Next Gen is Not the Graphics
In the July 2007 issue of Official XBox Magazine, there is an opinion piece by Tim Schafer where he waxes thoughtful about his 360:
…The single greatest achievement of the XBox is not its performance or any of the fancy graphics features, but in how I interact with the machine. The relationship you have with your XBox is the most next-gen thing about it.
He goes on to describe what he means by this primarily in terms of how the Live features dictate his gaming or the progression he goes through between powering on the system and actually firing up a game and summarizes the whole thought with this:
I’m turning on the machine before I know what I’m going to play. Instead of thinking, “I’m going to play Gears of War,” I’m thinking, “I’m going to play some XBox.”
I think he’s on to something here but he stops way short of describing what it really means for a console to be next-gen.
It starts with the online element: Live, Home, Wii’s Channels are all part of the always-connected aspect of the current crop of consoles. They leverage the expanding broadband ubiquity into a realm where you have your internet connection—in some way at least—piped right into your living room. The encroachment of your computer’s real source of power (network connectivity, arguably) into your primary living space is something that is happening with these game devices not so much the way it did into your work or home office environments, which was top-down and force-fed to accomplish some particular task either onerous or at the very least razor-focused, but gently from the bottom. It’s not some sort of draconian requirement, it’s presented in a “hey, wouldn’t it be cool…” sort of manner. With the original XBox we saw some of it begin, like the germination of a seed where we had things that were cool growing but had not yet reached their full potential. Whether the potential was obvious to everyone or not doesn’t matter, it was certainly there.
That matters because when the evolutionary steps manifested this time ’round, it felt incremental and, well, obvious. Of course there would be mandatory online presence for every XBox game. Why not? Clearly we needed some sort of focal point for our online profiles (birthing the Gamerscore/Achievements concept which, incidentally, you can bet your bottom dollar will be even more fully explored later this gen by the competition and explode into mania next gen), it’s only natural. And there was no reason why we couldn’t use some of this available space to play some games that weren’t purchased elsewhere but used the network to complete the entire transaction and distribute the files necessary to run the game digitally. So it follows that if we did that with games, why not other stuff—say, movies or TV shows?
It feels less like a paradigm shift and more like a step up because the frameworks for these activities and features were laid several years ago. But the whole premise of the living room box as networked extension of your virtual self is where the real shift is happening, and it has been handled so delicately that I don’t think most people even noticed. You see the gamercards everywhere; but do you consider how they really represent a constantly updated notion of your on- and off-line life? Maybe look at it a different way: Consider 360 FriendSpot’s LiveEye or 360Voice.com and note how easy it is to go about your normal (gaming) activities and using only the simple hooks Microsoft has left in the Live system, monitor, catalog, sort and encapsulate your online life.
For the most part these features and projects are novelties for now: They track a mundane and non-critical part of our activities. Imagine, though, a more robust system. Note that as with the original XBox the features here are either seeds or stages of development for a larger set of possibilities to come. Consider a successor to the 360 which does more than provide API hooks to the games you’re playing, but also notes the TV shows and movies you watch. Think about features like the Friends lists that are generated in IM programs, services like Live but also Netflix and even more robust systems such as those found on sites like Last.fm with it’s data-mined “neighbors” who are really just potential friends based on similar interests culled from tracking activity online. The core of 360 FriendSpot’s functionality does this same thing for Live gamers as well.
The key is integrating the features of Live with a broader scope that encompasses all or at least a much larger number of online activities. Think about what it might be like to have a single online identity whose taste in music, movies, shopping, games and more is easily trackable based on songs listened to, films watched, items purchased and games played. Consider having those things collated into a series of badges or condensed into a small, transferable graphical representation not dissimilar to a gamercard but more broadly applicable. Imagine then having a single point of identity that can be associated with other identities which works across applications and services so that your Netflix friends, your Skype contacts, your AIM buddies and your Live Friends are all part of the same global list then further enhanced with neighbors who represent people you don’t know (yet) but whose aggregated data suggests similar interests.
Now move beyond an abstract “identity” concept into something more like Sony’s Home, with it’s graphical avatar representation which is more akin to Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse concept: A virtual playground where you have not only a collected set of data to define you but also a “character” or a digital self-portrait that interacts in interesting ways (which are still abstract, only less obviously so) with those friends and neighbors. The possibilities expand from there given additional technology and interface refinements (physical gesture control via something like the Wii’s remote?) but it all starts with something as simple as a box in the living room connected to the Internet all the time.
And note that in all this, games are a very minor bit role. But consider that to a certain degree the whole product becomes a sort of game: Like with the meta-game of the Gamerscore which applies a sheen of “game-ness” to your whole online personality, it means neither instant respect nor total disdain but does offer some clues to a person’s actual life and from the player’s perspective brings a sort of unifying theme to all activity centered on the device (in this case the 360). Obviously the system is artificially game-y for the moment because at its heart the 360 is still a traditional game console. What about perhaps a subtle game element to more activities? Would completing an interactive DVD quiz earn some sort of point value? Listening to each of a band’s albums all the way through? Making x number of posts to a particular online forum? If creating a sort of collective game element for more than one game is effective in engaging the audience, why not create a sort of social game element for all digital activity?
Of course, the limitation is the device. The assumption here is that the cohesiveness of the concept is dependent on the ubiquity, or at the very least popularity, of a particular platform. And to a certain extent this is what these console wars are being fought for: To create the perfect launching pad for the cornerstone of the next phase of a digital society. And the polygons are not a factor.