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Just for a moment forget the PS3 as a costly machine and concentrate on the new Home service. Sony’s disclosed today their secret project: an interactive virtual environment for players to interact, socialize, plan their online gaming session, have fun, play simple, casual games and show their achievements in games in form of trophies to place in their homes or to wear. The service has also several mundane gathering points like a movie theater (where you can watch real movies), a stadium, discos and other loitering areas, like a solarium. Many compared it to Second Life, even if the Sony’s virtual urban entertainment area is only a next-gen avatar-based chat, with far less interactivity than the Linden Lab’s virtual sandbox. Highly influenced by the Phantasy Star hubs that made multi-player PS2 popular, Home melds a next-gen Mii Channel with a Metaverse philosophy to your average multi-player gaming social platform. And the strange thing is that works. Really.

The idea to create a real, MMOG-like, interactive community for online players is very nice, it moves the stake a bit further from creating the same and dull contact list\online added services duo that, frankly, it’s just arriving on our western-limited reality but has already saturated and bored the relevant part for a true global online gaming market: the Asian continent. If you ask me, one of the reason X360 was largely ignored in Asian countries is its inability to give something new to Asian players. They have plenty of massively multi-player generic games, that are far better than the costly single player\limited multi-player generic games the X360 sports in its inflated catalog. They, of course, also have very good online games and they have online communities better geared and more developed than your average Live service. They can buy Ragnarok Online stuff with their mobile phone while at work, they can organize a raid from a Web 2.0 community portal and use their community membership card to get discounts and free entrances on shops and amusements, they can also use virtual credits to pay bills, buy real stuff or cover phone calls costs. They have convergent, community centric gaming services, we just have online gaming and publishing constraints to exploits new ideas with unneeded and often too convoluted digital delivery services. Sony, as an Asian company, knew it and tried to enter the fray with a better understanding on what “next-gen online gaming” means.

Home is the next step in the evolution of social\gaming community hybrids. Don’t just give the tools, give the tools as a Metaverse by itself, make the players\consumers have their own avatars their own virtual place on their community of choice, give them a home, make them interact directly with each other, make them feel others more real. From a gaming enthusiast standpoint it is more interesting and fun collecting trophies items reaching objectives in games than showing a sterile number proving my ability (or persistence) in gaming. If my avatar could wear the Cloud sword from Final Fantasy VII, anyone will recognize me immediately as the guy that finished Final Fantasy VII. Gaining simply 100 points for the same effort, hasn’t the same impact on others, from their perspective, I would have collecting them restarting continuously a game to reach the 1000 gaming session achievement, as many Live score wores actually do, instead of actually playing anything. The first option gives me something tangible and distinctive to show to other people, something to be proud of, something that I can reuse outside the game, it adds something to me. The idea of achievements Sony had was simply great.

It’s not old news that Microsoft has difficulties to make achievement points mean something for their players. An amorphous number doesn’t distinguish a player from another. Points are are exploitable, uninformative and boring: if people are defined by a shallow number, there’s no mean for players to know what a player really did to have a certain standing. Many players will eventually feel cheated by the system (that’s why is happening on Live right now). Microsoft’s initial aim to make Achievement Points useful to buy Live Arcade games or to win prizes was an ill conceived idea, that’s why it is far from becoming real. Virtual prizes that doesn’t add anything tangible aside bragging rights and fun things to do in the Metaverse are, mabe, a better option. If people exploits a game to obtain a funny soap bubble pistol, let’s them do it: people will eventually know that the bubble pistol was really easy to achieve and it’s relevance among players will decline. If you plan to give them a reward of 100$ credit bonus you may be in serious trouble, especially if your control in the scoring system is so badly designed that the next Barbie Horse Adventure can let players earn that amount in less than two days…

The true meaning of achievement: personal satisfaction, nothing more, just like the badges in Battlefield games. In addition, trophy items are an important marketing tool for game developers: since people will be carrying or owning something related to your game, they will actually see how many gamers reached that goal and played that particular title, giving it a status-quo inside the community, something that other eventually want. It’s the Pokémon effect, a feature that will work because gamers are often very dedicated collectors.

Granted, you won’t be using Home so much and some added features aside gaming are a bit dubious. I mean, the ability to e-Shop for real goods or the capability of seeing movies in a virtual movie tether seem like the usual Sony’s way to trap people in their own closed market campaign made of DRM and proprietary formats. I’m a firm believer that consoles seen as computer or media center replacements are a bad idea. By today standard, when most of the console-owning people already have a PC (and most likely a recent laptop, the PC of choice for many casual users), that can do almost anything, the idea to compel them to replace a true PC with a console is a bit funny, since the user doesn’t gain anything on browsing the web or watching films with a more limited and cumbersome user interface. Just concentrate on getting people playing on your console!

Still, the Home best idea remains to replace the classic pre-game chatroom with something more next gen, than a blatant copy of Gamespy Arcade (that is more than 10 years old, so much for your next gen online gaming). Giving players a virtual place to own in the community is more inventive than letting them own a mail address and a blog… It is more inventive and complete than the Nintendo’s Mii Channel: even considering the announced Mii upgrades (the ability of interact with other’s avatars and to enter contests), it can’t simply stand the whole Home offer at this point.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Game Design, Games Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.