I like my PS3. Despite its high asking price and insistence on the best audio and video equipment, there’s a lot of value packed inside that giant black box of immovable shiny metal. It’s too bad that in these trouble times, the machine is completely unattractive to customers’ wallets.
Despite the shoddy sales, Sony finally realized – in beta form – one of the cornerstones of their online strategy. The virtual microtransactive land of Playstation Home is a chatroom, game extension, and virtual avatar system, all rolled into one tidy world.
And it’s completely sterile.
It took me a while to come up with an appropriate adjective summing up all that is Home. The world is perfectly rendered: parallel walls, lapping waves, and a pretty lens flare when you stare at the virtual sun. There’s also a physics engine controlling the movement of objects, so stacking furniture becomes a viable obsession, available to the Youtube chronicles.
That said, the world is a little too clean for comfort. Much like the faux-reality conjured by countless movies, when the main character steps into a “white room” devoid of objects beyond the colorless walls in symbolizing its emptiness, Home has that same kind of artificiality. The gravel path floats just above the pond, next to the five benches arranged in a perfect semi-circle, above a centered LCD screen, beneath a cloudless sky.
What to do in this world? You start with an avatar – with the usual facial and body customization options – and a default sparsely-furnished room (more unusual apparel, for yourself and your home, are available by a surcharge). Stepping outside, you enter a few “locations”; some are related to games, others are more of the generic “mall” and “plaza” fare. Each required a small ~30MB download to enter.
But you’re there to virtually interact, so the world is sown with various minigames, movie trailers, and poster advertisements remiscient of Minority Report. Your avatar expresses itself via text bubbles (handy to type out with the new PS3 keypad, as Home’s posters consistently remind you), precanned dance moves, and the aforementioned fashion accessories. The experience is a piece out of – and completely reliant upon – the social aspects of other games like World of Warcraft or Second Life.
And hence the biggest complaint about Home, despite its free price of entry and beta development status: there’s just nothing to do in Sony’s playground, no overarching goal or objective to compel players to log onto the system. The plan was to sell plenty of advertising and brand awareness on the pristine walls, but along the way Home’s project managers forgot how they were going to entice people to join the service. The advertising real estate is worthless, even with the catchiest slogan on the biggest billboard, when it’s residing in Nowhere, Alaska, Sony-land.
Fortunately, they did realize their missteps earlier in the year, and vowed to focus more on getting gamers to use the service first. Right now, though, the sterile walls, the sterile ads, and the sterile experience is in sore need of, uh…
Some natural personality.