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The Nomination mail:I am an older gamer, a working professional and an avid online gamer. I belong to a site called 2old2play.com. This site is dedicated to actively filter out the 24 and younger crowd that seem to have hormonal challenges that prevent them from contributing in a positive way to the LIVE community. I am a very proud founding member and wish to nominate the site admins, doodirock and DSmooth, for a gamer spotlight. We are growing bigger everyday and have found success by complementing the feature-rich site with an active community of very like-minded supportive gamers. We are quickly building a juggernaut and would appreciate the support and exposure from the Xbox LIVE crew to enrich our community further with the kind of gamers that we appreciate: 25+ years of age, mature minded (to an extent ;), respectful, and have a passion for gaming online or off. | Community Spotlight:TriXie Interviews Founders of 2old2play.comPublished June 14, 2007 I recently spoke to DSmooth and doodirock, founders of 2old2play.com, the "Older Gamer's Paradise." Here's what they had to say about themselves and their community for the over-25 set. TriXie: What's the story behind your Gamertag? DSmooth: When I started at college my friends started calling me DSmooth. I went by that for four years. After college when I entered the working world, I started work, and made some friends there, who independently started calling me DSmooth. After that I knew it had to become my alias … :) doodirock: I played a lot of FPS games like Doom and Quake back in the day and always thought it was funny how all the younger guys would keep calling me dude. In the spirit of competition, any time an opponent would tell me, "Dude, you suck," I would respond with, "Dude, I rock." So that simply became Dudeirock. After the Xbox LIVE® launch I tried to secure the name, but it was already taken so I had to change the spelling to doodirock. Consequently most people now just call me doodi. Perfect, I know. TriXie: Where do you live? DSmooth: Natick, MA. doodirock: Chicago, IL. TriXie: What do you do for a living? DSmooth: I work as a software engineer for a small storage-networking startup company. Before that I spent six years at Cisco Systems. doodirock: For work, I currently run a freelance Web design and development studio as well as the popular gaming blog GameStooge.com and of course 2old2play.com. TriXie: How long have you been on Xbox LIVE? DSmooth: I started on Xbox LIVE in the beta several months before it went live to the general public. Playing football and Whacked!® with the other beta participants. doodirock: Actually I was all over it on launch day. I have always been an online gamer even way back when. Something about gaming with friends is just the perfect way to waste some time. TriXie: Can you give us some background on 2old2play? Who started it and when? doodirock: I built the site for my Halo® 2 clan around April of 2005. At first, it was just a simple forum that we used after we left another community to create a place of our own. Shortly after I put it up, I enlisted the help of my good friend and co-founder Dsmooth who helped me to build out the programming of the site. Things started to escalate as more and more people joined until the Halo clan was overflowing with applicants. Instead of turning them away, we decided to just give them a forum of their own under the 2old2play site. This all snowballed after our site was given a spot light in OXM magazine about 3 months into the site's existence along with an article on Bungie's homepage. Since that time, the site has been growing by huge numbers each day and we just keep adding features, writers, and clans. DSmooth: Doodi did the site design and I did most of the coding. We felt like we needed a haven from "Timmies" and wanted a place where gamers could be free of that. We were happy when we hit 100 members and now we're well over 9,000 strong, and growing. TriXie: Have you ever had folks under the age of 25 sneak in? If so, how did you discover it and did you boot them out? DSmooth: We have to wield the banhammer often. Sometimes they slip in unnoticed for a while but a few forum posts give them away. Other times, they are dumb enough to put their real age in their profile. Either way, justice is swift at 2old2play. doodirock: It's a funny thing, actually. People sneak in all the time, but you rarely see them actually try and game with the community. I think this is mostly due to the fact that people on 2old2play are there to meet other people like them. They are there to GAME with their peers. So as soon as you get in a room with someone underage, it's fairly easy to tell. They have a tendency to weed themselves out and the community is pretty much a self-policing group. After all, why