Real Talk

Hello world! I need to have a word with you about Playstation Home.

But before we start, come back through time with me, to the end of 2008. Home was put into Open Beta. Remember that despite being talked up constantly throughout the development as a bridge between games, it took longer to load than any other full-price game on the market, including over a minute of black screen that would quite rightly make most users think their console had exploded? Remember how your choice of character defaults (still available!) looked like a collection of police mugshots from the breakup of an illegal farmhouse rave in 1992, after a terrible accident tipped a container of corrosive acid over the revellers? Remember how nearly everything in Home was a placeholder for things that weren't there yet, despite three years of development?

Combine these facts with a major deviation from the way Sony normally operates with in-house stuff (Motto: "Polish everything to a shine before release and it's harder to spot a turd") and you cannot come to any other conclusion than Home was an aborted mashup of different people pulling for different things, and after three years was put out to pasture, presumably hoping for a quiet death a year down the line. Which is fine! These things happen. Not every project works out.

Then something amazing happened. Something that you were all involved in! People starting buying stuff. Lots of stuff. Despite it not really doing anything, despite the full selection amounting to a few painfully Lifestyle outfits to slip onto a mannequin with weirdly distorted facial features (to avoid the licensing issues that come with users being able to create an avatar that looks like anyone who exists in real life), people started eating it for breakfast. Rather than greeting this development with joy, the way Home has developed since gives you the feeling there was mainly confusion at Sony HQ, because nobody could figure out why the hell it was happening.



And yet, money is money. So Sony looked at their outfits spreadsheet and tried to figure out what to do next. This is where you come in. Or, tragically, in the case of the US (and now EU) region, don't. There is no more privileged situation for a consumer (that's you!) than to have a company want your money and not quite know how to get it. You can make them do anything. They will roll on the floor, they will jump through hoops for you, anything, as long as every month that spreadsheet shows more money coming in. You see, your money is a powerful form of control and communication. Use it wisely and you can change things in your favour. But use it poorly or without thought, and the only message that will get through is THEY WILL GIVE MORE IF WE LET THEM.

So let's say we're now in 2010, and Home is still raking in a steady, inexplicable stream of cash, and they're experimenting, and trying all sorts of new ways to make their numbers go up. Devs start asking the users what they want to see, which could charitably be seen as half of a desire to please their base, and half genuinely having no idea where to go next with Home. In Japan, Home's audience is vocal, and makes it clear exactly what they want. They want community, they want events, and they want region-specific content. Less commercialism, more things they may actually interest them as a group. Things that give their world a sense of place and character. Because of the aforementioned corporate desperation, they get exactly what they want, because they'll get whatever they ask for as a community, as long as the money keeps flowing.



Now look at what has happened in the US. Someone got greedy, as they're always going to do, and dipped a gold-plated toe in the water to check the temperature. Positive result. Next an entire leg goes in, and much like getting in a bath with a temperature that is just right, or like a dog that has no self control, or like a businessman that will happily depersonalise, cut up and sell the place you visit for small change if you let him, they can't stop themselves. They've got the taste. You gave them the taste. You waved the green flag made from notes and effectively said "Hey business guy, good work! I don't want to visit a place with heart or soul, or people making objects and spaces that mean anything to anyone, I want you to construct a fictional replica of the capitalist model so that a range of companies start pumping out generic catch-all content aimed at what they think other people would like!"

It's not really your fault, though. It's just how things go. When Second Life gave people nothing more than a shaky physics engine and some polygons to create the world of their dreams, they probably didn't expect that nearly ten years later drawing upon the infinite well of human creativity would have resulted in an endless strip mall full of bondage gear and animal masks. Just as Sony probably didn't realise that the idea of persistent rewards that people 'keep' for as long as Home lives would end up with people spending hours of their day chasing crude marketing trinkets for products they wouldn't look twice at otherwise, trinkets that will sit in their database of crud collecting dust after 'winning' them.



You can probably work out that this post is a direct response to the latest ante-up of bad taste in Home, the X7 space.

It is not so much against the creators of it, as against the people who allowed it to happen in the first place. A lot of you are on here, which is why this is being posted here. Is a virtual strip club full of pretend diamonds really the kind of thing that appeals to you, or just a nasty example of what happens when a bunch of otherwise well-meaning thirtysomething white guys are told to make something that is exclusive and VIP so people will spend more money, and all they can think of is a rap video? Does this not embarass you, or make you feel like something has gone very wrong somewhere? Do any of you really believe in the concept of EXCLUSIVE VIP EXCLUSIVITY amounting to sitting in a sparkly room inaccessible to most, in a downloadable toy, for a games console? If you don't (and I really hope you don't, deep down, because I can assure you the developers don't), show them. Don't sit on the fence or respond with vague ambivalence, because your opinions really do matter.

Start thinking about how to make Home a place where you can be proud to show people a reward from back at the start rather than a universally dismissed money sink for bored people who are more susceptible to reward structures than the average person. When things seem half-baked or thrown out lazily, they probably are. Don't give everything a pass. Criticise constructively. Make it clear what you don't like, but also what you want improved. Home seems to be reaching a critical point where the undercurrent of potential that was always bubbling under the surface will be lost forever to tasteless pandering. The maintainers of this site are especially important, because they control a large chunk of Home's popular opinion right here. YPSH needs to take responsibility for putting occasional sticks up arses, rather than universal praise to anyone looking to make a dollar from this platform. Give Sony reason to fear the response of this site should they try to (perhaps literally) pass off muck as gold.

