"What's your gamerscore?" is the innocuous enough question now emblazoned across blogs, bumper stickers, t-shirts, and people's brains. I'm a new guy in the party, having had a Xbox 360 for only two weeks and an active Live account for only a few days. I've got, in my opinion, a respectable gamerscore for the brevity of the time that I've been playing.
The gamerscore, for the unintiated, is the grand sum of the point values of each game achievement. Most games have achievements, little badges of honor of the completion of some task in the game. It presents something of a unified view of your progress across the various games that you play. Quickly an entire ecology of websites have started growing to further the reach of your gamerscore. There are specialized comparison websites, graph websites, and even a website that anthropomorphizes your Xbox 360 with the data as conversation.
360 gamerscore is well on its way to being a fairly large massive multiplayer space. One opt-in service (My360Stats, aka GamerScoreWhore) shows a statistic of over 36 thousand gamertags being tracked. With every Xbox 360 console purchase it grows... and there are fun rumors around the Internets about a Windows service codenamed "Panorama".
Those that know my fascination with massive multiplayer spaces should guess that my mind is having way too much fun coming up with weird ways to tell stories within this space. If anything, I'm a bit disappointed there isn't more fiction (beyond the cool "Xbox blog" idea) already out there. "Microsoft points" are even more ripe for fiction potential, considering their nature as a true micro-currency. I'm curious if there is an interesting reason, or at least fiction, behind the Microsoft points logo, which in 2D form looks like a modified batmobile and in 3D form a modern art spherical lamp.