Signal to Noise

I finally got around to keying in the beta test activation code for Home, Sony’s new virtual world system for the Playstation 3. The initial download was around 80 GB, and Home requires an additional 3 GB allocation on the PS3′s hard disk.

Right off the bat, the similarities in mechanics to Second Life are greater than the differences.  Of course, Sony’s graphics are superior, with the virtual world having less jaggies and pixelation than Second Life.  As far as I can tell, you can’t create or craft virtual items in Home the way you can in Second Life, but that could change as this is merely a beta.  Item creation inevitably leads to virtual perversion, so time will tell.  Remember that Second Life “rape” case?

My girlfriend hooked up a USB keyboard, which worked as expected. The chat interface, without a keyboard, is the same on-screen keyboard seen in many PS3 titles, and is too frustrating to bother with.  If chat is your thing, a USB keyboard (we borrowed one from our iMac) is a must.

We created two characters to try out. One that looks like me-skinny, pale and white–and one that looks like her–skinny, pale, white, and cute.  It is remarkably easier to get your avatar to look more like your real-life self that it is with, say, a Mii on Nintendo’s Mii Channel.  Of course, Miis are supposed to be caricatures, and I don’t suspect Nintendo has a Wii social network up their sleeves.

Walking into Home’s first main area, a town square, the female avatar was immediately inundated with chat requests and “really close” dancing by the other (male) beta testers. There were hundreds of male avatars running around, but I only counted three females including my girlfriend.  So, not exactly chick-friendly.  I’m guessing that the PS3 and XBox have far fewer female users than the Wii, since the dominant offerings for the Sony and Microsoft systems are shooters, Madden, and racing games.

There are some neat things in Home, despite its freshman appearance.  Though the stores in Home’s virtual shopping mall were “unavailable”, there was a giant-screen in the town square running a game trailer for Far Cry 2–a shooter, imagine that.  Also, there is a rather cool bowling alley where you can play arcade games that look like old-school standup machines. Pool tables (like the one shown at right) and bowling lanes provide real value-add gaming experiences, so that’s cool.   A poker room would be even cooler, but Sony apparently hasn’t licensed a fast-enough hand evaluator to get poker running in the beta.

Some of the participants were chatting about a version of Home for the PSP, but it boggles the mind. Why anybody would walk around a virtual world on a 3-inch screen when they can just walk around the real world is beyond me.  In a way, the same argument exists for the full-on PS3 version of Home. I guess it’s the same issue I’ve had with all these virtual world chat / emote / fantasy environments like World of Warcraft and Second Life. Perhaps that’s why Google canned their virtual world project. Somebody at Google must’ve had the bright idea — hey, what’s so bad about wandering around the REAL world, anyway?

It seems that there are a lot of unfinished ideas in Home: entrypoints into other games, participant contests, and so on.  The things that do work (which surprised me) are buddy call (where you can call buddies from your list like a telephone), open-area voice chat, and the virtual games.  Everything else more or less reminds be of stuff we’ve already seen a thousand times, whether it be Sims Online or the Mii Channel. Here’s hoping Sony can crack this nut.  They’ve made it useable.  Now it’s time to make it USEFUL.