Achieving: Free Avatar junk and 0 Point Achievements

Clearly I’m a sucker for Microsoft’s Gamerscore system — the meta meme built on top of every Xbox 360 game — but I also go in for the odd diversions they’ve pushed to the Xbox’s Dashboard over the past several years. Remember being able to play a simple game of football against your friends’ Avatars? Destination: Arcade? The myriad ‘Game of the Year’ and ‘Academy Award’ surveys? I love that stuff so, naturally, I loaded up the Xbox Live Labs app as soon as I got home from work last Thursday to watch a whole lot of nothing unfold on my screen.

To entice users, the program unlocks three mad scientist-styled Avatar props and Zero Point Achievements just for spending 6 hours letting Xbox “perform a number of network tests from your console”. There’s also mention of making note of what hardware you have plugged in but they’ve already got my credit card number and billing address so what more private info could they have gathered?

Intrigued? You can still run the app from your own Xbox 360 Dashboard until March 27th and partake in the Social Classifying Experiment — err, Invasive Personal Research Program, ummm, FUN! How about we call it fun?

Achieving: Tales of Pointless Self Reward in Games retold in brief posts whenever we feel like it.