I suck at racing games. I know this. So when Xbox executives suggest that I pull off some kind of fancy maneuver in Forza Motorsport 5 on the Xbox One to test out the box's recording and sharing capabilities, I decide to just smash the car instead in the hopes of generating some fiery wreckage.
Turns out I even suck at sucking at games as all I manage to do is bounce off a wall of tires. But I'm anxious to just test out the thing I'm supposed to be testing, and so with only a twinge of self-conscious embarrassment, I yell at the Kinect.
"Xbox, record that."
Actually, the Xbox One console, which Microsoft will launch on November 22, has been recording everything I have done in the background this whole time. So that means the last five minutes of whatever game I'm playing will always be saved. So if I ever do something really stupid (this is likely), I can just shout at my television without even having to remove my thumbs from the ol' analog sticks, and I'll be able to save a video clip of it, then upload it for the world to mock.
I'm in Microsoft's temporary Xbox One Loft, which coincidentally and I think even unbeknownst to some of these Microsoft employees is literally right around the corner from WIRED's office in San Francisco, actually getting my hands (and vocal cords, I guess) on the Xbox One's dashboard. It wouldn't be that much of an exaggeration to say that these snazzy new features – recording and sharing, live television watching, etc. – are the raison d'être of the new Xbox. Certainly they're the thing that clearly separates it from the Xbox 360.
Because it isn't the graphics. The last time Microsoft launched a game console – well, the last time Microsoft launched a game console I was a couple years out of college, and now I have grey hair and am married and basically have one foot in the grave. Anyway, last time Microsoft launched a game console it was 2005 and it was a quantum-leap situation; we were moving from 4:3 standard-def gaming into widescreen 720p and the benefits of upgrading were pretty obvious from a single screenshot.
Today, the vast majority of games are cross-platform and don't look all that different from what we're already playing. You'll hear a lot of developers talk about how much easier is is to create games on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, and this is important since it should help keep the high-end console game development business going without everyone either running out of money or deciding to ragequit. But in terms of near-term incentive for players to upgrade their boxes, "the guy who made the game had an easier time of it" doesn't even show up on the list.
Hence, Microsoft and Sony have poured tons of energy into developing these wraparound features that enhance the previously existing gameplay. Will gamers bite? The idea of recording and streaming of gameplay being integrated into the box and accessible after the fact – that is, immediately following some thrilling, totally unrepeatable moment of emergent gameplay insanity, the kind of thing you want to show people – always seemed to me to be a fundamentally sound one. It's not asking players to engage in a new behavior, it's taking something that's already very popular and giving players the tools to do it more easily.
As far as Xbox One goes, once I record a video, I can jump out of the game – leaving it running, but paused, in the background – and load Upload Studio, an app that lets me search through the clips I've recorded, edit them and overlay commentary. I try this last one for myself: While the video of my non-spectacular tire bounce plays, the Xbox captures video and audio of me talking about it, and stitches the entire thing together.
At this point, the video is instantly transmitted to the NSA. Ha ha! I am just kidding, as far as I know. What actually happens is that you can immediately share that edited video... but apparently only through Xbox Live, on day one. YouTube and Facebook sharing are apparently coming in 2014. So it's kinda sorta a little bit useless at launch. (PlayStation 4 has a similar feature that will let you share with Facebook, though not YouTube, on ship day.)
And once I'm done with that, I can jump right back into the game, instantly, and keep pretending I know how to play Forza.
The benefits of the other Xbox One features are less obvious. Microsoft loves talking about "Snap." You can say, "Xbox, snap NBA" and the NBA app will open up on the side of your screen, and you can do whatever it is you were doing (watching Desperate Housewives, e.g.) while going through the latest NBA scores. The use cases for this that Microsoft outlined were that you could check on your fantasy football team while watching a game, or read GameFAQs if you're stuck in the game you're playing. This seems less useful to me, but we'll see how that goes.
If you're sharing your Xbox with other people, this feature may be important to you – the Xbox One is constantly doing facial identification and voice recognition to figure out who is controlling it. You can say, "Xbox, show my stuff" and Xbox will know who "me" is referring to. This is magical – when it works, which it didn't all the time during our demo.
Finally, I should mention how Xbox One works with live television. Microsoft would really, really like it, I'm guessing, if every Xbox One owner did this: Instead of plugging your cable box into your television via HDMI, you can just plug it right into the back of the Xbox One instead. Once you enter your cable company's info into the Xbox One, it'll have a channel guide all set up, and you can use Xbox One (and voice commands) to change the channel and search for programming.
You actually should be able to yell "Xbox, watch Pawn Stars" and have it bring up Pawn Stars if it's currently playing (which it always is). How does it manage this witchcraft? It searches its own guide for the show, figures out what channel it's on, then uses the Kinect to blast an IR signal into the room which your cable box will pick up on, and flip the channel.
As I think we've said before, this isn't the Trojan horse, this is the Greeks spilling out the horse's body into your living room: If Microsoft can get you to the point where you turn on your Xbox One every time you watch television, it's getting a level of customer engagement that every other videogame platform only dreams about. If it works.
The caveat that I should mention here is that although I was definitely witnessing a live demo of an Xbox One, it was still a controlled environment set up by Microsoft. They picked the game, they picked the apps, they picked the channels, etc. It will only be once we get Xbox Ones into our homes and try them with our own setups that we'll really know what happens when the rubber hits the road.
