Bindings and Ties: Community Building Within Home
by Gideon, HSM team writer
Home is a unique platform for consoles that has disappointed, surprised, enabled, captivated, inspired and recently abandoned its users. In a not too surprising development, many of those users have remained active within their respective Home communities without the environment of Home itself. There are a myriad of sites tucked away in the corners of the internet where people gather to seek the same social fulfillment that they have found in Home for the past two years or so.
This interconnection is proof of what many HSM articles and countless discussions have attested in the past – this community is real, and it’s here to stay.
Coupled with Home, services such as HSM have synergistically created the community that began with individual users visiting and experiencing Home. The simple fact that many Home groups have thrived through the PSN outage, without access to Home, is a testament to the development of those communities. Home, once thought to be the foundation of these communities, has been revealed to be their launching platform. Home communities exist independently of and are supported by Home, if only in part.
Home – in its current state – is not an adequate social networking medium. Yes, the PSN has a friend list and the ability to send messages to those who are allowed to be on it, but that alone does not build a community. Only when multiple people interact with one another and are brought together by common interests and ideals does a community begin to flourish.
The concept of Home is one of a hub in which gamers can meet and share their love of gaming, find like-minded gamers and enhance their gaming experience. A do-it-yourself game matching service, if you will. While this is still one of the primary features of Home, it is not a feature that builds communities. Although there is a fully functional game launching and game invite function, it completely lacks the ability to search Home-wide for other users who want to play the game. This limits the search to the immediate vicinity in the Home virtual world. Even finding someone to play a game within the specific space involves running around to see which users are currently also wanting to play the game. This, more often than not, is akin to panning for gold in a dry riverbed.
This practice in real world spatial constriction seems counterproductive. Home is a setting which should have no real-world constraints. This limits the hopeful game player’s ability to find other Home users who are looking to play their current game of choice, and will inevitably lead to annoyances such as random game invites.
Have you ever been here? Me neither. Just kidding!
There is a dedicated space to find other like-minded wannabe players, but the Gamer’s Lounge has little added functionality that makes it more useful than the other public spaces a user can visit. A weekly schedule of game recommendations means that a user may be able to visit the Gamers Lounge on any specific day and enjoy a slightly increased chance of finding other gamers who also want to play the game of the day. It’s not much, but it’s something.
While Home was always meant to create a sense of community and belonging for its users, the lack of more advanced functions, such as a game launching search function, make the use of Home – as a platform for community – cumbersome at best.
Even a socially focused feature like Home Clubs become tedious if it is used for any sort of advanced social connection. Sending private message to a club roster involves a hybrid multistep process where one must first check the club roster, then navigate to their XMB to send a message to the people on the roster. This can become irritating since you can only send twelve private messages at a time and the club admin may not remember all the names of the club members. They better have a pen and paper ready to jot down the names of the club members before they begin.
So much potential!
This sort of tedium could be remedied with a simple function built into the bulletin board of the clubhouse that gives the admin the option to send their bulletin board post out to all members of a club as a private message. As it stands now, the clubhouse is little more than a semi-publically accessible private space. It’s this sort of watered down functionality that creates, but does not support a fully functional and socially viable community.
When individuals who meet in Home begin to get to know one another and form a community, the tools we are given in Home are quickly replaced with external websites, social networking sites, instant messengers, forums and blogs. These external tools allow the community’s members to express themselves and strengthen that which connects them, their connection to Home, and to each other.
However, the one thing that connects these users remains to be the cornerstone for most of the user communities, even in its absence.
Even the most successful Home communities have been Home-centric in their focus. Most user websites for groups that have formed in Home base their content on Home and Home activities to establish and nurture their communities. These groups write articles and blog posts about Home, participate in forums to discuss Home, hold meetings in and out of Home to plan their Home activities, make videos within Home to share outside of Home, and gather within Home and dance the night away as a community. This Home focus is understandable, since Home is the medium with which these communities were formed and is the one obvious factor that everyone has in common. This observation leads to the question: are there communities that use Home as a tool and not as a framework?
Do you enjoy Ostriches?
It’s not usual to find a community that uses the Home service to enhance and enrich their own activities. This may be because these sorts of communities may not seek out additional members and only utilize Home on a limited basis. Maybe it’s because, many times, it’s difficult to actually find members of the community who are interested in another hobby or pastime that doesn’t involve Home or gaming. What if you are an artist, a kitten lover, a movie buff, a manga aficionado, an ostrich farmer, or a poet who wishes to use Home to seek out others with similar interests? What options do you have within Home?You can randomly walk around and ask “Excuse me, do you enjoy giant land foul husbandry?” but then, you’ll likely be quickly ignored.You can join a large established group, hoping someone else in that group is also the next Van Gogh.
That’s about it. You can search for clubs by name but there is not a system that enables clubs to actively recruit in Home. There is no place for a new Home user to go to, within Home, to see if there are other users that also enjoy the latest fan translations of Korean manga, also known as “manhwa.”
