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.
It was really revolutionary - MSN Messenger could show when someone was playing music etc but it was often a place you’d dodge old school mates who were still way too chatty given you’d not seen them for 5 years, but Xbox showing you all playing games, what level and if in multiplayer etc really did foster a community spirit.
My best 360 days by far were living with my uni housemates, inviting friends round too and we always had some game or other on - particularly in the last year or two we’d be online in Halo 3 or Reach, or racing Mongoose on racetracks we made in Forge.
Uni friends could see we were on, and text to drop round and join - we had two screens, two 360s and 8 controllers (I made the most of my discount working weekends in an electronics store lol, no one had to have a third party one).
It was a wonderful time, and when we left uni I stayed around a few more years with one housemate then eventually moved back home - and in those quieter years, and nowadays with the Xbox friends list, it was comforting to see friends still playing, still enjoying and if you had time, know you could probably join them online - or WhatsApp them to get their opinion on the latest game they were playing.
Some live the other side of the country, but we can cruise on Forza Horizon chatting just as we did in the same room on Test Drive Unlimited all those years ago - it’s the reason I’ll forever be in the Xbox ecosystem and why my friends remain in it too, the value etc is great but the experience Xbox Live brought and the memories it helped create are something so much more important…
360 was special because it started (or perfected) a bunch of things that we now considered standards: Xbox Live was expanded and much more prevalent inside games with Profil and Avatars, DLC, game updates, crossgame chat, messaging, indie games on consoles with XBLA, even had Backwards Compatibility for a bunch of games and later on: apps. And it wasn’t a good media platform at the start, but it got better over time.