When 1 vs 100 was unveiled during that bewildering raft of NXE-related announcements at E3 2008, few gave it much credence as a legitimate addition to the Xbox Live roster, choosing instead to lampoon Microsoft’s change of direction as a desperate attempt to catch up to the family-friendly Wii. In the summer of 2009, the service has finally rolled out in beta form across Europe and the US. It’s free to play for gold members, takes only a few minutes to download, and might just make you think twice about the role that videogame hardware could play in the future of living room entertainment.
The premise is fairly simple. ‘1 vs 100 Live’ is a streaming quiz show (complete with television host) in which players compete as their own avatar to become part of a ‘mob’ of 100, or take the ultimate position as ‘the one’ attempting to bring them down. Multiple-selection trivia questions form the battleground, with a single wrong answer knocking players out of the round if they got lucky enough to place as mob member or on the podium. The more members of the mob eliminated, the better the prize hamper for our solo star; currently consisting of XBLA games and MS Points, or a grand prize for defeating everybody. If ‘the one’ is eliminated, the grand prize becomes ineligible and the rest of the goodies are split up and shared amongst the remaining members of the mob. (The Xbox Live Arcade game is duplicated as a prize for all mob members, for those of you with a keen eye for an obvious question)
The masses watching along as a member of the crowd are able to play the same questions at the same time as the live show, comparing answers, statistics and generally yelling at the stupidity that’ll see 20 mob members eliminated attempting to decide which is the taller out of an ostrich or a penguin. Players are automatically placed in a group of four people (skewed towards friends list members), but allowed access to a raft of statistics from the entire game population; currently ranging from around 30,000 to 70,000 active players per session. This meta game can become engrossing, and finding out the true level of idiocy within the scores of Xbox Live users holds a certain morbid fascination – as if Halo 3 voice chat isn’t enough to confirm worst suspicions.
Elitism aside, as a game show 1 vs 100 is entirely dependant on the quality of questioning, and in that regard Microsoft seem to have hit a sweet spot of random topics and ramping difficulty as each round progresses. Of course it’s here that things become highly subjective, but the experience thus far has proven largely positive. Early questions often trick the less attentive with easy answers sandwiched between clever doppelgängers, and most of the latter questions prove taxing but not so obtuse as to become obnoxious. The speed of a correct answer determines the amount of points added to each player’s total, with a lifetime success percentage and points tally supposedly skewing the probability of becoming either a mob member or ‘the one’ in their favour.
Given those vague requirements, lifetime score can also be increased during the ‘extended play’ games held every week night with themed question sets ranging from ‘ultra hard’ through to sports and European. These scheduled slots are strictly for fun, with no live host, no mob or ‘the one’; just quick-fire questions to battle over with friends. Shorn of the tension of the live game, these sessions actually serve as a perfect lobby whilst awaiting others arriving online, providing a good counterfoil to the party system. In essence, the congregation of groups of people within a themed gaming area puts the same theories behind Playstation Home to far more practical use than Sony’s system has managed thus far – there may well be a lesson in UI and dashboard integration hanging around in there somewhere.
As an initiative, 1 vs 100 also seems to be the first step of a larger drive to push the party system and avatar creation firmly into sight of casual players. With free-to-play title Joy Ride arriving later in the year along with Sky TV group viewing support (not to mention the leaked footage of a Hotshots Golf-style game in development) Microsoft seems keen on fostering a sense of avatar ownership and community amongst casual users; a noble if potentially pointless cause. Investing time and effort flying that flag in the face of Nintendo may yet prove to be futile, and there is certainly a long way to go before the NXE can match the simplicity of the Wii interface for users more accustomed to a remote control than a joypad. The pulling power of 1 vs 100 for family members and other non-gamers is undoubtedly strong, but will they ever be able to find it themselves amongst the menu clutter on the Xbox interface? Perhaps more pressingly, can they even work out how to switch the console on in the first place?
With both hardware and interface requiring a thorough redesign to ensure that vision doesn’t go to waste, it’s difficult to see how much of an impact can be made here. Putting that to one side however, there is still a distinct feeling that 1 vs 100 points to a bright future for interactive television-style experiences amongst the current tech-literate audience. Whilst the population percentile claiming such a status is understandably limited by brand loyalty, hardware partisanship, generational media trends and the infancy of the videogame industry; every passing hardware revision may well end up bringing us closer to a unified platform and accepted interface. If that happens, experiments such as these could well determine the foundations of future mass-market casual entertainment. Whether or not you call it television, is up to you.
Professional enthusiast, videogame "journalist" and all-round spectacular sofa dweller. "
