James's Weblog

So I finally bought an Xbox 360, pretty much just to see if Limbo is as good as I’ve been hearing. (My verdict is that is that it is a really good physics-based puzzle game, but it’s not mind-bending like Braid, which I like much better. And anyone who hasn’t played Braid yet must do so.)

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 “Gamertag” (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.

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?)

Signing in with an existing Gamertag (which kind of confusingly is under “Recover Gamertag”) requires that I know my Gamertag first.

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.

• Gamertag creation and Gamertag “recovery” should be merged into a single sign-in flow. It should ask for a Gamertag or 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’t already exist. (The Xbox Live website already lets people sign in with an email address and a password; why doesn’t the console?) This also would avoid the misleading “Gamertag recovery” name.
• Windows Live should make it easier to see Microsoft services associated with the account, and in this case, it should clearly indicate the account’s Gamertag in the account information screen.

At least it’s only a one-time pain, and admittedly most users wouldn’t run into that.