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Call me crazy, but on Thursday, July 12, I trekked down to Santa Monica solely to attend the C3@E3 event that Microsoft was hosting for bloggers, community sites and community members. There were some people I had worked with in various ways over the past two years that were planning on attending the event and I knew I wouldn’t have another chance to see them anytime soon. This was underscored by the point that I would not be attending E3 this year either, so it just turned out to be a mandatory thing for me to do. Despite first thing in the morning flights and an overall lack of sleep on either end of the trip, it was more than well worth it. I was happy to run into everybody I have ever interacted with and all the Microsoft folks too. Somehow everybody managed to look conscious through the night.

It was very important for me to meet Shigeo Tatsumi, who was attending E3 and was at the community event. I have talked to Tatsumi-san on several occasions over the past two years, which is partly what led to our intermingling of foreign piñatas in our respective Viva Piñata gardens. Obviously this was the opportunity I would have to talk to him, but not really talk to him because I don’t speak Japanese and he doesn’t really speak English. Thanks to our great translator Jennifer we were able to speak briefly and I’d seriously like to learn Japanese so I could have a bit more of a conversation than we ended up having. I definitely look forward to talking to and meeting Tatsumi-san again in the future. Be sure to check out a video recap of the “C3@E3″ event as captured by Tatsumi-san and his videographer for their Xbox Japan community site.

After meeting with Tatsumi-san is where the whirlwind of meeting people and talking about anything and everything started. Another guy from Japan I was looking forward to meeting was CheapyD from CheapAssGamer. I laughed at his retelling of funny behind the scenes tidbits when he was doing on-air interviews with the BBC and Bloomberg. However, he hadn’t imported a bottle of Pepsi Ice Cucumber for me, so he unfortunately loses quite a few points right there. Spencer from Siliconera (and from Greenwich, where I grew up, go figure), Ben from Opposable Thumbs and I went over our thoughts about the press conferences earlier in the week. Let’s see, my memory is a bit fuzzy a week later, but I also said hello to Chris (the other Chris) from ShackNews, Charles from GamingNexus, Howard from Popcultureshock and Ron from Destructoid. I also ran into Flynn (Fruit Brute) and David (Tiny Dancer) from GayGamer.net, which recently celebrated the site’s first anniversary — you can read the recap of their first ever E3 here. I also ran into Cameron, who is a game designer at Krome and is working on the recently announced Viva Piñata Party Animals, which I was not able to check out due to a lack of ESA pass. James, community manager at Insomniac Games — speaking of whom you check out Major Nelson’s podcast for a great head-to-head between these two. Robert, community manager at Infinity Ward, was demoing the super hot Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but I didn’t get a chance to even check that out. The night wound down and most folks headed over to the Gamecock party down the street while I joined Flynn and David for one more stop before essentially not sleeping the remainder of the night before my flight.

I know I missed about a million people, so apologies for anybody I may have missed, but it was an amazing trip that was well worth it. I hope to see all of these folks and more at the next E3, wherever they decide to hold it.

Images courtesy of the “E3 - C3@E3 Community Party” Flickr photoset by Gamerscore blog.

Tatsumi-san from the Xbox Japan blog wrote me this weekend to let me know he posted his side of our trans-Pacific piñata exchange which I detailed a couple of weeks ago. He has video of when he opens the crate he received from me which contained the pink and white kittyfloss named Tama I sent him.

Because I’m a huge dork the kittyfloss has a flower on his head and a scarf around his neck. Unfortunately since this was a first generation kittyfloss, Tama didn’t have my personalized tag on him. Sad.

You can read an auto machine translated version here.

I’ve been sort of “conversing” with Tastsumi-san, who runs the Japanese Xbox.com webmaster and community blog, for a while now. We’ve mentioned to each other that we should play a game — a retail or Xbox Live Arcade title — one day so we could “meet.” We haven’t gotten around to it yet, the least of not is the language barrier. I can’t speak for Tatsumi-san, but my Japanese is non-existent and Xbox Live games being voice chat based isn’t helping me much either.

