Coping With Home Deprivation Syndrome
by Terra_Cide, HSM guest contributor
I have a confession to make. The only real reason a PS3 ever came into my home was because of (at that time) the upcoming release of Final Fantasy XIII. I am a self-professed addict of the series, and while I would have happily waited until a month or so before its release date to buy a console to play it on, an offer came along that was just too good to pass by.
To cut a long story short, in March of 2009, I was able to obtain a Japanese PS3 (nifty little factoid: JDM PS3s use the “O” button the same way we use the “X”) that came with the full, uncut version of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children on BluRay. Now, I don’t care what side of the Sephiroth/Cloud debate you’re on, but the sight of one of the most famous villains in video game history turning his foe into a piece of Swiss cheese in full 1080p glory is a sight so full of win, I lack the vocabulary to give it justice. On top of that, it also came with a demo copy of Final Fantasy XIII.
I’ll repeat that again. A demo of Final Fantasy XIII.
This means I was playing the game nearly a full year before it hit the North American market. Cue excited fangirl squealing in three, two, one…
But while the actual release was still some ways off, I had time to kill, and since none of the games for the PS3 at that time appealed to me enough to part with any money (outside of Burnout: Paradise City and Ninja Gaiden Σ2, but that’s another story for another time), I felt it was a waste to just let the console gather dust while waiting for Square Enix to give me what I really wanted.
Enter this little thing called Home. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Being a stay-at-home mother to a toddler and living in a rather rural environment, you have no idea (or perhaps you do) what an incredible joy it was to have adult conversation during the day while my child napped. To discuss something beyond developmental milestones, children’s television, sleeping habits, or trying to rationalize with an almost two-year-old as to why exactly he cannot have my coffee was a veritable godsend to my sanity.
Of course, I went through the whole “new” phase just like many of you – finding very few people willing to talk, the default clothing, and wondering why the hell is this moron running up to me, dancing and typing in a language only someone well-versed in ancient Cuneiform could understand. But with patience, observation of Home society at-large, and finding just the right atmosphere where you know you’re going to find good conversation, it wasn’t long before my friends list started to load up.
My first seven months in Home were truly a golden period. No, there weren’t that many games. Yes, the number of personal spaces and wardrobe options were absurdly low in comparison to today. But from ridiculous “cawfee tawlks” whilst dancing on Sully’s bar at eight in the morning to hysterical live, on-mic karaoke parties (the songs of Journey being a perennial favorite) at someone’s Log Cabin private space that would last til three in the morning, I can’t think of a better camaraderie than what my friends and I shared.
It was the quality of the relationships, not the quantity of them, nor the spaces, not even Xi, that made the moments so memorable. I wanted to come back again and again. So I did, until it became as integral to my day to day life as my son’s bedtime routine.
Now with the upcoming core client update coming for Home, it’s caused me to recall the first time I experienced such an update – the infamous version 1.3 update. It’s been too long to remember the specifics, but the messages exchanged between my friends and I that day were along the following lines:
God, is it up yet? They said it would be up by now!
I still can’t log in! Urrgg! *nerd rage*
How long can this possibly take? I’ve been waiting all day!
Okay, who do I gotta **** at Sony to get Home back online? Because seriously, this is BS.
I can’t take it any more!
Must… Get… On… Home… Can’t take… Withdrawal… Gah..!
I’m in the fetal position on the floor, rocking back and forth, waiting for Home to come back on. Hold me.
Yeah. You get the idea.
This does raise an interesting question; just how does one cope when they are incapable of accessing their favorite slice of the virtual world? Not voluntarily cutting themselves off from Home, as I did when Final Fantasy XIII actually came out, or being suspended by Sony because you’ve behaved badly – which can be circumvented by creating another account. Not that I’m condoning such an act, but to ignore it is to ignore one hell of a huge elephant in the room. (You know exactly what I mean.) I’m talking about when – for whatever reason – you can’t get on Home due to forces beyond your control. Sometimes for a long time.
The editor requested my input on such a subject, as I am – for reasons too personal for public discussion – currently sans PS3 and subsequently Home-less, and have been so for a few months now. In order to approach this in a manner that everyone can relate to, and because I find it best to deal with such things by using a bit of dark, droll humor, I have chosen to use Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ seminal work, On Death and Dying, as a template for this piece. For those of you unfamiliar with her book, she categorizes the process of death into five stages: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. While not being Home is in no way near as devastating as someone’s – or your own – impending demise, it is a loss nonetheless.
