In November of 2002, something big released into the gaming world. Something that has had a ripple effect, forever changing the landscape of interactive entertainment. Something that may outlast motion control, 3D, and other previous innovations that were further enhanced and repackaged for our newer consoles. Its scope rivals the development of online play, and as long as games continue to develop with online features, it may never go away. It is something that its own developers would likely never truly understood the impact, nor the millions of gamers that now refuse to live without it. A new form of gamer identity.
Xbox Live released in November 2002, and while the network fought terrible bouts of lag, the voice chat rarely worked as promised, and the game support itself started slow, Microsoft also implanted something of which took years to see the true effects . As part of the design to separate paid Live accounts, you had to create a gamertag, a sign-on, an account by which all your save games and settings would be remembered.
You created your gamer identity.
Now before I get called out as a Xbot fanboy and all of the other colorful terms used to describe myself, family, and dog, hear me out.
In the beginning, God created the Arcade. And it was good. We plunked in a few quarters, got mauled, came back for more. And as our skills grew, we saw those high score initials pop up, a silent challenge by those strange three letter signatures. Most of us probably just shook our heads and walked away, but others, we took that challenge, and would play game after game, wordlessly making a bet to ourselves and that stranger that our own three letters would surpass them. It spurred us on, and when our name made it to the top, we were the king of the world- or at least, the block that machine was in. Our initials on a high score board was the first step toward claiming our gamer identity, letting others see us, if just locally, putting our stamp on the digital domain. It may seem like a huge jump, but decades later having your name imprinted on a computer moved beyond game competitions, and would develop into Facebook, MySpace, and a whole list of methods by which we use to write our digital signatures, our virtual identities. But back to the more important subject: Games.
While high score tables grew into the home video game market, it would take a few more years and more complex role playing and adventure games before you were able to put more content and progress behind a saved name. The original Legend of Zelda, a console game breakthrough in many regards, allowed you to put in your name at the beginning, and all subsequent progress, every heart container found and every dungeon conquered, was saved under your own name. It was a mark of pride, of
identity, to see that progress listed under whatever name you gave your file.
And then things didn't change much for a few decades. Super Nintendo, Playstation, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, Playstation 2, Virtual boy, 3DO, Jaguar CD, even PC. Sure, more games let you name your own proof of progress to show others, and virtual worlds became open and big enough that you could alter something permanently and then call it your own, but gamer identity stayed private, impersonal, isolated from one game to another. Attempts were made to connect who you are to the game you played, but nothing really progressed.
Then comes the Xbox. Using the ubiquitous computer method of logging into a user ID for personalized content was the first subtle transition. Combined with Xbox Live's cross-game connection with your gamertag, a whole new realm of gamer identity opened. Now, if EnderBuggerKiller7 passed you in MotoGP, a day later you might be popping EnderBuggerKiller7 with a PPC in MechAssault,
and it was the same guy! The importance of cross-game connectivity was more than mere novelty; for the first time, you could keep a name, a unique identifier, through every online game, and it would stay consistent. Get to the leaderboard in one game, and people would check their own favorite game's leaderboard and see if you were in their turf too, another silent challenge from a name on a table that we mostly phased out of since the glory days of the arcade. With voice chat, the challenge didn't even have to stay silent anymore- you could send a message or talk in-game, egging each other on or discussing strategies.
But if cross-game consistency opened the door for the future of gamer identity, it was kicked off its hinges with the invention of the gamerscore. The true expansion of the idea of global leaderboards, now your entire current-gen gaming career materialized, open and visible, and with it a new sense of progress and identity. Now, you could compare not just a high score in an individual game, but how many games you had completed, conquered, squandered, or wasted time with. You could look up to see if someone had found a secret you missed, ask them for help through voice chat, or just play together. In its ideal form, Xbox Live is designed for community and competition. That it sometimes seems to mostly consist of tweens with infinite amount of time to master a game and a dialect almost entirely comprised of racial epithets and sexual slang (with video chat to match!) is unfortunate, but expected when you hand the keys to the Ferrari over to your little siblings. It's just a matter of time before they crash it and take out a few innocents on the road with them.
