I'm not sure why it is that I don't find competitive multiplayer all that exciting. Like I've said before I used to play a lot of games with my friends all physically located in the same room so playing with anonymous people I've never met never felt the same. Especially when you can get some real prats online who take it far too seriously, or the hackers, glitchers or team killers who don't care about spoiling it for everybody else (or who specifically do it to annoy everybody else). Perhaps if the average game wasn't filled with idiots or a couple of people using the public voice chat for private conversations about films or other nonsense then I'd be more interested.
But then again, I used to be involved in running a Kingpin clan years back on the old Wireplay service and I found the management and 'PR' (forums) side infinitely more enjoyable than actually playing the game. When I was playing WoW I seldom engaged in PvP combat and much preferred teaming up with people to take on dungeons, and when they went right the raid dungeons, forty people working together to take on AI encounters, were glorious. That's where the online appeal would be for me, working with people to work through difficult, story-based encounters. Competitive encounters with the sole goal of topping the scoreboards just don't do it for me, for some reason.
Cross-format gaming is certainly interesting. The PC is a bit iffy because of the potential for hacks and the like that will always be more prevalent there (though I understand that Unreal Tournament is going to try it at some point with the PS3 and the 360 already has some interaction with the PC through Xbox/Windows Live), but for relatively closed systems like the 360 or PS3 there's no real technical reason that they shouldn't be able to interact, save for there being no way Microsoft would allow people to play games outside of Xbox Live and no way Sony would want their online service integrated into Microsoft's.
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The poster formerly known as Macho Man!
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