When Gabe told me that he and Kara had taken 1 vs 100 for a spin, enjoying it thoroughly, I asked him if he'd tried Extended Play - the relatively no-frills trivia offering - or a Live Show, which features a more robust ruleset, prizes, and living host who comments directly on the proceedings. He didn't know that was even a thing. He made the time, and came away impressed.

When I played, I sure as shit didn't play against any Goddamned trees. I played against lethal organic computers with absolute geographical knowledge and optimized servos for maximal answerosity. Mechanically, it works - leveraging the classic tropes of prizes and progressive payouts, it feels very much as they must have intended it to.  There are layers of competition, from the crowd, to the one, to the noble one hundred who face them.  Independent of the game show conceit, you're also matched with three other people in a private room to play against - villains, who you will come to despise.

Would you like to hear something strange? When I saw my Avatar on the show, I felt underdressed. Understand that I don't give a shit about my appearance, digital or otherwise. I look like one of those boneless chickens that wheeze, beakless, in some Kentucky Fried dungeon - little more than a mound of wet meat.  And yet there I was, fretting about my simulated ensemble.  Fucking bizarre.

I'd been meaning to try the game for weeks now, just because I was curious, and it wasn't until last Saturday that I was able to catch the five o'clock show. It might be a concern for them, obviously, that a person with the hardware and the interest wasn't able to orient his life to experience it. The notion of "gaming by appointment" isn't unfamiliar to raiding guilds, where the skeins of social power regulate human behavior, but the dynamics of individual play are (at least, for me) very different.

There has been a suggestion that Microsoft may charge for the game, which I think would be a bad idea - not necessarily because it isn't worth it, because it's a perfectly amusing (and potentially lucrative) way to invest one's evening. This is something that would give a Gold Account some inherent value, something it desperately needs, if only as a riposte to their competitors' PR.  When I say value, perhaps I should be more clear.  I mean value independent of the things they tore out of the system's base functionality, which they then bentoed into some "premium" package whose very existence is suspect.

(CW)TB out.

just because i got a girlfriend

I jumped into a live game of 1 vs. 100 on Friday night and had a really great time. Originally I was just going to jump in and take a look. Then Kara ended up joining me on the couch and before we knew it, two hours had passed. We had a blast and we never even made it into the "mob" much less got chosen as the "one". Playing from the crowd as they call it is still incredibly entertaining. You're still competing for real prizes and watching the action between the one and the mob. Cheering when they choose to battle the mob and booing when they take their money and run. I'm hooked now and plan on catching as many of the live shows as I can. The announcer was great but in my fantasy Microsoft comes to Tycho and I, and asks us to host a version of the game filled with only video game trivia. 

When you come across two Gods creating universes from scratch, it can be worthwhile to compare their approaches.

Our perspective on Home is, by now, well known. My mother always said that if I "can't say something nice about an extensible multi-user environment, I shouldn't say anything at all" - but they make it very difficult not to have an opinion on their service. Because this troubled realm lies at the very knot of a hundred disparate interests, the experience is fractured quite out of necessity. Every aesthetic from every major brand must have some place at the table, and those "games" which do poke through the gloom are heavily rationed, lackadaisical, or most likely both.

They've consistently said that Home is a great place to meet other gamers, but I've been meeting gamers inside games since the dawn of the consumer Internet, and it seems to have worked pretty well. Home is a ridiculously complex solution in search of a problem. Contrived is the word.

To contrast, 1 vs 100 gave me something to do with my avatar that felt, well, real: it took the little guy that I skip past in my Dashboard and it gave him a context. Your primary method of interaction is not traversal, as it is in Home - you interact with it by playing a game. There is no "not play" option, and there's no twisted, Soviet rationing of play like that proposed by the Sony offering. They both have ads, but one has ads in the form of commercial breaks, and one commands the player to literally exist inside an advertisement.

In essence, 1 vs 100 showed what Home could be. Which I think we can all agree is very weird.

(CW)TB