Have you ever wondered how many hours you've spent playing Gears of War or Assassin's Creed or something? I do. All the time. I love it when games tell me how long I've spent playing them - witness Just Cause, Test Drive: Unlimited, Blue Dragon and Mass Effect amongst others on this very blog recently. It seems somewhat rare for a game to log cumulative playing time but I really appreciate it when they do.

Your Xbox360 reports your gameplay data to Xbox Live which is then served up via your GamerTag. You can display this on blogs, forums, etc. This gameplay data is accessible to developers through the Microsoft Xbox Community Developer Program to produce some highly interesting applications and websites. I've been signed up for 360voice for some time and that site gives my 360 it's own 'blog' so to speak. It also reports my most frequently played games, topped by Guitar Hero ][, Bejeweled and Rainbow Six: Vegas. GH]I[ is making its presence felt and is creeping up in 5th place at the moment.

But the other day I came across an absolutely brilliant Xbox Live related web-site, The Live Eye. Their slogan is "Watching you... because YOU asked us to." They go on to say, "have us keep an eye on your gaming and see how much time you REALLY spend!" Oh man, that's just answered one of my pressing things I'd just love to know! "This is an application that will watch your xbox live activity (...), and you will be able to view this information in summarized as well as detailed daily views." Sold!

It's an easy sign-up process via registering with their forums and then activating your GamerTag. Now, bewarned, this service won't tell you what time you've spent playing before you sign-up. It only starts logging data once you register, once you ask them to as they say. I think 360voice works in a similar manner actually. Here's my Live Eye page. As I write this it's only logging yesterday's Xbox Live Wednesday session but it shows that I spent 15 minutes evaluating The Club Demo before spending two and a half hours playing Rainbow Six: Vegas with Bob Tracer, Bultark, ChuckStudbuckle, Dr.Genessier, and Jimmer Himself. That's just awesome!


When I previewed this blog entry to Skinnydog earlier today he 'got it' within a millisecond or two of me summarising what the site did. The concept just makes perfect sense to us at least! He too got all excited and decided he would be signing up tonight. After I explained it only logged data after you asked them to he mentioned that it was a shame we couldn't examine time spent over Xmas during the 2007 GamerScore Challenge. You can view activity across some broader domains (retail games, demos, etc) or on specific dates e.g. last night's Xbox Live Wednesday is summarised here.

I can't wait to see this fill up with data through 2008. I'll add a LiveEye link in my link-dump top-left of this blog. Hopefully some of you will also be inspired to sign-up so we can compare data.