Bear in mind, too, that everyone’s experience is different. There may be instances that some of these stages do not apply to you, or you experience them in a different order. Your mileage may vary.
Denial and Isolation
We’ve all been there at least once; we select to go on Home, and instead of getting to the loading page we’re used to, we get Error D5027 or C-931. Or the power goes out due to some catastrophe courtesy of Mother Nature. Or that most devastating of blows: your
The horror… The horror…
beloved PS3 gets the infamous Yellow Light of Death.
Oh no. No no no no.
Not today. Not now.
This can’t be happening.
It’s just temporary, right? It can’t last for too long, can it? Can it?
It can be fixed, right?
When faced with the rather abrupt change or end to something we hold dear, our subconscious mind tends to protect us from the resultant trauma by suspending our belief in reality. This can last for an indefinite period of time, depending on the individual’s coping strategies.
For that initial failure of logging onto Home the reaction is almost always universal – if it didn’t work the first time, it’ll most assuredly work the second time. We’ll blame it on our ISP or even the PlayStation Network for being overloaded/incompetent/slow. When there’s a power failure, we’ll believe it’s just a small matter and it will come back on in a minute or two (I lost power for three days straight last year – not exactly a minor thing.). The YLOD – while not as common an issue today with the slim model as it was with the older “fatboy” – is always a trigger to send us running to the computer in a desperate search for some other, less fatal PS3 malady that the console could have.
When an individual has any one – or a combination – of these misfortunes befall them, they invariably become the pariah in their circle of friends. This is never a deliberate, conscious decision on the friends’ part; it’s just that their main method of connection – Home – is now gone. Or you find that you yourself are withdrawing from you friends because of the loss. Sure, you may use other means of communication – the Sony forums, AlphaZone4, PlayStation Home Today, a Facebook page for your character – but it just isn’t the same, and the differences may be irrevocable to such a degree that you notice your friend list being rather abbreviated by the time you do get back on. If, that is, you do get back on at all.
Anger
This is by far the most obvious stage. It’s easily rationalized and justified in the instance where there is complete failure of the PS3, too. After all, you’ve just spent in the neighborhood of $300 (not including wardrobe/virtual real estate/games), and to no longer derive pleasure from that ROI is means for anyone to feel a bit angry.
However, the actions we take are not always so logical and are often the results of anger that is displaced. In periods of high emotion, human beings revert to the more primitive parts of the brain; so the higher the emotion, the lower the intelligence. And so we tend to lash out needlessly – at the poor customer service agent at Sony who is unlucky enough to take our call, at the family member/acquaintance who is empathetic about the loss, but views Home as “just a game” and cannot understand its significance, at the imaginary Internet gods – and whatever target we set our sights to vent our frustrations out on, it will be struck.
We envy our friends who haven’t had these experiences – we resent them; the inevitable question, “why me?” will pop up. No longer are we able to suspend the reality that things are okay and normal service will resume. However, at the same time, we don’t want to be forgotten by our Home peers, or thought less of by them because we can no longer spend the same amount of time we used to enjoy there. We don’t want to be left behind, as it were.
For me, being deprived of the ability that Home gave me to escape the goings-on of my real life for a moment, to unwind, to defuse myself at a time when I needed it the most – that would spark my anger.
Bargaining
What would you do for a Klondike bar? Or rather, what would you do if you had potential access to a PS3 – and Home – via a third party? Would that individual be getting just a bit more of your time and attention if it meant you could be getting access to Home? If the person is a family member, you may find yourself being more inclined to do things for that person in trade for time using their PS3. I know of a person who claimed to have done all the essays for his younger brother’s college applications in exchange for using his PS3 while his own was being refurbished from it’s own episode of YLOD.
Good, bad or ugly, human beings generally do things that serve themselves. “If I do what they want, then maybe I’ll get to do what I want” is a concept that even my three-year-old gets. That boy will not pick up his cars or blocks to save his life, but give him the promise of being rewarded with chocolate milk, and he’ll even mop the kitchen floor as an added bonus.
Sure, you may feel a bit of remorse for your actions, but even the most guilt-ridden of us will momentarily forget that feeling the instant we see the loading page from Home light up the television screen. That doesn’t mean it will go away completely; if anything, it will only come back a bit worse each time.
Depression
For myself, I found that in my personal experience with Home withdrawal, I switched this step and the anger step as far as the order in which I experienced them.
