There are two activities that I have always related Home to. Cosplay and LARPing (Live Action Role Play). The ideas in these activites are the ones point out that Home has. I think more people need to realize that Home can be a game of their making and it doesn’t need to be a reflection of their IRL self.

As always Orion, well done. Wonderful read.

You bring up a great point, too, about how Home’s ability to let us explore different guises and identities is an amazing opportunity for role-play, and an even greater opportunity for sociological observation thereof. To use a very morbid (and extreme) example, consider Zimbardo’s infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, in which ordinary people suddenly displayed very different behavior when placed in roles (and a setting) which encouraged it.

One thing that’s fascinated me about Home role-play is the proliferation of “mafia fams” throughout the community. I wasn’t able to really put my finger on what drew some of these people to spend so much time on it, until one person finally said, “It’s the best political simulator out there.” And that made more sense to me. It’s role-play.

(Keep in mind that that’s not an endorsement of fams, by the way. Most of them I tend to take a rather dim view towards. But it’s certainly a notable example of how people can behave very differently under certain circumstances.)

The more I look at Home, the more I realize that the goal of it being a social network for gamers is a goal best achieved indirectly. Just as the search for happiness is usually fruitless (you don’t go looking for happiness — you look for something you enjoy, which in turn makes you happy), Jack Buser hit it on the head when he pointed out that if you put a bunch of gamers in a room and ask them to talk to each other, it doesn’t work. But if you go at that goal indirectly — by building an MMO with social virtual-reality components — it could be very successful.

This was a great read.