If you haven’t noticed, social networking has infiltrated our lives. We post our resumes, our pictures, our relationships, our minute-by-minute thoughts, nearly everything we are to create better connections with our friends and loved ones. For the most part, though, we have left out our culture’s most recent entertainment resource: video games. Facebook, for instance, asks its users to list interests, favorite movies, favorite books, favorite TV shows, favorite quotes, and favorite charitable causes, but it neglects our favorite video games. We share most of our lives, but to date, no one has provided us the same ability to share our games.
OnLive, a new streaming video game service, is sweeping the gaming industry off its feet – or at least trying to. Through the use of cloud computing, they’ve created a platform that could allow all video games to be immediately accessible to gamers, even those not interested in buying a super-powerful PC or next-gen console. The technology is pretty cool.
The most amazing thing about OnLive’s user experience though, isn’t the immediate access to games, rather the immediate access to other gamers. OnLive has effectively created a brand new gaming social network.
What OnLive has recognized is that creating and maintaining social connections is a type of play, and is an important piece of the gaming experience that has been underserved by the current generation of consoles.
For example, simply search for Guitar Hero on YouTube.
The majority of what you probably found was a lot of videos of people playing those songs that people consider “impossible.” Almost like a rock star social club. The videos are meant to brag to their friends and the larger Guitar Hero community online. The only problem is that these rock stars have to reach outside of the game to share, rather than making bragging rights an integral part of the game.
Nintendo also had this insight when they launched the Wii. The entire campaign was based around the shared experience of the Wii with your friends and loved ones.
Although they recognized the importance of those physical connections, Nintendo completely ignored our virtual ones and failed to facilitate a useful way of sharing games or even playing with your friends online.
This is what OnLive aims to remedy. They have allowed gamers to create friendships, share videos, and watch their friends play across their entire library of games. If and when they combine this technology with a partner like Facebook Connect, OnLive will have finally allowed gamers to dive headfirst into the world of social gaming.
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