Sad kitteh is… Sad.
This is the step where no amount of consoling words will suffice. If anything, they will have the exact opposite effect upon the person they are directed towards. While initially, the encouragements from friends that they will eventually return to Home are a source of comfort, they have a limited shelf life. The perpetuation of this supposed “comfort” has actually less to do with the person experiencing the loss and more to do with the consoling person’s intolerance towards dealing with another person’s negative emotions. It comes off as patronizing, even if the words are genuine and the intentions are good, because the listener knows that if the situation was reversed, they wouldn’t want to hear the “cheer up” song and dance forever either. After all, it’s rather hard to fight the obvious.
What the person in this phase of Home deprivation wants the most is to be heard. They want to express their grief over what they have lost – the community, the friendships, the Home experience as a whole. And they want to do it without being told – in essence – that it isn’t so bad. As counter-intuitive as it might sound to just listen instead of console and comfort, this is actually a healthy thing to do, that way they are content regardless of whether or not they do get another PS3 and return to their beloved circle of friends, and they are better prepared for the next stage. In this stage, silence truly is golden.
Acceptance
Congratulations. You’ve made your peace with the unknown. Whether or not you’ll ever get another PS3 (though the likelihood is quite high), keep all the friends that you had on your list, and know the same joy you had before disaster struck is now moot. You’ve accepted the fact that things happen beyond your control, and in fact can look back upon the time from when you lost your connection to Home to now and even laugh a bit at it. Maybe you can even laugh at yourself for the reactions it triggered. Perhaps you’ve even met other similarly afflicted former Home residents and have made new friends in this time. Maybe the remaining friends that have stuck with you have found you through mutual friends and you are now maintaining those relationships on a whole new level than you were before. Whatever the case may be, your life now is certainly a different place than where it was when all this began, and you can move on.
In Fight Club, the character Tyler Durden states, “It’s only after you’ve lost everything, that you’re free to do anything.” And as nihilistic as it sounds, it is so true. This may sound a bit like sacrilege, and may offend some of you, but at the end of it all, it’s just stuff. Stuff can be replaced. The Home as you knew it is now gone. Long live the new Home. And all the unforeseen adventures that will await you when you return.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go work on my vocal impersonation of Steve Perry.
March 11th, 2011 by Terra_Cide | 15 comments
Terra _Cide is the former Community Manager for Lockwood Publishing and Editor Emeritus for HomeStation Magazine.
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This is the 2nd PS3 that I have bought, since my 1st YLOD and i absolutely HATED being away from my friends on Home, I hated having to wait for my PS3 to be repaired and even when it WAS repaired (This is the fatboy model) it did the YLOD thing again :S
(Que, GRR, ROAR, stomp on the ground)
I ordered the slim model, and maybe this was paranoia that was driving me to do this, I went out and bought a FAN for it, I tried not to leave it for a long amount of time. I do play games but mostly multiplayers that i can drop in and out of.
I HATED that I had to redecorate all of my Personal spaces again. Some of my trophies and achievements were lost from my thousands of hours of playing.
I thought my PS3 worked similar like a PC, that it had a Heat Sync Cradle so that it didnt burn out from long usage? (I still don’t know if it has this feature)
My suggestions for the next Playstation is to have them built to LAST, have huge fans built into them to take the long punishing hours of play. (Especially when playing RPGs, you have no idea how big those games are. Or when exploring on HOME.)
I keep saying that this is the last gaming console I will ever buy. But I did say that when i owned the PS2..
I absolutely love this article. Who amongst us has not experienced the sheer OMGWTFBBQ mania of not being able to get into Home? Even when you *know* Home is about to get shut down for its weekly maintenance, you can’t help but be indignant when you get the Error D4512 Network Connection Lost screen.
One thing that both Joanna Dark and IrishSiren have done — and it’s a smart move — is write down or take photos of their avatar settings. This way, when something like a YLOD strikes (which, I agree with Cheeky, happens far too often), at least you can quickly rebuild your avatar on a new machine.
Granted, with cloud-saving becoming an option for Plus members, perhaps the future will bring less of this grief.
Um… None of you know that you can back up all your PS3’s save data to a USB flash drive that you can pick up at Wal-Mart for about $12? (She says in a rather shy, über-geek voice.)
That’s what I did… Mind you, I discovered this quite by accident; I looked at ports on the console where you charge your controllers, looked at my flash drive, and thought, “hmm… I wonder…” And there you have it. I found I can also charge my iPod there and play my music, too. It doesn’t come up in any discernible order, but since I at least love all my music that’s on it, I don’t particularly care.
