40 Days #12: Personalize the New Arrivals section to reflect what I look at

Over the last couple of dashboard updates, Microsoft has slowly been refining the New Arrivals section of the Xbox Live Marketplace. Currently it quickly sorts content by type, making it easy to search for just new movies, games, or TV shows, for instance.

However, despite the multiple revisions, this feature still sports an issue that aggravates me to no end whenever I use it. The problem is that just like the Spotlight section that features a variety of old and new content - the same set for all users, the New Arrivals screen is also the same for all gamers. It is a list of what is new on the Marketplace, for everybody.

That means that if I go look at the list in the morning, and then later again in the evening, I keep seeing the same content. It may have been new to me the first time I saw it, but not after that. I wish the dashboard somehow kept track of what I had looked at, and either took those games off the New Arrivals list, or perhaps more sensibly (so that the list doesn't have to be totally recreated for each user), somehow dimmed the games that I had looked into. Sort of like marking your e-mail messages read. If I open up a game in the list to see the new items "inside" it, mark it as viewed, and thus not "new" anymore.

If a "viewed" game gets new content after I had looked into it, it would become "new" again. This would cover the rather frequent scenario where I look at the new content for a game, but then that game gets even more content before it leaves the New Arrivals list, and I mistakenly think I had seen all its new items, thus missing the latest ones.

Because of issues like this, I pretty much check into each and every game that I am interested in on that list every day, just on the off chance that something truly new could be hiding in there somewhere. And that's no way to live. So let's see some dashboard personalization and tracking of that I had looked at. This sort of new/viewed visual distinction would be handy in other areas as well, including the Spotlight, and the Xbox Live Arcade sections. Little "smart" touches like this would really go a long way to making gamers feel like their console "cares" about them, instead of being the typical dumb appliance.