14 DAY TRIAL // Home, the social service for the PlayStation 3 released late last year, is set to allow Sony to change the way people approach online gaming. The quality of interactions between people who do not know each other in real life is bound to increase from using Home.
Jack Buser, who works for Sony Computer Entertainment of America, stated at the Engage! Expo taking place in New York City that “Home is a really important strategic move for us at Sony. Early on, we saw a real need to bring the PS3 community together with a social network.” The main idea behind the service is to get back to the more intimate, communication-driven multiplayer sessions of the old day, when controllers, games and even consoles we're moved from one house to another for gaming sessions. Buser says that, in Home, you can get the same feeling by going to the Warhawk area, planning strategies and then entering the game.
Because online friendship is different from real life friendship, Home is also designed to blur the lines between the two. That's why the social service has areas where people (or, better put, their avatars) can play bowling, throw house parties or just hang out and talk. Buser says that “An avatar without a space is pointless. The space around the avatar actually says more about that person than an avatar in isolation can. People will go around Home, meet someone, and then say, ‘Hey, do you want to go back to my apartment?’ That's where you see the true engagement and that’s how people make friends”.
Or how stalkers are born, some would comment. Still, Home now has more than 5 million users, even though it is still in beta stage and a variety of companies have announced their intention of creating content specifically for it. Sony itself is planning to add more areas to Home, most of them related to the videogames that the PlayStation 3 is getting.