Twitter Coming To Video Games

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Twitter has already made its appearance on a ton of personal electronics, so why not video games? UK-based developer Bizarre Creations, best known for their racing games, plans to include Twitter functionality in-game in their upcoming racing game, Blur. Twitter users will be able to tweet Blur challenges to their followers as well as share your achievements.

Bizarre Creations is best known for the popular Project Gotham Racing series on the Xbox (although their best game was Metropolis Street Racer on the Dreamcast, but I digress). Bizarre Creations is claiming that their upcoming game, Blur, will change the way that racing games are played, both in gameplay, and now apparently with social networking features as well.

But there will also be a strong nod towards the Internet and the Web 2.0 revolution. In the game’s “career mode” the player will navigate via going through fake social networking sites in the game. There will also be a “Inner Tube” video service, al la YouTube. With all these nods towards social networking, it’s no surprise that Bizarre Creations will have support for real-life Twitter.

It’s probably unlikely that Twitter users playing Blur will have the opportunity to type out a 140-character message from an in-game interface. It sounds like users will input their Twitter data when they first turn on the game and then will be able to send out automated Blur updates and challenges to their Twitter followers.

It will be interesting to see how the Twitter features in Blur will be received. If it’s popular, we could see it added to more games, or even Microsoft and Sony adding such a Twitter feature to the firmware of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.