“Home”sick
by MahmoudEm, HSM guest contributor
As a PlayStation Network member, I love and use PlayStation Home, the best social gaming platform I’ve played in my years living in this world.
This past month I have missed out on Home due to technical, cultural and vacation reasons.
I used to use Home on a weekly basis, chatting with acquaintances, but I’ve grown on Home more and more as the months passed. I want to share with you all a little story about my experience with Home.
My first experience with Home to me was okay; really, it wasn’t that bad. I remember the first week I got my Playstation 3 as a birthday gift. I can’t remember the date, but I decided to download PlayStation Home on a Wednesday night. After I downloaded Home I was welcomed with opened hands to the gracious “Harbour Studio.” After five minutes of fooling around and whatnot – arranging my furniture to my personal taste – I returned to my wardrobe.
Initially, I decided and attempted to try to give my avatar that “Tom Cruise” look, which was an immediate failure. So, I put on a grey sweater, blue jeans, and some comfortable white sneakers for my journey towards Central Plaza. I thought to myself, “Holy freakin shish-kabob,this place is amahzing with an H!”
I loved and yet couldn’t fathom how PlayStation created such a realistic area into a virtual world. I got a hold of how everything worked and set my pop up color. In my first month of PlayStation Home, I met so many wonderful friends that welcomed me with open arms, toured me around their personal spaces, gave me social advice, and most importantly made PlayStation Home one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in my life, which resulted in me purchasing my first ever PSN Card. I bought a couple of outfits to start off, and a nice Tropical Escape my third month of using Home, which was October.
As the weeks turned into months, my friends lists dramatically increased. Bonds turned into friendships. It has been a little over a year now since I have first used Home. To see it grow in so much in a year for me is dramatic; for some it may be years or for others It could be days, weeks, or months. I have had a great experience with Home for the past year. I have lost in contact with some friends from their inactive logins. While that is unfortunate, that is also a part of living an online life.
For a month until now I have had no access to PlayStation, and I won’t again until I get my PlayStation 3 back from a repair shop. I can pretty much say I feel homesick. It’s as if I flushed my goldfish down the toilet. It’s kind of saddening. I and many others have grown a lot with regards to our compassion towards Home, and even when I’m away from PlayStation Home I think about what I’ll do when I next go on.
I have invested more amounts of money than I thought I would in Home. Yes, some things in Home aren’t the best, yet we don’t realize that for some of us, “nothing” is “something” and that we appreciate whatever PlayStation chooses to give us. No, they didn’t have to give us a hundred items for free, but they did. No, they didn’t have to give us a Ford Event or an Axe Body Spray Event, but they did. No, they don’t have get real clothing companies and render their clothes into Playstation Home, but they did. No, they didn’t have to give us live streaming of events onto the video screens in Home we pass by most of the time, but they did.
I hope you see where I’m going here. Home is expandable, and that’s what PlayStation is doing here with its coming revamp – expanding Home. For example, I’ve seen pictures of the Dead Island Zombie mini-game event in Home, and it seems that many people have fun bashing zombies with all sorts of weapons! So much so, in fact, people are asking to keep the space.
PlayStation Home is like a car, and in order to keep it running fine, you need maintenance and most importantly an owner who treats it well. if we can’t access our PS3 for some reason, then there’s a community that PlayStation provides us – in the form of the forums – to reach out to loved ones and friends, to support each other, and to give most importantly what every company needs – feedback. And we can do that from our PC when we’re not on our PlayStation 3.
Home has a great community. Are there places where it can be improved upon and ways it can be be made more accessible from a social standpoint? Sure. But if you want to talk about the negativity that occurs on Home, then save that for another place and person. I will never remark on negativity with my posts, never.
I love reaching out to the community to discuss events and ways to make the Home platform run better and bigger. I live by this motto: “Always carry a blueprint for the future, and keep a scrapbook for the past.” Life is short, so live it to the fullest. I would love to know your story on Home.
September 12th, 2011 by MahmoudEm | 5 comments
Mahmoud is male teenager who has a passion for PS3 games and an addiction to Home.
Hey, Mahmoud, good to see you back. A lot of people on the HomeForum have been waiting for you to announce the winners of the August Photo Contest. If you are still unable to get into Home, please let me know and I will relay the message.
Thanks! I totally forgot about the August Contest due to Graphic Arts Projects here and there. I’ll Update the post and announce the winners. I guess I shall Make an October Edition (around the end of September) since I feel Its a tad bit to late for September since this months is a very busy month for me.
I was astonished how I had time to type this post, =]. It’s good to be back (Sort of), If any one asks for me on Home tell them “I’m coming home” soon after I pay this release form for a repair shop that I took my PS3 at, and then I’ll be up and running in a Giffy.
M.M
Hello my name is Amanda and I discovered home back in February of 2009. Believe it or not home and and some of the greatest friends have been getting me through a really rough time. Back in 2010 I found out my husband had cheating on me and left me for another woman. I had some really awesome friends Punkstitch Teona1 Xavier-4 and Suckonmynine who have stood by me through the pain and heartache I have adorned
I have had one person as well take advantage of my situation and use me. But I also met and fell in love with another man aka meanbrd94 who has taught me how to love and again fully. We met met in February of 2010 and have been talking ever since. He himself had adorned a lot of heartache from past relationships and we just seemed to fit like a puzzle and clicked. I have made awhile lot more friends through meanbrd94 jahoe kittyk8 and many more! But my experience on home has been great so far!
I started on Home a bit over a year ago. I don’t remember when exactly. Before ever going online, I installed a 500 gig HDD to my PS3. Since I had more space than I was ever gonna use, I decided to download every free option on the PS3. I understood what Home was from the explanation but never did any research on it, so it was entirely new to me. After being on the PSN for about a month or two, I finally downloaded the Home icon and got started; been on ever since.
Well, I got involved as soon as the closed beta finished. I had read, watched and taken in everything that there was availible in the media about it. When it launched at midnight (ish) it took a few HOURS of trying to get a connection through, but I finialy got in, and was still blown away by it regardless of all I had seen on the net previous.
I must say though, after spending about an hour creating my avi in my image and suiting him up in the only availible clothes, I stepped out into the virtual wild to be told nearly INSTANTLY that I looked gay!!! I never really expected it, and it was the first time in my life I’d ever been in a place like Home, so I was quite shocked and angered by this. But then, it’s not like birds are told how to fly before they’re pushed out the nest is it?
I kept going in regardless during the months that follwed and refused to be put off by the rudeness of some *most* people because I found that if you have enough patientce and dig deep enough, there were people in there that had the same vision of Home as I did. As time has past and Sony have found ways of policing Home, the rudeness has been reduced a fair bit and over the last few years I have found friends in Home that (much like Amanda above me) have become pillars of my life that I wouldn’t ever want to be without.
So thank you in particular to Sari, Muz, Bella, Jim and Snap for making Home what it is to me. Big thanks to all the other Homies on my list that have helped with tips and info, and I a little prayer that Sony NEVER shut off their servers!!!