Rewriting the Social Interface

by NorseGamer, HSM Editor-in-Chief

An oft-repeated request from the Home community, for as long as I can remember, is  the desire for new emotes, gesticulations and dance moves. And this request makes sense: whether you’re in Home for the games or for the social scene, the more you can actually do in Home, the less static the Home experience itself feel.  Self-expression is a powerful tool to increase average user session time.

Here’s the catch: there’s only so much memory to go around.

Example. Remember when Home users could only decorate their personal spaces with fifty items? Then, a core update was introduced which merged the memory allocations for active items and regular items — in effect, giving you much more control over your decoration choices. For someone like me, who doesn’t use a lot of active items, it effectively doubled the amount of memory I had for furniture decoration. And, now that 1.65 has been deployed, I fully anticipate there will be a lot of low-memory active items created to take advantage of the new system.

So: if you want new dances and gesticulations, but there’s only a set amount of memory to work with, then what are you willing to part with?

Let’s start with dances.

  • Rock. Who uses this? I’m sure there are some people out there who want to go Headbanger’s Ball in Home, but aside from idiotic children using it to simulate punching each other, I haven’t seen this one used very much. Although Terra, when equipped with her whip, has been known to make good use out of it.
  • Robot. Aside from the fact that it’s not a particularly engrossing animation, it’s another one that I’ve seen rarely used. Let’s ditch it and make room.
  • Ska. Little-known trivia fact: my brother actually fronted a ska band for a while. I’ve seen Ska used in Home more frequently, and even though it’s not exactly what I’d call an authentic Ska pattern, it can be somewhat fun. Still, in Home, it looks like your avatar is having a seizure.
  • Rave. The female rave isn’t a bad animation, but the male rave…no. Just no. I enjoy raves and trance music, but that animation needs to die. Most of the time, when I see the Rave being performed, it’s so that some troll can simulate raping another avatar.
  • Cabbage Patch. It’s not that it’s a poor animation — it’s just that it seems to be rarely used. Why not ditch it and make room for something else?

I leave it to others here to suggest replacement dances. The only thing I would recommend is not suggesting that godawful “hip hop” dance that was shown in the Home GDC 2007 video. Come on. We can do better than that. Personally, I’d be up for a merengue mambo. Developers, if you need some inspiration, here ya go:

The holy grail of Home dancing — indeed, of Home emotes in general — is interactivity with another avatar via mutual consent. In the case of dancing, this would open up the possibility of pairs dances, such as a Viennese waltz. Indeed, an interactive dancing mini-game in Home would be, I imagine, insanely popular; imagine dancing with your partner and seeing, “Press (X) to twirl” as a prompt?

(By the way, one thing I want to mention: avatars with specialized emotes or movements is all well and good — I love my Lockwood MechJet, for instance — but the whole point of this article is to have these things available to all Home users, regardless of what they’re wearing.)

Let’s move on to preset dialogue. Keara wrote, a while back, about how much of the preset dialogue goes unused or fails to be of any real value to new users. And she was right. Preset dialogue is there to help new users navigate and interact with Home, which is exceptionally important since the PS3 isn’t bundled with a keyboard. I was considering listing out the dialogue presets that should be removed — “I have no keyboard” and “Where are you from?” being the two top candidates — but in this case, a frankly more comprehensive solution would simply be to revisit the “Quickchat” feature demonstrated at Home’s inception. For those who aren’t familiar with it, it includes the following prompts:

  • Where…
  • How do I…
  • I like…
  • Let’s go to…
In each instance, there were sub-categories for those prompts. Thus, one could quickly ask, “How do I play pool?” Given Home’s shift towards being more of a gaming platform, this would make logical sense to revisit. The beauty of having a more game-centric Home is that  the Home experience, for a new user, can be defined far more by developer-controlled experiences than by the largely uncontrollable (and often perilous) interactivity with other users. Yes, the beating heart of Home is its social scene, but there are far, far too many idiots running around Home to entrust first impressions to them. Preset dialogue should be treated more like an interactive FAQ than an attempt at genuine conversation.
Then, of course, we have emotes and gesticulations. Let’s be honest: how many of them do you actually use? And do you use so few of them because the menus required to find them are too cumbersome, or because they just aren’t that important to your communication with other users?  Off the top of my head, the only gesticulations I use with any frequency are “applaud,” “wave” and “point” — the rest barely get hauled out. Granted, for machinima purposes, it’s sometimes nice to have a wide range of various movements to choose from — but in terms of serving the whole community, I wonder what could be achieved if the memory required for those emotes was applied elsewhere.
I know we all want more, more more; that’s the nature of being a consumer. But there are finite memory allocations to work with, and I’m guessing the only way to add something is to take something away in return. If we examine what we actually use on a daily basis in Home, though, there does appear to be quite a bit of room for pruning — which, in turn, might create room for new stuff we could actually utilize more frequently.

