Thoughts on 1 vs 100 Live

Jun 17, 2009 20:09

So if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you may have noticed that I wouldn't shut up about 1 vs 100 for a while. I've tried to cut down on the tweets, but I needed to get my thoughts out about this game somewhere, so here I am posting more than 140 characters.

Brief introduction: 1 vs 100 Live is a video game adaptation of the short lived (at least in the US) trivia game show, 1 vs 100. It's the first "show" on Xbox Live Primetime and is a massively multiplayer online game show for Xbox Live gold members.

While it's based on the 1 vs 100 concept, there are some tweaks. There are a few live shows each week, in which there's an actual host in a studio in Seattle who has his audio streamed during breaks, and each episode is 2 hours long. Apparently 101 people wasn't "massive" enough, so you can be selected as the One, one of the 100 in the Mob, or play in the crowd, which is everyone else. Some episodes have had over 100,000 people connected at once, which is a very large crowd.

The alternate format which occurs most evenings is the Extended Play in which there's no live host, and there's 37 questions each episode. These scores help you qualify to be selected as the Mob or the One in that week's live episodes. But they're not too relevant to the story here.

The game is in its second beta phase right now. The first one was the Canadian beta in which I managed to play in for the last weekend, and it is now in the US/Canada beta phase which opens it up to the US.


Here's the thing: most people don't enjoy playing trivia with me. I'd arrange You Don't Know Jack tournaments while in university, and I'd have to stop playing so that others could have fun. When I'd play Trivial Pursuit with friends in high school, most people would turn out so that it just turned into two of us playing. So I figured that by playing online, I could enjoy playing trivia while not annoying those around me.

It started off pretty goofy on the last weekend of the Canadian beta. The host asked a question about the Super Mario Bros. movie, which I've never seen, but yet still knew the answer. So I while I was emailing the address given, jessicasays heard the other part of the question which I answered, and included my phone number as requested. So a few minutes pass, the phone rings, and Jess just hands it to me after answering and is like "it's the guys from Xbox" in a bemused tone. So I talked to the host and Major Nelson for a few minutes which was recorded and played back later in the show. Also during the show, I think I finished third, second, and first in score from the crowd/mob during various rounds. So that was odd, right? But once the American beta started, there'd be a lot more people, and I wouldn't be up at the top so frequently, or so I hoped.

A brief interlude of vanity surfing of Youtube which foreshadows the rest of this story:
So the first night of the US/Canada beta comes along, and I start to play again. The first round of the night, The One takes the money which is silly, because this is a beta and there's no actual prizes, but I see my goofy avatar on the screen as the top scorer overall. Ok, that's cool but unexpected...

I've played a lot since then, so I don't remember all of the details of the other rounds, but I know Jessica and I were selected for the mob, and we "won" 400 MS Points and an Xbox Live Arcade game, but of course, we didn't win anything. I think I finished another round as a top scorer, and then while a round was starting, I saw my face on the One screen before my avatar appeared on stage, which gave me time to yell for Jessica to come back.

So, here I am as the One. Short story, 12 questions, using two helps, and a prod from Jessica about How I Met Your Mother and spicy meatballs, and I had defeated the mob. In a real game, it would be worth 10,000 Microsoft Points (~$142 CAD), but in the beta, I knew all I won was the knowledge that I was the first to defeat the mob (in the US beta). However, what quickly became evident during all of this was when you're playing with tens of thousand people on Xbox Live at the same time, and you're the centre of attention, things quickly go crazy.

There seems to be a few different responses from people (although to be fair, with tens of thousands, the default response is to not do anything.)
  1. Send a note of congratulations
  2. Send a note asking whether I really won 10000 points
  3. Send a friend request
  4. Send a party invite, because clearly you're the only one who has the idea of asking the guy who wins to give you the answers and you're the only one he wants to talk to
  5. Send a ridiculous number of messages or chat invites or whatever to cause the notifications to go crazy on my screen in an effort to annoy or distract while I'm the one
  6. Send various forms of abusive messages, none of which are worth documenting here
I don't think the notifications finished until about a half hour after my turn as the One was done. I used the file complaint button where possible, and turned down pretty much all the friends requests. As I see it, they all feel like they played with me, but unfortunately, I have no idea who they are.

