Xbox Live offers Gamers a Statistical Assessment of their Gaming Habits

On the face of it the notion of Xbox Live providing gamers with a statistical breakdown on how they spend their gaming time seems like a perfect example of dichotomy in motion: on the one hand you have an interesting and maybe useful quantification of your gaming habits, but on the other hand you now know exactly how much time you spent gaming and being entertained by your Xbox -- which we suspect will also clue you in on how much time you did not spend doing the laundry, mowing the yard, and all of the other items on your Honey-do list. It would be an idea, therefore, to prevent your wife or significant other from ever seeing that monthly report!

Back to the "Interesting" part of this whole notion, being inquisitive and extroverted staff members here at Gaming Update, when we received the email from Microsoft telling us about the Statistics Report, we felt absolutely compelled to take a look, and once you take that first step, the second step -- sharing the results here with you -- was pretty much a given.

Statistically Speaking

All that we had to do to see our stats was click on the link in the email -- and then sit for five minutes trying to remember the password for our Live account because, yeah, we never use that. It is "remembered" by our GamerTag so why would we bother remembering it ourselves, right? Right! Eventually I managed to remember it without having to resort to the I cannot remember my password button -- and voila! Statistics!

If you have not received that email, or you just want to view your own stats without having to mess around with logging into your email program and locating it, you can also reach the page by logging into Live with your web browser and then clicking on the "My Rewards > My Stats" links on your GamerTag Profile Page. Doing so will bring you to a page that is dedicated to your statistics, complete with a the greeting we swiped below to share with you here declaring that it gives you "The Low Down On How Your Stats Stack Up" and what do you know, they are not kidding!

Instead of just providing you with a bunch of numbers that are only relevant to you, the gnomes over at Xbox Live set up a report that compares your stats to those derived by averaging the stats of pretty much everybody else on the service, so you can see how lame -- or cool -- you are!

"We love giving stuff back -- and as a loyal Xbox LIVE Rewards Gold member, you can enjoy a great new feature we've added to your Xbox LIVE experience: your very own MyStats page that collects your Xbox LIVE usage. Check it out and see how you measure up against the global Xbox LIVE community," the introduction declares, and as that is followed by an easy to understand set of graphs and an appeal for you to send in any ideas you might have about other ways that they might use the data that they have been collecting on your game play... Wait...

It turns out that the gnomes over at Xbox Live know more about my gaming habits than I do! Not to mention they have kept track of things like my most played games, how many Achievements I have been unlocking, the total time in minutes that I have been spending playing games and being entertained, and even what the percentages are that I use the value-added services on Live -- like Netflix, Zune, ESPN, and etc. that they present in a colorful pie chart for my edification!

OK I am not so sure I like the idea of Live keeping track of that much information on us... Big Brother? Hmm... The basic stats are broken down into four primary units, and these are followed by an assessment of Marketplace Downloads, the most popular Avatar Item, Arcade Game, and Zune Movie, and how our use stacks up to those factoids. When I examined the stats for my Live GamerTag this is what I discovered:

My Top Games Past 6 Months

As you can see from the chart above, my top four for the past six months consists of L.A. Noire, Call of Duty: Black Ops, LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars, and Ticket to Ride (which is an XBLA game). According to the chart my stats breakdown like this:

(1) L.A. Noire -- My Time: 131 Hours / The Community Time: 132 Hours

(2) Call of Duty: Black Ops -- My Time: 88 Hours / The Community Time: 773 Hours

(3) LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars -- My Time: 122 Hours / The Community Time: 0 Hours

(4) Ticket to Ride -- My Time: 98 Hours / The Community Time: 32 Hours

First, I feel compelled to qualify this by pointing out that I racked up those hours in LEGO Star Wars because I wrote the Walkthrough/Strategy Guide for that game for SuperCheats -- and it is a good game too so how it can possibly make sense that nobody else played it just boggles my mind? The only logical assumption is that it came to zero because they averaged out the time spent by everybody and not just the people who actually played the game -- which makes that a slightly less useful statistic than otherwise.