Gaming’s Growing Love Affair With Twitter

Everyone knows by now that Microsoft are planning on updating the NXE to include Facebook and Twitter integration later this year. But I was blown away when I inserted my Uncharted 2 game disc into the PS3 and was presented with a Twitter option. I really hope we see more of this.

The option is incredibly simple to setup. You just insert your Twitter ID and password, then select at what points you want the game to tweet about – options include when you start playing multiplayer online, when you complete a chapter, when you earn trophies, when you earn multiplayer money or when you reach a level milestone.

Now, for me, not all of this is appealing. I don’t want to tweet every single time I earn a trophy, for example. But I do like the idea of tweeting when I start playing multiplayer, so that perhaps people on my social network may decide to join me. But fortunately you can customise what parameters you want to tweet about. What’s even better is that the tweet itself (at least for the multiplayer one) includes a link to my stats page for the game on Naughty Dog’s website, so people can see just how bad I am at multiplayer games (or they will, when I actually manage to finish one…)

The only problem with this arrangement is that it’s (so far) restricted to the one (albeit awesome) game on PS3. At the moment, there’s not a lot of info on whether the Xbox Twitter integration will allow automatic updating when certain parameters are met, but hopefully it will. Because the idea of melding social networking with gaming is pretty exciting, at least in terms of merging a couple of different aspects of your online presence.