Computer Technology Made Simple

       I just spent a few hours last night checking out Sony’s latest feature for the gamer and social networker in all of us. I’m of course talking about the new Playstation Home open beta. While the virtual world is still in the beta version, it is an amazing leap forward for console gaming. It will only take you a few hours to explore the areas currently available in the beta version, however what is available is visually stunning. Some of the beautiful locations include: your harbor studio apartment, the central plaza, the mall, the movie theater, the bowling alley, and game spaces created for the games Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, and Farcry 2.

       The first thing you will do when you  log into Playstation Home is create your avatar, a digital representation of yourself. You can choose to make your avatar look as much like you as you can, or you can go for something totally different from how you really look. With options for gender, character presets, clothing, facial dimensions, and body dimensions there are many ways to customize your avatar. There may be some people who will look the same, but if you put a little bit of time and creativity into creating your avatar, you will have one that is certainly unique to you.

       In your apartment you can add new furniture, some of which you will start out with for free, with the option to purchase more at a store in the mall, move your furniture around, and change the paint scheme for your apartment. This allows for quite a bit of customization to really make your apartment your own. Then, you can enter the Central Plaza. Once there, you can interact with other Playstation Network members, play games, dance in the music area, or go to the mall, bowling alley or the movie theater. If you choose to enter the mall you will have the opportunity to buy new things for your apartment or other personal spaces, new clothes, or new personal spaces. Prices in the mall are fairly reasonable, most things are about .50 to a dollar, so you can easily spend about $5.00 and really have a lot of cool things to customize your personal space and your avatar. The most expensive thing I saw was the Summer Home Personal Space, which costs $5.00 US. That sounds like a lot for an intangible property that only exists as ones and zeros on a Sony server somewhere, but hey, when was the last time you got the chance to buy a house for $5.00? Especially one as nice as the Summer Home, it’s like a small mansion. If you have the money to spend, I’d recommend buying it. It’s certainly worth it. Although I suppose that depends on how much you intend to use Playstation Home.

       Now, let’s go visit the bowling alley. In the bowling alley you can obviously bowl, but you can also choose to play a game of pool, play some arcade games, or just hang out. A serious problem I’ve notice with Playstation Home is that it’s just overcrowded. In order to actually get to go bowling, play pool, or hop on one of the arcade game consoles, you will have to wait in real time for whoever beat you to it to finish their game, before you can start one of your own. There are about 5 alleys, 4 or 5 pool tables, and about the same amount of game consoles as well. So as overcrowded as Home is, it may or may not take you a while to actually get to partake in one of these activities.

       Once you’ve had your fill of games, or alternatively you are just fed up with waiting for a pool table to become available, then you can visit the movie theater. Inside you can sit in the theater and choose to view the screen in the usual third person view, or zoom in on the screen to make it full screen, allowing you to see it just as if you were watching tv or a movie. Sony plans to stream movie previews and games to the movie theater and in the future we may also see new movies being played in the theater. Wouldn’t that be an interesting turn of events? Rather than getting ready and meeting friends at the movie theater to see the newest movie, you just load up your Sony Wallet with money from your credit card, and meet your friends in the Central Plaza of Playstation Home. Then you all go to the movie together. You all can have your own snacks, popcorn, and drinks, and only have to pay the fee to get in to see the movie. Perhaps afterwards, you all go shopping together in the mall. There are a lot of possiblities for Playstation Home.

       By using your world map you can also choose to visit the game spaces for Uncharted: Drakes Fortune, and Farcry 2. I found Sulley’s Bar (Uncharted) to be far too overcrowded to really enjoy. And it was odd to read the description of the train statino from Farcry 2 as deserted, only to find it equally overcrowded. In the future we will likely see other games opening up their own game spaces to promote their games and allow their gamers to meet in locations from their favorite games.

       I’ve mentioned the overcrowding a lot in this article. I think the problem with overcrowding will become less of an issue as more game spaces are added, and other companies choose to make their own spaces as well. Right now there just aren’t many places to be, so the places that are there are understandably overcrowded. In the future we will likely see new developments that will give members new places to be, spreading everyone out a little bit more.

       One serious problem that I’ve seen that should be addressed by Sony is that any attractive female avatar will be absolutely swamped to males who only want to harass them. Cat calling and following them around. I tried to walk around the mall with a female friend of mine I met at the Farcry 2 train station. You would have thought that we were celebrities and they were the frikin’ paparazi. Every two steps we were ambushed by a bunch of male avatars cat calling my friend. My friend tried to tell them we were on a mission (we were shopping for our avatars) but this only lead them to begin asking questions about our mission as well. My friend got a kick out of when I told them to “beat it, clowns” but in the end trying to go out in public with a female avatar is pretty much impossible. I don’t see how women using Home can stand it. There is a feature to block players, as well as to file a complaint against other players who are harassing you. This is all accessible through the select button. Though from as widespread as this problem is, I would say that either Sony can’t process the complaints fast enough to act on them, they just aren’t offering harsh enough punishment for this type of harassment, or the select button is heavily underutilized. This is definately a problem that Sony must address to give it’s female consumers (and their friends) a quality experience from Playstation Home.

       Overall, I think Playstation Home is an amazing new feature that many people will enjoy. In my opinion it can only get better from here on out, as more places and features are added. It could indeed grow to become a powerful and very popular online community where friends meet up every day. Only time will tell.

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