Just finished a couple of hours on Xbox live, playing Mech Assault. Just incredible. I’ve been playing video games for long enough to remember Space Invaders and even Pong when it first come out, to have clocked Defender and to have wasted most of my university education playing Ghosts and Goblins. Playing online and talking to people while you do it should kickstart a new round of innovation and wholesale change in video game mechanics. What an enormous shame that Halo was released without live capabilibity. The 4 player split screen game re-coupled and made into 4 players, no ability to see each other will be some fun.
Why am I talking about this in my e-government blog?
Three reasons really. (a) I should have been working instead of playing so I’ve lost a couple of hours of catchup ahead of meetings tomorrow, (b) Online collaboration, discussion and consultation is something that we haven’t got right in government, but it happens right there and then on live without prompting – so if the application is right people will do it (not saying that government should be made a video game), i.e. people will help each other out (as well as kill each other) if you put the right environment in place, see Upmystreets social conversation for an example and, finally, (c) this will stimulate broadband uptake once people find out how much fun it is.
Now all I need to do is to get some longer cables so that I don’t have to rearrange my room to make it all work. Oh, and I need to find some friends … when I kicked off Moto GP and pressed the “friends” button, instead of going out and finding Jennifer Aniston, the xbox told me “you don’t have any friends …. press (a) to continue!”.
Go buy an Xbox, go get live. And if you get killed by a headshot from a sniper rifle, come Halo 2 … that will be me.