Instead, I noticed one night he was online playing Viva Piñata and I got an idea that I would send him a piñata via the in-game post office. I bought a Kittyfloss from Paper Pets and I think gave the him (or her) a flower and a scarf and, with some help, named it Tama — which is apparently a very common pet name in Japan. I sent it to Tatsumi-san one evening. Some time later I got the tip to check my post office in the game. I got a crate back! I cracked it open and Tatsumi-san sent me a Pretztail and the name was in the Japanese charater set. This was great! I feel weirdly attached to this unique Pretztail in my garden. Some piñata better not ever try to eat it.

It was really nice of him and so in return I sent him a Doenut that I named “Haruko” which means something like “the child born of the spring.” I felt it was a timely name. I hope he likes it too.

A video of the special Pretztail in my graden is below.

Video: Viva Piñata - 「あつまれ！ピニャータ」 - Japanese Pretztail

(You need a Windows Live ID to log in to MSN Soapbox for a short time it seems.)

For the past few months I’ve been in close contact with a few of my colleagues in the Tokyo office of my company and, through them, with Shigeo Tatsumi, Xbox.com Japan Webmaster and community manager of sorts. Part of our conversation have been about sharing information and thoughts about expanding the community relations that Shigeo has been doing for some time already in Japan. When we last talked in early June, Shigeo planned to take the already smart things he has been doing since the launch of the original Xbox to a new level in early July. That time is finally here.Taking a cue from the creation of the Gamerscore blog, Xbox Japan has launched an employee blog for all things community related in Japan. Right now, only Shigeo is writing on the blog, but that might change in the future. So far, he’s posted a lot of things already — from upcoming demos (Zegapain XOR) to videos about the quick charge kit (he’s in the video) and what seems to be a Halo 2 comedy routine to just posting what is new on the Xbox Live Marketplace. I’m interested in seeing where this goes, but I think Shigeo is off to a great start, mixing his own vision with the usefulness of a more official version of MajorNelson.com and the aforementioned Gamerscoreblog.com. I’ve already got this as an (unfortunately) auto-translated bookmark on my daily list of sites to check out.

The other part to the community program in Japan is the launch of the Xbox Friends web site. Social networks and networking are fairly big in Japan and it seems a lot of people are connected with their friends in a lot of different ways (in Japan and in the rest of the world naturally). Of course, Xbox Live is supposed to add another way friends all over the world are connected. The challenge in Japan seems to be that just randomly running into someone on Live, who may not even speak Japanese, to play a game with — never mind actually put on your Friends list — is an awkward social situation more often than not. This is where Xbox Friends comes in. From what I understand Xbox Friends basically looks to supplement the existing friends list features on Xbox.com to help gamers in Japan find new friends that share things in common by including information not available on Xbox Live such as prefecture, age and profession among other things. This information was willingly given by the gamers in order to join Xbox Friends, since that’s the whole purpose of the site. On Xbox Friends, gamers can create groups such as clans, guilds, student clubs, etc. and they can also search these groups. On home page for the Xbox Friends site itself, there are three main tabs for search: user search, group search (search for gamer groups according to game genre) and user map search.

This is what the most interesting part of Xbox Friends is — the “user map” function. Basically, you start with selecting a game title and then on the next page you can choose to narrow down your user map search by a few categories. They include: Gamer Zone, Prefecture, gender, age (minors cannot be searched), favorite game genre, and profession. The search result is a Flash-based user map and the type of user map you get — score view or match view — depends on what criteria you did or did not select to search by. You can also narrow down the number of results returned by using the 10 - 100 slider bar on the right side, so that the user map you get isn’t too busy and you can pick out a Gamertag to choose from to view. From these results, gamers in Japan can now find someone to request to be a friend on Xbox Live and not have it totally be random. It’s definitely a great idea and something that is needed out there. I hope that Japanese gamers put it to full use.