If you bought the Guardian last thursday may have noticed my column on 360voice, a website that allows you to enter you Xbox 360 gamertag and then view a blog 'written' by your console, based on your gaming habits.
The blog is based around the XML feed broadcast by each Xbox whenever you go online and play games, and it's one of the more interesting uses of this data that I've come across - second only to the Stats section of Bungie.net, which you can visit after each multiplayer Halo session to see a map of your last game, including where you scored your kills and where you got fragged yourself.
Anyway, I interviewed 360voice co-creator, Trapper Markelz, about the site and could only use a fraction of his replies in the column. So here's the full discourse for those interested in the concept of games and consoles spying on their owners...
Have any of your subscribers been surprised by the information their Xbox has revealed about them? Yes, we have had quite a few people say they are freaked out that this information is gathered and made available about them. I don't think they are surprised that they are playing the games... but they are surprised that given a little bit of caching to the public feed, you can get a pretty clear picture of someone's gaming habits.
The funny part is that people are not clear what is in the public feed and what text we are adding in... so for awhile people were thinking the Xbox logged how you powered it on, if you listened to music or watched movies, what movies you watched, etc. I think there is still a lot of misunderstanding over what we know using the public feed and what is simply text that we are taking on to the stats. I have posted in the dev blog exactly what we are collecting... but I guess I can't expect everyone to see it there.
Do you think people will start consciously changing their gaming habits if they know their friends are subscribing to their 360voice RSS? A few people have already said that they feel a greater urge (at least in the short-term) to play their consoles so they have good entries. I know that I personally have chosen to jump on to play a game or two, just so my Xbox blog isn't blank for too many days in a row. Whether that continues or not probably depends on how interesting and compelling Steve and I can continue to make the experience.
If you really wanted to get scary with it, you could make the Xbox have certain judgements for what games they are playing. For instance, gather the meta rankings for all games and if they are spending time with a game that got a terrible review average, make fun of them for playing something so low quality... or maybe judge them if they play trashy games... or overly violent ones. The options are really endless... it just comes down to time... and how much data we want to cache and augment.
In what ways are you looking to expand and update 360voice? The biggest thing eating up my mental bandwidth right now is internationalization. There have been lots of people asking for multiple languages and time-zone awar/date format aware entries. Right now we process everything once a day. It might make sense to split it out into different processing by time zone. We know the user's country, but to do that is a significant enhancement to our XML import jobs. They are already massive. That type of segmentation would add significant complexity to all aspects of what right now is a simple site.
What is really holding us back is ownership. There is no good way to "verify" with 100% accuracy that the person who signed up the gamertag owns the gamertag. If we could do that, we would be rolling out all kinds of customization options... but we are sort of stuck until Microsoft gives us an option for that.
In the near term, we are just doing whatever we think is fun. It is a side-project after all, it isn't our day job, so in the end, as long as it keeps being fun, we will keep making enhancements. One of the next big things will be additional tools for doing analysis on all the data we have captured. We want to give people a set of tools for consuming all of this great history we are getting about their profiles. This would include tools for charting, listing, sorting, ranking, etc.
The examples of 'blogjects' you provide on your wikipedia entry all gather information that could provide a practical service to the user. Do you see a point at which 360voice may have practical applications? The primary reason to make 360voice.com was a practical one. I am a big advocate of RSS and one of the things I noticed is that there was no "snapshop" of the gamercard. I have the gamercards of all my friends on my desktop at work... I would come in and see that their scores went up, but it wasn't easy to see by how much and which games they actually played. If it was a single game, it was easy, but not without a little bit of clicking around.
Setting out to make an RSS feed though required us to suck in all the data for everyone we wanted to gather. In order for that to have any sort of worthwhile value proposition, we needed some sort of killer idea that would entice people to participate. The blogject idea sort of brought that to the surface. Originally, the site didn't even have a blog page. It was ONLY an RSS feed... but the day after launch I added it because everyone was asking for it.
So to boil it down, the practical use of 360voice.com is to be able to subscribe (via RSS) or read a daily blog that recaps what your friends did on Xbox Live.
Having that subscription in my feed already serves as a conversation starter. Every morning it is fun when your buddies are coming in to work you can say "Hey I saw you got 2 achievements in Kameo last night!" You could never really do that before... it opens up a whole new ability to discuss your gaming on a regular basis.
Apparently, Microsoft has shown interest in 360voice. Do you think they spy a new way to monitor the behaviour of gamers? Yes, Microsoft has sent some congrats and have offered to have us look at some new ideas they have for feeds... so that is exciting. I really don't think we are doing anything they aren't doing already. I am sure they have more data than they know what to do with about every aspect of every thing your Xbox has done while connected to Live.
But hopefully, we have given them a new way of thinking about how to use some of this information. If they were to open up a few more streams of information, say your friends list for instance, we could do all kinds of crazy things like have the Xboxes leave comments on each other's blogs and such... really crazy things that tie you and your friends even closer together through auto-participation. There are lots of people on my friends list that I sort of met in a few games, but never really developed any relationship with. I would like to think that the 360voice.com blogs could serve as way of tying people together through their devices. Think of it like two strangers walking their dogs in the park... if the dogs stop and start "talking", the owners feel compelled to also communicate. There is nothing saying our Xboxes could not be like our dogs someday...
You can follow the continuing development of 360Voice here
