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XBox 360’s New Controllers

XBox 360

It Just Feels Right

I’ve had my XBox 360 for nearly a year now (having won one in a trivia game at last October’s Ajax Experience conference), and it’s been the best experience I’ve ever had with any Microsoft product…because it doesn’t feel like a Microsoft product. Where most Microsoft “consumer” products make you feel as if they were designed by the “B-team” — the ones who didn’t make the cut for the stuff aimed at corporate customers — the XBox 360 feels right. I don’t, as Danny O’Brien puts it, “feel like I’m eating out of the trash bins outside a cubicle farm”.

(According to Scoble, one of the reasons the XBox is a good gaming console is that their headquarters were purposely located miles away from the Microsoft campus.)

The XBox 360 now occupies a nice middle ground between the inexpensive casual/party-game oriented Wii and the overly expensive grind-away-for-hours PlayStation 3, and the two new controllers suggest that the XBox folks know this and are pressing this advantage.

For the Hardcore: The Chatpad

“Chatpad” controller for the XBox 360

The Chatpad marries the standard XBox 360 controller to a QWERTY thumb keyboard, which I assume will be used for in-game communications and IMing among the more hardcore XBox Live set. They’ve been talking about this for some time, and there’s been demand for this sort of thing, so this isn’t a surprise.

What I find more interesting is the other controller…

The “Big Button” Controller

“Big Button” controller for the XBox 360

The upcoming Scene It? game will be bundled with four of these controllers, which have the standard A/B/X/Y buttons and a different-coloured giant button for each one so you can tell them apart. Unlike the standard or Chatpad XBox controllers, whose design seems to be for the more serious gamer playing alone or as a twosome, these controllers’ design suggest that they’re for ther casual gamer in a more social setting. It’s apparent that the XBox team is learning lessons from the Wii.

When I first saw these controllers, I thought of two things:

  • First, I thought that this would be a perfect opportunity to resurrect the game You Don’t Know Jack, one of the most fun computer games I’ve ever played. The game is simple enough for them to turn it into something you could download from XBox Live, and I think it would be a hit. I’m not the only one; check out the comments to this Engadget story on the Big Button controller.
  • I was also reminded of Microsoft’s trackball for kids, the Easyball:

    Microsoft Easyball

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Anime Video of “Code Monkey”

The machinima videos that people have made for Jonathan Coulton’s geek anthem Code Monkey haven’t impressed me; unlike the Red vs. Blue series of animations, the visuals feel poorly matched with the storyline.

Better by far is this video, which does an excellent job of repurposing clips from the Japanese animated TV series Black Heaven. If you watch only one fan-made video of Code Monkey, watch this one:

[via Amber Mac]

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Your Boss Has “Friended” You. Confirm or Ignore?

Would You Like to Confirm Your Boss as Your Friend?

Facebook friend request from “your boss” (played by transgender Jakon Nielsen)
Transgender Jakob Nielsen isn’t my boss, but he thinks he is.

If it’s not one boss, it’s another. If you’re not freaking out because your mom “friended” you on Facebook, there’s still the chance that your boss might, meaning that he or she may be privy to your extracurricular indiscretions. The Wall Street Journal looks at this dilemma in OMG — My Boss Wants to ‘Friend’ Me On My Online Profile.

What you may want to keep in mind if faced with the decision of whether or not to “friend” your boss is that the openness works both ways:

Paul Dyer was always able to hold off his boss’s invitations to party by employing that arms-length response: “We’ll have to do that sometime,” he’d say.

But when his boss, in his 30s, invited Mr. Dyer, 24 years old, to be friends on the social-networking sites MySpace and Facebook, dodging wasn’t so easy. On the one hand, accepting a person’s request to be friends online grants them access to the kind of intimacy never meant for office consumption, such as recent photos of keggers and jibes from friends. (“Still wearing that lampshade?”)

But declining a “friend” request from a colleague or a boss is a slight. So, Mr. Dyer accepted the invitation, then removed any inappropriate or incriminating photos of himself — “I’d rather speak vaguely about them,” he says — and accepted the boss’s invitation.

Mr. Dyer, it turns out, wasn’t the one who had to be embarrassed. His boss had photos of himself attempting to imbibe two drinks at once, ostensibly, Mr. Dyer ventures, to send the message: “I’m a crazy, young party guy.” The boss also wore a denim suit (“I’d never seen anything like it,” Mr. Dyer says) and posed in a photo flashing a hip-hop backhand peace sign.

It was painful to watch. “I hurt for him,” says Mr. Dyer.

My Own Situation

My boss, Leona Hobbs, is my friend on a number of social networks, as is my old boss Ross Rader. The powers that be at Tucows are aware of my blog and read it every now and again; in fact, a lot of the credit to my getting hired has to go to a number of personal blog entries of mine at The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century. Everyone here is aware of my blogs and the goofy stuff I sometimes put in them.

I’m reminded of what someone at the DefCon conference back in 2000 told me. He was a guy who worked at a U.S. military site but whose major was in Marxist Studies. I asked if having how he managed to get a job like his with a degree like his, and he replied by saying that they hired him because he was open about it. Had he tried to keep it a secret, someone could use that secret to blackmail him. I suppose the moral of the story is that if you’ve got a reasonably open-minded boss (and proclivities that aren’t too far out there), openness might be the best policy.

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India’s Edgy Playstation 2 Ads

These edgy Indian print ads for the Playstation 2 turn the stereotype of the gamer who’s so into games that he doesn’t have a girlfriend upside-down: the tag line for these ads is “PS2: Because your girlfriend bores you shitless.”

Indian Playstation 2 ad with the tagline “PS2: Because your girlfriend bores you shitless”
Click to see the ad at full size.

