It has been sometime since my last blog post... The reason for this is very simple: Halo 3 and XBOX Live have invaded my living room. For sometime I have been wanting to dive into the gaming community to see how it measured up to photo sharing, video sharing, and yes even social networking communities.
Halo 3 (probably not the mellowest of games) was my baptism of fire. At any given time there was well over 100,000 users online around the world battling for turf in "Territories, Bomb, or Slayer" scenarios. At first I found the controllers difficult to manage but with well over 180 social matches I am now getting the hang of it.
The social aspects of gaming communities on the Xbox 360 are quite intense and require more immediacy from other members than say other members in community platforms such as Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, or Myspace. For example, the survival of your avatar may very well depend on your ability to work as a team player in a group. Many tools are put forward by Microsoft to help you to do this which include: instant messaging, mail, audio conversations during play, add a friend, etc..
Like in many other video games the addictive elements of the game can be found in your ability to reach the next level. In Halo 3 there is a clever reward system called "rank" so you have the recipe for getting a community of habitual users.
There is no doubt that my experiment has put me in this category of users. I am a second grade sergeant in Halo 3 and fight on to get my next virtual promotion. Although I am having fun trying to understand the gamer psyche hardcore gaming does not come risk free. I weighed myself on the scale this morning and realised that I had gained 4 pounds in the past 6 weeks! I also realised that social interaction with others had gone down considerably in my personal life as I wanted to spend more time reaching the next level...
The other thing I noticed is that socialising in a gaming community is also very different than socialising in a platform like Facebook as relationships there tend to be deeper and more meaningful (especially with real life acquaintances).
With all this said I do believe that being able to communicate a message within a gaming platform could yield very interesting results as this audience is extremely captivated by the video game. The opportunity is huge but the challenge still remains on how do you disconnect the users from their virtual world and make them active consumers of your message in the real world.
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