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| Ch@t Zone: Meet Scotthon@zone! | |
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Scotthon@zone: I take a lot of flak over my ID. It's just Scotthon. I've been Scotthon at Microsoft for 10 years, MSN for over five years, and everywhere else I can think of. Not imaginative, but everyone knows who I am without asking. Zone: What part of the Zone do you work for and what are you in charge of? Scotthon@zone: I'm the Test Manager. I'm responsible for the quality of the Zone, from the card and board games to Fighter Ace. Zone: Is playing games part of your day-to-day job on the Zone? Scotthon@zone: Well, every other day maybe. Zone: And what is your favorite part of working on the Zone? Scotthon@zone: The team. Microsoft generally employs very smart people, and they make coming to work every day very interesting. The Zone is a uniquely fun place to work. Most of the team is focused on how to deliver the coolest games to the largest number of people. At the end of the day, it's very common to see people in their offices playing each other online. Zone: Were you always interested in games/gaming? Scotthon@zone: I was always interested in gaming technology. Games tend to push the envelope more often than "serious" applications. If you want to see some exceptional graphics hardware at work, you have to run a game. Zone: What is your favorite part of working in the online gaming community? Scotthon@zone: Visibility. It's now very easy to tell people what I do. I can just tell people I work on "The Zone -- you know, www.zone.com." The usual answer is, "Oh right, my son plays up there all the time." Zone: Tell us what you think about the Zone Community. Scotthon@zone: The diversity of people visiting the Zone is amazing. We sit in meetings attempting to guess what our users want, and we realize it's impossible to characterize a user. We get messages all the time with both kudos and problems. Because our audience is worldwide, it requires a significant change in the way we think. Zone: What do you think is the coolest feature of the Zone and why? Scotthon@zone: I like the retail matchmaking. The ability to buy your favorite game at your local store and go home and get whipped by someone halfway around the globe at any time of day (or night) still impresses me. Zone: Did you work on this feature? Scotthon@zone: This was one of the earliest features of the Zone and was one of the features that attracted me to the group when I first came. Zone: What was your first experience with computer gaming? Scotthon@zone: Lunar Lander on a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1. It's a pretty bad game but was interesting at the time. The first one I saw that really amazed me was Adventure/Zork. I had versions of that game for the TRS-80s, and somewhere I still have an 8" PDP-11 floppy disk with Adventure on it. Zone: What is your all-time favorite game and why? Scotthon@zone: Jumpman on the Commodore 64. I'm not sure why. I just found that game incredibly addictive. I used to stay up all night and play with a friend. Maybe I'm just nostalgic. Zone: What's so cool about this game? Scotthon@zone: The graphics were cheesy but the sounds were fun, and it had some puzzles and lots of fast, smooth action. It was just a great game for a pretty weak platform (by today's standards). Zone: What is your current favorite game available on the Zone and why? Scotthon@zone: Motocross Madness. I own a Honda XR650L, and when I hit the dirt, it hurts much more than it seems to hurt that poor guy in Motocross Madness. I haven't destroyed nearly as much clothing playing the game as attempting much simpler maneuvers on my real bike. Even adding the force feedback joystick doesn't yield the same level of bruising. Zone: What has been the toughest part or greatest challenge of working on the Zone? Scotthon@zone: Not bursting out laughing when people refer to "The Gaming Industry." I have worked in groups that built enterprise solutions for Fortune 500 companies. Now we host multiplayer games on a Web site. Cool, certainly, but very hard to take seriously. Zone: What advice would you give a Zoner who wants to do what you do? Scotthon@zone: My computer background and passion for technology landed me my job at Microsoft. Microsoft is always looking for excellent technical people. The Zone tends to favor technical people who are the most passionate gamers. Zone: If you had a magic wand and could change anything about the world of online gaming, what would it be? Scotthon@zone: I think there are two things. Getting everyone to seriously look at their multiplayer support and build the best-possible experience for their users. The second is that we have enough bandwidth (and low-latency connections) available to everyone to take advantage of these great new features. Zone: What do you think the future will be like for online games? Scotthon@zone: I think we're in the Jumpman stage of online gaming. We have enough features to make the experience compelling, but we haven't fully exploited the technology we have. There are so many things we can offer even with current technology, and the additional speed of new hardware and Internet connectivity combined with further development of browsers and the operating systems will make things possible in the very near future we can only imagine today. We have so much work ahead of us! Zone: Tell us something you've always wanted to share with Zoners everywhere. Scotthon@zone: We truly want to know what you want to see on the Zone. We look at the tens of thousands of simultaneous connections and can only guess what improvements all these people want to see. What annoys you? How can we make this the place where everyone wants to play games? Just let us know! |
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