May 28th, 2012 by | 7 comments
NorseGamer is the product manager for LOOT Entertainment at Sony Pictures, as well as the founder and publisher of HomeStation Magazine. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, he holds a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and presently lives in Los Angeles. All opinions expressed in HSM are solely his and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sony DADC.

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7 Responses to “Rewriting the Social Interface”

  1. BONZO says:

    NOOOOOO!! Not the Ska dance, it’s the only dance I do. Unless they replace it with a Shuffle dance. The rave dance should be replaced with the Shuffle though. Disco only serves as a cliche it doesn’t need to be around. I am surprised they never had a line dance. They should introduce a ball dance. You request someone to dance with you and if they agree then both avatars do a ball dance. That could bring up some gender issues when it comes time to lead though.

  2. Dr_Do-Little says:

    NOOOOOOO!! Not the Ska dance… oops! that one been said already ;) What will be the Novus Ska line without it? As far as the emotes goes i must add 1 more complaint. I have Home in french and the translation are… let say missleading.
    One thing about interactivity. It would be nice if male and female were dancing on the same beat. The sequence is never the same length for both. Making it impossible to be in synch. hmmm maybe i should put that in the suggestion.

  3. Burbie52 says:

    I agree Norse. Goodbye rock, robot and cabbage patch at least! Running man is a Home favorite, but I wouldn’t mind seeing that go too as it has become too cliche’. I would like to see reset chat features like “I am here to help” and “How are you?” or like was suggested ones that would spur conversations. They tell us in the TOS that we shouldn’t reveal information about ourselves then turn around and contradict it with “Where are you from?” makes no sense to me.
    New dance moves and emotes and conversation pieces like “Would you like to dance?” would help a lot in Home not only new users but also those of us who are downright tired of these old standby now.
    Nice article.

  4. SealWyf says:

    If we lose the Rave dance, Homelings will have to find some other way to klent. The male Rave dance looks just like scrubbing!

    I wish we could have one dialog slot that was customizable, subject to the normal Home net-nannying. What better way to shout “HOMELINGS!” or “OPEN TABLE!” or “DO YOU WANT TO JOIN MY FAM?”, “U GOT CAM?” or even “****!”, repeatedly? (On second thought, maybe not…)

    One of the things I liked about Free Realms was their deeply nested chat menus. You could say a surprising number of things with them. Something like that would be ideal for new Home users. It sounds like we had it at the beginning. I wonder why it went away?

    • Terra_Cide says:

      Funny, I always thought the male Rave dance looked like they were climbing a tree…

      Anyways, I’d gladly trade out the Rock dance (even if it does make me look good when brandishing a whip) for the Charleston.

  5. KLCgame says:

    I don’t get why we don’t have a similar quick chat innerface as japan or the other asian region, as far as I understand they have phrases for asking for help, different greetings & other stuff that I have no clue what it is.

  6. sposny3 says:

    Well I have to say first of all the video you put there made my day laughed harder than I have in a long time thank you I agree with the get rid of some to make room with that being said some of the new because I have yet to see one that takes less than 22 slots thats the new ones that I am reffering to by the way you do have some lazer lights that only take 1 slot and a couple of other interactive items. the active items taking less slot should have been accompaniedby a few more slots taking the fact that all existing active will continue to take 22 slots maybe determin the amount of slots by the size of the place would have been a much better way to go and be fore some on answers this with (we only have so much memory to work with with) I know that but like they did with the mansion was cool you know deco it alittle bit makes it nice less slots to use but just a thought I have 60 places now and enjoy (decoing) short for decorating for a short time every day and I mean a short time lol but at he end the mighty dollar will always have the last say on the ? why this and why that $$$$$ never the less good article

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