MTV: Sony Developer Improves My View Of PS3 'Home'

October 7th, 2008, 21:47 Posted By: wraggster

Jack Buser, director of the PlayStation 3 virtual world "Home" project gave me a private demo of the service in midtown Manhattan last week. He was trying to impress me with "Home," which launches free to every PS3 owner this fall.

Buser was going to have to work hard.
I'm the guy who, following an unsupervised 10-minute session with the service, wrote the following about Home for Kotaku back in June:
"Home is clearly still a work in progress, functioning not that differently from what you heard about more than a year ago. Whatever it needs to make it a hit, I don't think it's in there -- yet."

My impression has been changed. What I hadn't seen or had explained to me when I entered "Home" on my own those few months ago, was the function and helpfulness of the community. "Home" will be pointless if no one's in it, if its central plazas are empty. Buser said they won't even launch "Home" -- an event scheduled for this fall -- until they meet their goal to "have a kind of community to show people around." The idea is it's all social. You go to an area of "Uncharted" to find out what people there think of the game or to ask for a hint. Yes, some of us would go to NeoGAF or Metacritic or GameFAQs for that kind of stuff. But perhaps the average PS3 owner wouldn't. For them, perhaps "Home" is the answer to questions they barely knew they had: Where do they go to meet people just like them?

I could see Buser's point about how socially empowering "Home" may be, even if his demonstration barely budged my sense that it will be meaningful "Home" will be for a PS3 user like myself. For a gamer like me who already has ways to talk to other people about games, "Home" still doesn't seem terribly useful. For all the gamers who haven't found a way to connect to people just like them and would like a comfortable way to do so, "Home" may suit them fine.

http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/...w-of-ps3-home/

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