filtering them would do a lot for leveraging a feature you already own to help promote your system further.

If they want to take this even further they could piggy back on the good ideas started by sites like MyGamerCard.net and Top360Tag.com and implement Gamerscore leaderboards… but maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

10. A web browser or RSS Reader
Perhaps more then the Xbox Live community built through friends lists and game invites is the dynamo that has been created though Xbox.com, the achievement system and the ability for 3rd party sites to grab that data and do things with it. MyGamerCard.net, 360Voice.com, Achieve360Points.com, etc. The web community is it’s own beast, but every much a part of what makes the Xbox 360 community what it is.

It seems quite odd to me that the company that makes the most widely used web browser in the world is the same company that makes the only video game consoles connected to the internet without a web browser. Heck even the old Sega Saturn with it’s dial-up NetLink modem came with a web browser out of the box. I understand that part of the reason for not including a browser is political, they don’t want the console to be viewed as a PC and they don’t want it to compete with the Windows platform. Though, I really question the foundation of those concerns. Not only would the inclusion of a browser help the Xbox 360 keep up with it’s competitors it would do much to bridge the gap between the Xbox Live community on the web and the Xbox Live community on our consoles.

As for concerns about vulnerabilities in the web browser and the unfounded fears of viruses and malware somehow making their way into your console, stop and think for a minute. There’s no reason that the browser couldn’t exist in it’s own little environment where websites don’t have control over anything but the browser. Not to mention they could easily implement a stripped down version of the browser much like those that are used on the Wii, PS3, and mobile platforms. Making it a download would easily afford those who don’t want the browser the ability to opt-out, and those who tried it and didn’t like it would be able to simply remove it and forget about it.

If, for whatever reason, pushing a browser is a futile effort to move a political sticking point how about meeting half way? An RSS reader could be really slick. MS would have complete control over the interface, and there could be some really cool integration with the dashboard. I have delusions of the guide notification popping up on someone screen alerting them of a new thoughthead.com post. You could have an RSS tab in the dashboard providing a daily digest of all the feeds you subscribe to. On Second thought, it might be nice to see a Browser AND and RSS reader.

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That concludes Part 2 of this 4 part series. Check out Part 3 where I cover Dashboard suggestions 11-15 which deal with the Live Marketplace and how We access content.