Such a lack of connection makes Home a daunting place for new and old users alike. A Home community which has their focus on things that do not directly involve Home is likely to sprout from existing friend lists and club rosters. There is no efficient method to recruit for clubs other than to blindly invite individuals and hope for the best.
One could argue that the cumbersome nature of Home community building is a way to ensure the communities that thrive have had their very own trial by fire. After all, there are only a handful of communities that are truly active and these have been the result of many hours, months – and is some cases, years – of dedicated effort. If it were easy to support a Home community everyone and their brother’s cousin would have their own wannabe society. As many of us know, there have been Home communities that have risen and fallen since the service went open beta.
Home provided the roots for our communities.
Can a community be successful within Home without having their focus squarely on Home activities? Sure. Can a Home community be successful without utilizing outside connection sources? That’s unlikely. In the end, each community is charged with discovering what they want to accomplish within Home and deciding which tools they need to use to achieve their goals.
Moving forward, it’s clear that many of the communities that have been established within Home are here to stay, sans Home or not. They have become entities independent of Home and will continue their activities outside of Home in any way they can. It is up to the individuals of the community to enable themselves to strengthen what has already been established. When Home comes back up, the members of these communities will simply log back onto Home and continue what they were doing before.
May 13th, 2011 by Gideon | 4 comments
Gideon is a team writer for HomeStation Magazine and likes cheese in all its forms. Whether it be block, slice, cream, wheel, log, string or aerosol, Gideon cant resist the pungent bitter taste of good cheese. Heck, he'll even take mediocre cheese, as long as its slapped between two pieces of whole wheat bread with a little bit of mustard.
great article and very true
I hope the Home developers read this one, post it on their bulletin boards and send it around the office as email. There are so many things that could be done to improve social functionality, such as the brilliantly simple idea of sending a club bulletin-board post as a PM to all club members. (Bravo!)
Some changes will require deep mods to the PS3 operating system: real email, for instance, which can be routed to and from the Internet. A much larger Friend List, with the option of assigning friends to groups, and addressing mail to all members of a group. A text-editing system, with the ability to capture the Home chat log to a file, edit the file later, and attach it to a note or copy it to a USB drive.
Other changes will require updates of the Home core: the ability to own more than one clubhouse, and to belong to more than five clubs. (This is a constant headache for club-active Home users.) As you mentioned, there should be a more efficient way to find gaming partners in Home — that’s what the platform was built for, or so they tell us. Visibility and follow-ability should be made more granular. Constant emotional drama is one of Home’s native features, and sometimes you just don’t want someone to be able to come to you, without actually unfriending or blocking them.
It would be interesting if Home could build hooks into external services such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. I’m not sure what this would look like, but it could really add value to the social dimension of Home. There are hints of this in the Twitter feed in Sodium Hub, but a lot more could be done, especially if Sony can solve the legal issues of streaming YouTube videos into private spaces and clubhouses.
Oh, and picture frames in clubhouses, please. I know I sound like a broken record on this one. But it’s one of my crusades: bigger and better art shows!
Thanks for posting this, Gideon. I’ll see you in Home soon, I hope.
Excellent read Gideon. I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment of the situation we find ourselves in right now. I created my website during this outage for the express reasons you detailed, the ability for my members to stay in contact, even if it is only to leave messages for each other. I love the idea of the bulletin board. I have had to send numerous messages since my club started and it would surely simplify it. I actually did what you spoke of and wrote down each persons name in each clubhouse so I could send those messages out to the right ones. You made several great points in this one, good job.
Indeed. Better clubhouse functionality and features need to be created and implemented, no doubt. We have been asking this since the beginning. But it must go beyond that. To the level of community. Home clubhouses and their functionality are less than lacking.
Homelings began in the closed Home beta. It was not long after Home opened to the public that our external pilot community was developed. This was a momentously significant and pivotal point in Homeling history.
The nature of the Collective demanded more from a website than what homelings.com originally had to offer. Ning seemed to be able to provide that “community” feel and some decent functionality, and so we migrated to fluidicspace.ning.com. It was the website, playstationhometoday.com that aided in that decision. At the time Ning sites were free of charge, and remained so for a time. We will soon be going on our 2nd year paying for Ning if we decide to stay there (which we likely will for another year), but Homelings have outgrown Ning, and indeed the restraints of conventional websites. We require more creative freedom.
Hopefully, the next year will see the birth of a unique, fully customizable, and interactive Homeling community. An interweb base with features and functionality that will more than fulfill Homeling requirements, both known and unknown. It will not only be Home-positive and promotional, but Homeling Friend accessible to a great degree. It will also be more “visitor friendly” for the curious.
The next wave of Homeling Collective evolution will be like nothing the Home community at large has witnessed, and nothing Homelings have experienced.
We are the product of imagination and ingenuity, and are therefore, without limitation.