(long pause)
Of course I knew that. Of course. What, you think I’m some Norsefail? Ha!
< -_-<
>-_->
::squealing tires in the vague direction of the nearest Wal-Mart::
Of course you know that, Norsefail, about the flash drive. You went to Wal-Mart to buy an iPod, right?
snicker :;
::laughs:: I’m the first to admit that I’m something of a luddite when it comes to technology. I stare at most of this stuff like an ape staring at the monolith at the beginning of “2001”.
Now, keep in mind that I’m not anti-technology by any means. I’m just one of the last products of the analog age. To me, the moment when Han Solo smacks the console on the Millennium Falcon with his fist in order to get it to work is something I completely empathize with.
As for an iPod…I just got one last year. I know, I know, we’re about to colonize Mars, and I *just* (sort of) figured out iTunes. God help us if they ever come out with a TARDIS.
hey norse, remember DOS??
XD
@Norse -- I’m only two years your senior, and if I can do it, you most certainly can too.
I also have only had my iPod for about a year, and iTunes still sets off my Voluntary Tourettes.
@DJ -- Funny you mention DOS (and yes, I remember it)… A former colleague of mine actually likened men to DOS, and you know, I kind of agree with his assessment.
I just use my terabyte external hard drive to hold all of my information on my PS3 and I could hold three more 250mb PS3s.
[more geek mode]If you’re of a handy with a screwdriver-type, and technically inclined, you can also just buy a 500mb harddrive (I think it’s Western Digital that makes the most compatible) and upgrade your PS3 yourself[/more geek mode]
… Not that I know anything about that, as that would void your warranty… >.> *whistles*
At this moment i am deleting and re-installing home thanks to my data getting corrupted.This happened about 2 min. after i arrived at motorstorm and stumbled upon a”fam”fight.Idk how they corrupted my data exactly but i’m positive 1 of these two”fams”was responsible,people were getting frozen and booted right and left.This isn’t the 1st or even 2nd time this has happened in a similiar situation,so i’m sure there is a way for user’s to corrupt other user’s data,intentionally or not.I for one would appreciate it if sony would fix that problem asap.I didn’t have back-up so i’ll be getting another make over but it’s been my experience that most everything else was saved on sony’s servers,i’m hoping that’s still the case.In this case i was merely a by-stander,i had friends on both sides of the room,and was just hoping to enjoy some oratorial jousting so i doubt that i was targeted but getting data corrupted on home is a long-standing problem and one that seems to be ignored by sony.I’m notoriously unsavvy in the area of computers so the reasons for our data not being auto. stored/saved may be known to many of you but to me this just seems like a needlessly cruel trick that sony chooses to ignore.
I feel that Fam’s on home should be dealt with in a quick manner once someone reports fam(gang) activity to Sony.
And what exactly constitutes “gang’ activity?
Greta article Terra as always. So far I have been lucky I guess. The longest I have been out of Home is a few days and those were by choice because I was out of town, as I am at this very moment. I do miss it when I am gone though. I love doing things with my club members and friends and also playing games with them online. I don’t know what I would do if something was wrong with my PS3, I have a warranty so it would get fixed, but I know I would probably have those withdrawals you have spoken of. I might even go buy another one so I would have a back up lol. Good read!
I love the article T. I am on the other side of the fence though with Home. I remember a time where I thought the same way about it and enjoyed the odd conversation with adults about random and trivial things. I just realized that Home wasn’t healthy for myself personally. I always hid the fact (still do) from my family and friends that I even went on there because I found it to humiliating to explain. Like where would I even start? I remember times when Home would go down for updates or the constant kicks because you entered your start menu in CP… Grrrrr. If that isn’t enough to send you into a tizzy I don’t know what is. But I then realized that I become distant from my real life and didn’t make enough time for a lot of other things i.e my RL friends, family etc… And the drama that always encompassed Home and it’s members was too much for me to take on in my own life. I think it’s a passing phase for most people. I knew and still know a great deal of people I use to communicate with on Home but we have all since moved on from those days. I find it easier to talk to someone with a voice rather then a text. I find it easier to turn off my ps3 when I am just leaving a voice chat or a game rather than trying to log of Home only to log on again 2 hours later 0_0 Home was a lovely place to sample for me and I met a great deal of friends from there but I am definitely I less stressed person without it.