When I look back on most consoles, I’m largely looking back at the games. The PS3 is LittleBigPlanet and Metal Gear 4, as far as I’m concerned, and even the GameCube, that squat, characterful delight, is largely hidden behind Mario Sunshine, Wind-Waker and Animal Crossing. (Even just typing that: cor, what a time that was.)
Go back further and the PS1 is Wipeout and Lara Croft and racing cars drifting around Japanese circuits under sodium lighting and a dark sky. The original Xbox is working out how to get from Shibuya to the Skyscraper District as quickly as possible in Jet Set Radio Future. This is all great. These are wonderful ways to invoke the memories of consoles, the idea being, I guess, that the console is primarily the games you play on it.
But the Xbox 360? That’s very different. I don’t get games so much as I get associations. I think of the birth of podcasts. I think of exploring the sliding blades of the original UI. I think about my friend chatting about easy Gamerscore. When I do think of a game, I think about how delighted my same friend was with Geometry Wars, a game that he felt was primarily designed to be played in between other games. Or I remember turning up at his house one Christmas to see that he was playing Kameo, but all the characters had Santa hats on, because somehow the Xbox 360 knew that it was Christmas inside the game, inside the console.
More than anything, I think of an association that, on the surface, doesn’t have much to do with games at all. Ask me about the 360 and the first thing that comes to mind is the brick wall of an apartment building in New York. Many different families live here, each one behind a different set of windows. Some of the windows are bedrooms, and when the person in the bedroom goes to sleep, the window erupts with a swirling blend of coloured paint to show that their mind is travelling elsewhere.
This is an image from a wonderful kids’ book I had when I was very young: Dreams, by Ezra Jack Keats, who’s probably most famous for The Snowy Day. Don’t get me started on any of that – the godfather of all tangents awaits. But anyway, yes: mention the 360 and I think of this building, this book, those coloured windows each containing a dreamer.
And this in turn is because, now that everything has settled, now that the games are on shelves somewhere, the console’s in the attic, and all those nasty fears about three red lights are behind me, it turns out that what really delighted me about the Xbox 360 was one simple feature: the friends list.
It’s odd, really. There are friends lists on modern consoles and I don’t think about them at all. There’s one on Steam and I have to admit I haven’t looked at it in years. I’m not excited by social media or Facebook or anywhere else a generation of obliging boomers is preparing for the AI arrival of lobster Jesus. And yet back on the 360, the fact that there was part of the console that was collecting all my acquaintances and could tell me what they were doing? Back then, that wasn’t creepy or TMI. It was a lovely, cosy, collegiate thing. It was the Community gang meeting in the study room. It was Laurel and Hardy wearing matching pyjamas and sharing the same bed.
So yes, the big difference for the 360 for me – the thing that lifts it above all other consoles – is actually twofold. The first thing is that when you turned it on, it was a place for you, regardless of whether you had any games. There were blades to look through, things to see. And the second thing is that you were instantly connected to your friends. You could drop in and see who was playing Crackdown, who had just logged in and was deciding what to do, who was playing surprisingly late – caught up in Hexic again.
Crucially, I never did much with this information. I had a Thursday night appointment to play Gears online, but that was about it. I wasn’t flinging out game invites or appearing suddenly in someone else’s Borderlands instance. And I wasn’t aggressively growing the list at every press event or party I went to, aiming to hit that – what was it? – 100 person cap. I don’t think my friends list ever went beyond 20 people tops.
But the key thing was they were all actual friends. They were never just colleagues or people it was useful to know. They were people who I already knew very well, so it didn’t feel weird to log on in the middle of the night and learn that they were still playing Peggle. When I saw that notification, it just brought back warm associations of who they were, and what it was about Peggle that was so clearly right for them.
So it’s not as easy as saying that the 360 gave me a community. Lots of consoles since have done that, I suppose, and it turns out that I’m not super interested in being part of a community anyway – I just want to play Lumines by myself while eating a Pop-Tart. What the Xbox 360 did was show the community I already had, the one that mattered, and that just happened to overlap with games. It made me appreciate my real-world friends, and it did all that with a simple list of names.