Indian Playstation 2 ad with the tagline “PS2: Because your girlfriend bores you shitless”
Click to see the ad at full size.

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Jakob Nielsen Doesn’t Drink at “Coyote Ugly”

Jakob Nielsen as a bartop dancer in the Coyote Ugly Saloon
An unsuspecting customer drinking Jakob Nielsen’s kool-aid.

After reading Jakob Nielsen’s rather self-satisfied and smug Write Articles, Not Blog Postings and Robert Scoble’s counterpoint, I have these three things to say:

  1. While Nielsen has a number of good ideas on making things usable, when it comes to communicating and reaching out to people, Scoble is the guy to emulate. As with some other UI guys I know, I suspect that Nielsen’s perspective on human factors come from his perspective as an interested outsider.
  2. Reading Nielsen’s post, I was reminded of a description of user interface specialists that George once wrote: “little dictators — SimCity-sized tyrants — intent on foisting their New Orthodoxy on everyone.”
  3. Finally, I leave you with the best version of an observation that Joel Spolsky has written a couple of times:

    Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.

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PlayStation 3 Price Cuts After All

Cover of “Bluff Your Way in Japan”

I remember first reading Bluff Your Way in Japan in 1992, and one of the bits of the book that stands out in mind is the bit about interpreting answers from the Japanese. “If they say ‘yes’,” said the book, “they actually mean ‘no’. If they say ‘maybe’, they mean ‘yes’. If they say ‘no’, they’re not Japanese.”

If only interpreting statements by vendors was as simple.

Playstation 3 as a George Forman Grill

On Friday, Sony President Ryoji Chubachi announced that Sony had no plans to cut the price of the Playstation 3. The quote attributed to him is “We have no plans”, and he attempted to dispel concerns about the PS3’s slow start in the market race by citing the slow start of the PS2, which initially had a poor library (some games publishers complained that it was a difficult machine to program), and was expensive for the time.

Later that day, Engadget reported the sighting of a leaked Circuit City circular (say that quickly three times if you can) that showed the PS3 marked down by US$100 to US$499. On Satuday, they reported that some Target stores were also selling PS3s at the reduced rate of US$499.

Today, we have the official announcement from Sony: the PS3 will get a price cut of US$100 to US$499. The reason? They’re introducing a new deluxe model, which comes with an 80GB hard drive (the PS3 currently comes in a “bargain” version with a 20GB hard drive and the “high end” model with a 60GB drive) and a free-but-you-paid-for-it copy of MotorStorm, which will retail for the 60GB unit’s old price, US$599.

In addition to having to deal with that say-one-thing-then-do-the-opposite issue, Sony will also have to rationalize the fact that in a time when even external hard drives, complete with USB interfaces, power supplies and their own packing are cheap like borscht, the additional 20GB for an extra US$100 seems a bit stingy. They’ll also have to contend with the fact that the XBox 360 is still US$100 cheaper, has a better library, a well-established online system and a lot of momentum.

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Microsoft Outplaying Apple? Not the Way I See It, Scoble!

Scoble’s got a sweet job: he’s the only person outside the Bush Administration who can be wrong a lot of the time and still reap the rewards from it. He’s also more likable.

The latest evidence of this is his post titled Why Microsoft Outplays Apple Long-Term. In the post, he talks about an independent developer event in which 300 people — mostly programmers — got together at iPhoneDevCamp, an independent, free-of-charge BarCamp-style event where developers got together from July 6th through 8th to workshop on developing apps for the iPhone. He points out that although he met people from Microsoft, Yahoo! and Verisign at the event, he didn’t see anyone who clearly identified himself or herself as being an Apple employee.

From this observation comes the thesis of the post: by not having an obvious presence there, Apple is telling developers to, in his own words “go pound sand”.

He contrasts this with Microsoft, who in contrast, looooove developers:

Where’s Apple? Microsoft is here.

If this were a Microsoft event the evangelism team would be here in force with T-shirts, stickers, free dev tools, tons of geeks who could help people figure out technical issues, and more. Look at how Microsoft dealt with Maker Faire, they sent the guy who builds Bill Gates’ keynote demos to help out. THAT is how Microsoft got 90% market share.

Why Microsoft Tries So Hard

The answer to Scoble’s questions lies in his talking about how hard-working the Microsoft Evangelism team is. I’ll counter with this: these days, Microsoft works hard at getting developer love for the same reason that people sign up for hokey courses at the Learning Annex on how to flirt: because they have to.

The fact that three hundred developers, with no funding or prompting from Apple, started their own BarCamp-ish event on iPhone development is a sign that Apple have, to borrow a Kathy Sierra-ism, created passionate users. They didn’t need to be there in an official capacity; they just needed to stoke enough interest in their product to turn their own customers into evangelists. Surely you’ve heard of Kathy’s blog, Scoble!

To get the same level of interest in a Microsoft event takes a lot more work. Consider the hoops that Microsoft has jumped through here in Toronto. In spite of the fact that we’ve got an active BarCamp scene here in Toronto thanks to events like DemoCamp, CaseCamp and VizThink, in order to get developers to get together and talk about Microsoft tech, it takes either a Microsoft-organized conference like the recent EnergizeIT or its local PR company to organize smaller events with free booze and food. They had to book the “rock star suite” at the Gladstone Hotel and hold a party afterwards to get us to look at Microsoft Live, but the upcoming gathering where we’re going to workshop the Facebook API grew out of a suggestion on a mailing list.

Although there’s a lot of passionate Mac fanboy-ism on the web, there is hope for Microsoft. There is one fanboy out there who praises Microsoft even though he’s not on their payroll: it’s Scoble.

I’ve got to run right now, so I’ll continue later ’cause I ain’t done yet. If you’d like to make any comments in the meantime, please do so!