{"id":195,"date":"2010-08-22T20:06:51","date_gmt":"2010-08-23T03:06:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/?p=195"},"modified":"2011-01-03T10:42:54","modified_gmt":"2011-01-03T18:42:54","slug":"connecting-to-xbox-live-should-be-easier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/archives\/2010\/08\/22\/connecting-to-xbox-live-should-be-easier\/","title":{"rendered":"Connecting to Xbox Live should be easier"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So I finally bought an Xbox 360, pretty much just to see if <i>Limbo<\/i> is as good as I&#8217;ve been hearing. (My verdict is that is that it is a really good physics-based puzzle game, but it&#8217;s not mind-bending like <a href=\"http:\/\/braid-game.com\/\"><i>Braid<\/i><\/a>, which I like much better.  And anyone who hasn&#8217;t played <i>Braid<\/i> yet must do so.)<\/p>\n<p>Getting the Xbox 360 set up was surprisingly difficult.  When I went to set up my new Xbox 360, I had the choice between creating a new &#8220;Gamertag&#8221; (a.k.a. a unique user name for their online Xbox Live service) or signing in using an existing one.  I chose to create a new one, having completely forgotten that I had bought a Windows game last year that already associated a Gamertag with my existing Windows Live\/MSDN account.<\/p>\n<p>The Gamertag creation screen on the Xbox 360 asked me for an email address and a password so it could log-in to (or create) a Windows Live account. Entering the credentials to my Windows Live account showed an error message saying that my account already had a Gamertag associated with it, but it neither switched to it automatically nor told me what my existing Gamertag was.  It instead suggested that I use a different Windows Live account. (Really?  I need to use a different email address?)<\/p>\n<p>Signing in with an existing Gamertag (which kind of confusingly is under &#8220;Recover Gamertag&#8221;) requires that I know my Gamertag first.<\/p>\n<p>I went to a PC to log in to my Windows Live account to see if I could determine my Gamertag there.  None of the account settings or information pages listed it.  Eventually I stumbled onto the Xbox Live website itself, which (because I was still signed in to Windows Live) prominently showed my Gamertag.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Gamertag creation and Gamertag &#8220;recovery&#8221; should be merged into a single sign-in flow.<\/strong>  It should ask for a Gamertag <em>or<\/em> an email address, each along with a password.  It then should sign-in to an existing account or should create a new account if one doesn&#8217;t already exist. (The Xbox Live website already lets people sign in with an email address and a password; why doesn&#8217;t the console?) This also would avoid the misleading &#8220;Gamertag recovery&#8221; name.<\/li>\n<li>Windows Live should make it easier to see Microsoft services associated with the account, and in this case, it should <strong>clearly indicate the account&#8217;s Gamertag in the account information screen<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>At least it&#8217;s only a one-time pain, and admittedly most users wouldn&#8217;t run into that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So I finally bought an Xbox 360, pretty much just to see if Limbo is as good as I&#8217;ve been hearing. (My verdict is that is that it is a really good physics-based puzzle game, but it&#8217;s not mind-bending like Braid, which I like much better. And anyone who hasn&#8217;t played Braid yet must do [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantsraves","category-usability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}