would a young kid want to party up with a bunch of old guys? The real problem we have is with our age limit in general. People see 25 and think that the only age we have is 20-somethings. In reality, our average age on the site is 35 and in our eyes, 25 is the absolute minimum. The idea of the age limit is to at least create some barrier between the younger generation and our own. Sure 25 isn't "old," but then again neither is 35 or 45 for that matter. We are looking for a mindset is all. Creating the age barrier is just one way that we can get closer to finding that mindset. TriXie: What's the worst or weirdest job you've ever had? DSmooth: One winter break in college I worked for UPS. I got bit by a dog. Needless to say, that was the last time I worked for UPS. doodirock: By far that would be a bar back in my college days. Nothing is worse than cleaning up someone else's "mistakes" in the bathroom at 4 A.M. on a Wednesday. TriXie: Dogs and vomit. That does sound pretty unappealing. What's your Xbox setup like? DSmooth: 65-inch HDTV with 7.1 surround. doodirock: I run my Xbox 360™ on a 55-inch plasma display with DD 5.1 whenever I'm in my living room. If I'm in the office testing games or just goofing off, I also have a Xbox 360 in there that I play on my 22-inch PC monitor. I actually prefer it to the plasma since you get a closer feel when you're sitting right next to the screen. TriXie: What's your favorite LIVE-enabled game? DSmooth: Although I'm trying to play only next-gen titles, Halo 2 is still king of Xbox LIVE. It did everything right. I'm hoping it gets unseated this fall by Halo® 3. doodirock: Without a doubt that is the tried and true Halo 2. Nothing really compares to the way matchmaking, clans, and friends lists seamlessly integrate with one another. We often joke about how even after years of Halo 2, no other company has really come close to the online experience that Halo 2 can provide. Well, until Halo 3, I guess. TriXie: How about your favorite offline Xbox 360 game? DSmooth: Guitar Hero 2™ is my guilty pleasure. I even make rock-star hands in the air after I successfully shred it up … doodirock: Offline would most likely be Guitar Hero 2 although I still have not finished it. I spend too much time online whenever I have the chance so I miss a lot of jam time. TriXie: You guys are like twins! What, in your opinion, is the best game of all time? DSmooth: Quake 2 on the PC was a pleasure of mine for years and years. I did the original Quake 1 server list Web site (back when I went by ][ronMan long ago) and was in a Quake clan with some guys from id Software. doodirock: Wow, the best game for me would have to be The Secret of Mana. I'm not sure many of the younger crowd really know what that is, but let's just say it was a Nintendo game. It mixed the best parts of multiplayer gaming, challenging storyline, and RPG game play. I consider it Zelda on crack. TriXie: If they made a movie about your life, who should play you? DSmooth: Owen Wilson. doodirock: Leonardo DiCaprio, because whatever movie he touches turns to gold. TriXie: If you could trade places with anyone for one day, who would it be? DSmooth: J Allard—he seems to have to coolest job on the planet. doodirock: Any master of the arts. Be that a musician, painter, etc. TriXie: Hot celeb you'd like to be stranded on a desert island with? DSmooth: Reese Hottiespoon—I mean Witherspoon. She is perhaps the most perfect woman on the planet. doodirock: Scarlett Johansson. Can you make that happen? TriXie: Yeah, I'll get right on that. What's the best feature of Xbox LIVE? DSmooth: Matchmaking … It's easy to network a game. It's hard to make it easy for people to find games. doodirock: Without question, it is the friends list. The whole reason gamers come to a platform like Xbox 360 is because they are able to easily share their gaming experiences online with their friends. In the end, the more focus Microsoft puts on expanding the social aspect of the friends list and online play, the better. I'm glad to see they are already thinking about that with the upcoming spring update, but I still think there needs to be a lot more refinement of the friends list itself. Sorting, tagging, and building new lists are a must to create an even richer online social experience. TriXie: What would you like to be doing in ten years? DSmooth: I'd like to be retired, but if that's not in the cards I'd like to be doing what I am now. Working a job that I enjoy and playing a lot of games in my free time. doodirock: I would like to continue with 2old2play and build it into an even easier to use online meeting center for older gamers. It would be great to have a centralized location for every older gamer to find peers who love games as well. I think we're on the right track though. TriXie: Yeah you guys have done great work! Thanks a lot! |
