Sponsored By

Xbone - A Call To Arms

Xbox was hard enough to say. Xbox 360 was even harder. Now we've got Xbox One. But the brave men and women of the internet are fighting back. Just when you thought they were beaten, they give you: the Xbone.

Gerald Belman, Blogger

May 22, 2013

2 Min Read

I saw the headline "Indies on Xbone: Where's the beef?" by Mike Rose on here and one word stuck out to me. Xbone. Genius. Does anything else need to be said? The absolute depths of creativity of the person who came up with this abbreviation is beyond me. Xbox + One = Xbone. PEOPLES NEEDS THIS WORD IN THEIR MOUTHS AND FACES.

Xbone is so easy - it just rolls off the tongue. Try saying it.

It's friendly, even a little endearing - like something you would name your childhood pet. And then you would dress him in a little gangster doggy outfit and a little gangster doggy hat.

It also implies a little bit of a jibe towards Microsoft about their product naming patterns.

It is always funny when consumers give their own names to products that some marketing department somewhere probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars coming up with a name for. There is a popular brand of beer in the United States called "Milwaukee's Best". It is a generally low budget and low quality beer (even by American standards). People have given it the nickname "Beast" - a play on words of "Best". It is a more efficient and more informative name than "Milwaukee's Best" since the word "beast" is easier to say and describes both it's poor quality and it's adverse effect on the digestive system(like most low quality beers drunk in large quantities). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee's_Best#Terms_of_Endearment

Google "Xbone". You won't find many other uses for it yet except for some kind of network system called "the X-Bone" that "dynamically deploys and manages Internet overlays to reduce configuration effort and increase network component sharing" – whatever that means. http://www.isi.edu/x-bone/

But since it is a nickname you don't have to worry about copyright/trademark and other such garbage. I am personally spearheading the effort to get people to use the name "Xbone" by posting right here and here alone - in the member blogs section of Gamasutra - so that as few people as possible will read it.

Comment below if you agree. Or you can just start using the word Xbone in your articles and in your general conversation. I think it could be the next cool and hip activity to do with all your homies and such.

Read more about:

2013Blogs
Daily news, dev blogs, and stories from Game Developer straight to your inbox

You May Also Like