--- IF YOU CAN'T BE BOTHERED READING THINGS BECAUSE YOU ARE TOO BUSY JUMPING THROUGH HOOPS TO GET A LIMITED EDITION CRISS ANGEL COFFIN COUCH, START HERE ---

If you slap a dog on the nose next time he brings you a dead bird, he might just learn to not do it any more.

 

So it's not a bad place, yet you immediately describe why it's a bad place afterwards. You know it, I know it, the cynics producing it know it. Everyone seems to be in on the ridiculous facade of the whole thing, but there is also this weird level of "Well someone must want it" resignation where the users seem convinced that is just how things are and nothing can be done about it. This is my point. Things can be done.

The thread isn't even about this new space. There have been others, there will be more. It's the ambivalent acceptance of every new pile of dung that's shovelled onto the plates of people who use Home. Demand better. If you want a relevant example, Granzella bust their asses to replicate Irem in Japan and bring out a wave of interesting, unique spaces in an attempt to build a community of spaces as diverse as Irem had. Item pricing aside (which can be forgiven up to a point considering they are a new company with no alternate income stream unlike Irem), the spaces are packed with free, unbranded rewards, more advanced games and content than any of the other regions have seen to date, and collaborations with other companies to make the spaces feel more seamless and connected.

Japan's response was to chew Granzella out for producing spaces with bugs in, prompting a public apology and extensive work done to fix it.

I'm not saying whether that was the right or wrong response, but it got results, and will clearly make other developers raise their game if they want to avoid the same level of scrutiny. Can you even imagine something as impressive and memorable (albeit totally let down by the engine) as Irem's one day April Fool's pretend MMORPG happening in any region other than Japan. It's not even a possibility while people sit on their hands and let lazy developers off the hook with their cash.

 

Do you really think the money you spend on overpriced, underdeveloped 'prestige' items is somehow funnelled back into making higher quality content for everyone? Or do you think that maybe you're just encouraging them to put out less quality at higher cost after you have so graciously demonstrated to them that they can earn more for less by exploiting the people who have a skewed money to sense ratio.

Oh, and don't kid yourself, you're not buying it for 'the devs', you're buying it for yourself, because it makes you feel good. And that is probably about as far as you've ever taken that train of thought.

 

Yoshikawa. I noticed that before you added the defensive rant to the second half of your post, it was entirely just you posting yet another thinly veiled, out of context brag about how much you've spent in Home, in a thread about the unacknowledged negative effects of people who do that. I was really hoping it was an attempt at sarcasm, but your edit shot that theory down. Oops.

I get the impression that you're too far gone to bother with anyway, but at least ask yourself why, despite vocally spending all that money, you still only ever seem to be 'happy' with material gains (and even then not for long), and never really engage with the human, community-led side of Home to the same extent. "My money my business" is only a valid justification for as long as your 'business' doesn't negatively impact the rest of the community. Just as you are free to spend ridiculous amounts of money with no other justification than "because I can", others are free to judge your character on the basis of that and other actions.

By the way, if you want to talk about business, the people who design the real deluxe money sinks on Facebook call the rare people who spend exorbitant amounts in trashy micropayment-based games 'white whales'. Did you know that statistically you are most likely to be a middle-aged female? I'd tell you more but they haven't analysed your lifestyle much beyond how much you spend, because they don't care about why you do it. Just that you keep doing it.

Here is to more well-balanced and constructive good times in Playstation Home!

 

Well, I know what you've thought for the last few posts, and it's right here: http://bit.ly/6GkrO

You want to revel in the out of context, societally conditioned pleasure of giving out Money and getting a Thing, but you don't want to do potentially difficult, adult things like exercising quality control or actually thinking about what you are buying.

You want to feel like you are doing something positive and supporting the development of Home, but do so by validating every money-spinning experiment they try, no matter how cynical.

You want to be exclusive, and feel special, but don't understand that the real way to that is through community and communication rather than a bunch of credit card transactions and a watered down strip club.

Finally, you want to reconcile your self-indulgent spending, and feel like you made the right choice. Of course you do. It's human nature to distort reality to fit with our circumstances. Without that process, we'd all go mad, and nobody would ever disagree. But you don't get to play the altruism card like the things you're doing are helping keep Home alive, because that is a lie to yourself, and a lie to anyone who reads it and takes it as justification for their own weakness.

 

I'm not going to deny being deliberately abrasive to ruffle feathers, but I feel like this issue is hitting a bit of a make or break situation now that the EU region has effectively been rolled into the US. Without some kind of shift in user base perception soon, that clear potential we all saw at the start may be lost for good. While I agree the big independents are currently putting out some decent (if curiously generic) output, their business model is still mainly focused on pumping out weekly batches of barely interactive objects to decorate Home's rapidly aging engine. It, and they, can do better than that.