It might seem like I'm giving Xbox Live too much credit for not much of a big deal. But the effects of these developments have exploded into every aspect of our gaming. Nintendo, not ready or willing to break out into the online scene just yet, creates Miis; virtual representations of your identity. The Mii represents the same creation as the Gamertag, a virtual identity through which all of your gaming progress is tracked. Instead of universal achievements, you get an entire calender with notes that represent the progress you have made. Not just in games, but almost all activity on the Wii. A look at the calender notes on the Wii reads like a different format for the 360's data tracking, with the same intent; to give you a sense of identity, of accomplishment, of easily tracking your activity. Microsoft would famously copy the Mii idea with a nearly identical Avatar system, attaching you yet again to your digital self. Xbox 360 even imported the Windows method of a small picture, user chosen, attached to the gamertag. Further Avatar customization has become its own marketable, profitable expansion.
Even Sony got into the act, with a profile crossbar system that debuted on the PSX DVR, and then on the PSP and PS3. Now, it's not as simple as putting a game in and just playing- you pick your Profile/Mii/Gamertag, the representation of your global gaming identity, the some of all of your gaming progress on that system. Sony's Home, a derivative of Second Life (which itself is, like MMOs, is a form of expanded digital identity on a wide social network) takes the concept a step further and removes the gaming aspect as a necessary item, allowing a social or exploratory side of digital identity.
While the concept of these unifying systems may seem like a natural progression from our early gaming days, the impact it has on our gaming cannot be understated. It shows no sign of ever going away. We now prefer a game for our PS3 or 360 because we want the trophies/achievements. We feel a sense of loss if we play a game together and can't log on to our own accounts for the representation of our presence. As long as trophies and gamerscores carry over to the next console generation (and they assuredly will,) gamers will buy a system just to keep their numbers growing. I remember playing a DS game and feeling disappointed that I put several hours into the game and would not get anything for my gamerscore out of it! (I'm over it now, as well as buying crappy games to boost my gamerscore. Now I just buy crappy games cheap to boost the collection
) Many of us try to avoid Miis and Avatars altogether, but they have proven to be so popular that a new incarnation of them will likely stay with us on future gaming systems.
You may not care about trophies or gamerscores. You may just click past the Miis to get to the game. You may never get online, and you may care less about a gamer identity. But the industry has spoken. The methods may change up a bit, but the infusion of gamer identity has fully integrated into our industry. And with the advent of digital downloads and add-on content for even single player gaming, there is now a more justifiable monetary reason to keep track of your digital self. It may never recede.
It is now practically unthinkable that we would buy a new console and not have some type of identity system we log on to, that keeps track of all our private save games, features the name people identify as who we are, and unifies our identity, online or off. The days of just finding your save-game, unattached to any profile, on your PSX/PS2/Dreamcast/Neo Geo memory card is long gone. Now, with the exception of a few portables, we either log on to a virtual identity, or we don't play.
Is it a good or bad thing? Both. Recently, when Blizzard Entertainment suggested the idea of posting the real identities of users inside forums, a sudden and powerful backlash resulted in the company nixing the idea. The privacy element of keeping our virtual identities separate from our real identities will grow more and more important. While there are dangers with any medium that allows role-play, it must be noted that these issues were not the same as when two kids popped in Super Mario Bros. As our electronic entertainment yields more complex, interactive universes, so too will players yield greater personal investment.
We will all feel different about the methodology. Yet our industry moves ever onward. From Combat to Modern Warfare, from Tetris to Peggle, we will continue finding ways to fulfill our wishes of living out an identity that is just outside our own. However, as with any entertainment, the impetus to stay responsible with our identity is on us, the players.
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