So hooray, I won at 1 vs 100, I took some grief over Xbox Live, and lived to tell the story, the end, right? Nope. The next episode goes from ~50,000 people to ~100,000 people. Surely I wont be the centre of attention again, right? Nope. While I can't be the One again for the rest of the season, during the two hours, I finished #1 in three separate rounds, and was #2 in the final round of the night. Now I'm starting to get some notoriety. The message flood starts each time after my avatar appears on the screen, and it's more of the same.

To move on with the story, there have been two more live episodes, and two more nights of frequent top 3 finishes, and too many messages via Xbox. At times the number of messages exceeds the 100 message inbox cap before I can go through them and file complaints on those messages that deserve it. At the end of Saturday's episode, the host starts to give a completely unsolicited shout out about me, although if you listen, it sounds like he forgets that I beat the mob, and then it's as if someone's waving to get his attention in the studio as he just kind of whispers "he's already taken the mob as well".

So that's enough bragging about how I'm great at 1 vs 100, blah blah blah, shut up Ryan, you're so boring. But now I can talk about what I've found interesting during all of this, which is this "nanocelebrity" as I referred to it in a tweet. Most of my Xbox Live use before this was to play the occasional game with datasquid or the odd game of Rock Band or GTA IV online out of curiosity. Now I've received enough friend requests to fill my friends list, a wide variety of abuse which has been interesting to scope and actually added a few friends to my list.

The other weird thing that I can't stop doing is searching for what people are saying about "me" (or my avatar? If I were more of a sociologist, I might be able to express the seperation a bit better). The links to Youtube above have a couple of funny moments amongst the videos. There's the one where I defeat the mob, and you hear them shout in anguish as they see my answer for the last question thinking I got it wrong. There's one where after showing up as #1, you hear the people discussing how they're going to add me as a friend and then insult me, before finding my list was full.

It's also been weird to see what people post about me on the net. There's an official forum hosted by Microsoft, and then there's Google and trolling various video game forums. I will abuse the HTML list formatting again to provide a summary of some of the comments:
  • That guy needs a life
  • He's a robot
  • He's Ken Jennings
  • He lives in the Microsoft data centre
  • He's 8 or 9 smart people in a room (nope, just jessicasays and we rarely have to help each other)
  • Umm, let's just say rude comparisons to Gary Glitter
  • He's Kevin Jennings (I replied that they were correct, but that I wasn't related to Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings. I don't think everyone got that joke)
  • He should go to sleep and never wake up (this person sent me a friend request after saying this. Unsurprisingly, he's not one of the few I accepted)
  • He cheats
  • He works for Microsoft and has all the questions and answers in advance as an internal tester
  • He's ruining the game for us and should be shunted off to his own game or stop playing
  • He can suck it
  • He can totally suck it
  • He's a nerdy Canadian asshole
There were some other funny ones, like one talking about how they expected that the balding guy would be out after 2 questions, and I took that as validation for my avatar design. There's also a thread proposing a drinking game that doles out one shot for each time I finish in the top three. Ahh, the irony of me being involved in a drinking game. There was also a thread about me that ran well over a hundred posts, but that's because it was derailed by a horrible troll, and was thankfully deleted by moderators.

So that's about it. I think I broke the team's expectations for the game. There's a limit of 3 prizes per season, and I've won 3 or more on multiple episodes. The issues that come from playing with 100k people at once seem to have the awareness of the developers, but who knows what's going to come from it.

I've always tried to stay relatively invisible, or at least that's what my head believes. This has been fairly interesting, even if it's just becoming well known to a bunch of video game playing trivia players. I've been mostly successful at not jumping in like some Kibo of the web showing up at every mention of my name and making snarky responses to their insults. (To those who told me to suck it hard, I discussed posing for a photo where I'm struggling to drink a thick milkshake and thank them for their advice.) And at the end of this all, most people will just know "Mutant Dog 123" and not who I am, and I can go off and enjoy my preferred anonymity, maybe after changing my gamer tag. It's a fun game either way, and I recommend checking it out. I hope you ignored all of the above, and I was able to get the above out of my brain without any of you reading it :)
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