LOOT Shatters the Fourth Wall
by NorseGamer, HSM Editor-in-Chief
It’s really hard not to envy LOOT Entertainment.
During the recent trip to E3, Cubehouse and I were fortunate enough to be able to visit LOOT’s offices at Sony Pictures Studios. As you recall, I’d been there before, but it was Cube’s first time. And I’m fairly certain he was properly sick of me going on like a drooling fanboy during the entire ride over.
Here’s the truth, though: getting to visit a major Home developer’s production center is an exceptionally rare treat. Not making a complete idiot of yourself, so they don’t bar the entrance with automatic weapons when you’re in town, is even harder. And then, of course, you get to see ALL THIS COOL STUFF THAT YOU CAN’T TALK ABOUT. It’s like going out on a date with Christie Brinkley except you find out Christie Brinkley is a cyborg fembot who secretly controls all the world’s banks from a remote hideout in Davos and spends her free time communicating with the Cythereans aboard their mothership. And then Christie takes you on board the mothership, and just when you’re thinking, “Screw you, imagination, this was way cooler than what you thought of,” you are deposited back into your mundane life on the sidewalk and you have to go poop.
Just another day at Sony Pictures Studios…
First off, the LOOT team is basically like the United Nations if the United Nations watched Attack of the Show. You think, “Hey, I come from Hawaii, who wants to touch me,” and then you meet some guy from France, and another guy from Ethiopia, and then the quiet guy off to the side is actually from Brazil and is so smart that he and Cubehouse start chatting about stuff while I’m grinning like the village idiot because, in this room, I am the idiot — and then you meet some girls who are really smart, and don’t let the cuteness fool you because their brains were Plancking before it was cool, and you realize, crap, this small handful of people who sit around and shoot Nerf guns at each other brought you the Sunset Yacht and the EOD and the Space Apartment and puppies and COOL STUFF THAT I CAN’T TALK ABOUT YET BUT OH MY GOD YOUR HEAD WILL EXPLODE SO DO NOT HAVE INNOCENT BYSTANDERS NEAR YOU WHEN YOUR HEAD EXPLODES.
(Oh, and the guy who runs all this madness — David — deserves his own action figure. Because he gets Home. He understands what it’s all about.)
Crap, I’m four-hundred words in. I should probably write about something.
WARNING: THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE HAS A LOT OF TYPICAL HSM BUSINESS ANALYSIS BUT THERE’S A REALLY FUNNY LOLCAT AT THE END SO IT’S OKAY.
Let’s start with this video:
Here’s why this is so important: Home has extremely limited options for user-generated content. Unlike other virtual realities such as Second Life or Entropia, in which considerable amounts of content are created by the userbase, Home is very much a walled garden. You may enter the garden and enjoy what it has to offer, but you may not plant your own seeds.
Then LOOT decided to roll in a grenade and come in firing.
What LOOT understands is that users who enjoy Home for long stretches at a time may be motivated by more than just gaming experiences. They enjoy being creative, spending considerable time and money to decorate their avatars and their estates as a form of self-expression. These are people who are looking to connect with each other — and lest anyone think such social networking isn’t lucrative, consider how social gaming is more or less rewriting the rulebook for the games industry right now.
As a result, we have the LOOT Stage Set and the LOOT cameras, which can upload directly to YouTube.
Granted, these commodities won’t make you the next DIRECTOR_ON_DUTY. But that’s not the point. DOD runs a legitimate production studio, which we featured as our cover story a few issues ago. Most users just want a way to be able to share cool experiences with friends and the world at large. And LOOT brought that to Home.
Let’s also not forget, by the way, that LOOT is the company that brought Entertainment On Demand into Home. Which, let’s face it, gives people a pretty awesome reason to go into Home that has absolutely nothing to do with games. If Home is going to feel like an immersive virtual reality, it needs experiences which break the fourth wall between the virtual world and the real world.
And, of course, let’s also acknowledge LOOT’s brilliant masterstroke of allowing user-generated content onto the EOD. With the creation of the PSTalent channel, LOOT’s pulled off something remarkable: once the EOD goes portable, it will be a method of delivery in which user-generated machinima could be played in a user’s personal estate. Rather than having to go to one central location for the content, the content will quite literally be brought to the users.
I think it’s a foregone conclusion you’re going to, in time, see additional community channels on the EOD. And what a fantastic goal for any Home group to strive for! LOOT has, in one stroke, turned Home from a faceless interactive billboard into a place where the community can entertain itself. Which, again, is extremely important to the overall goal of making Home itself a place worth enjoying, in addition to being a platform for games.
How cool is LOOT? It’s like a cat that can shoot laser beams. That’s how cool LOOT is.
Finally, a point that’s easy to overlook: one of the oft-repeated requests from the community is the ability to preview virtual commodities before purchasing them. While this now takes place with personal estates, it’s equally important to get a good look at furniture items that go inside them. You want to get a sense of scale and functionality before purchasing something, and the current preview features in Home are largely inadequate. With the LOOT Stage Set open house, you can actually interact with their items beforehand, so that you know precisely what you’re buying. This goes a long, long way towards improving consumer confidence.
It’s also a very clever bit of asymmetric marketing. Home has so much content flowing into it these days that it’s easy to overlook something (and I’m sorry, but Home’s present interface — itself a variation of the XMB — is not the most efficient means of showcasing all that Home has to offer, leaving a lot of content buried underneath a disturbing number of clicks). As a result, some developers in Home (most notably Lockwood and nDreams) have set up their own public showcases in order to promote brand awareness. And LOOT, of course, does the same thing.
This is the point in the review when I’m supposed to say something critical or point out a flaw. Y’know. For street cred.
Truth is, though, I can’t think of anything. LOOT just does it right. Bastards.
By the way, in a little while, you’ll be able to listen to LOOT’s official podcasts for the very first time. Do eeeet. Aside from the fact that they’re hilariously fun and informative, I love the idea of Home developers doing their own podcasts. It’s another method of connecting with the community that should be fully explored and enjoyed.
LOOT’s Stage Set open house. Go explore. And create.
June 26th, 2012 by NorseGamer | 10 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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2 thumbs up!!
Next time you’re in Los Angeles you better stop by again!!!
Loot have always done the best stuff, the yacht remains my favorite space of all time
Yays for LOOT and PST! Loves it! ^__^
Fun write up Norse, I liked the top half better though. Just go nuts and write us a silly thing one day will ya? As for the serious bottom half, yeah, Loot is good. By far one of my most favorite devs for Home, so many good ideas, and they’re always pushing at that sky limit within Home.
Gary’s very right to be proud of his Loot Yacht, it’s still one of the best, more interactive spaces on the market for a reasonable price. It’s no Space Apartment beater, but it comes closer than anything else the competition have come up with so far.
I can’t wait to see what else they have waiting to show the rest of Home how to do it right.
What I really like about Loot is that when they created their Yacht it was not a “stink-potter” but a lovely “rag ship” which actually mimics tacking with the boom swinging slightly from side to side. Being a sailor it was a must have for me. It was secondary that it as Crackle and I can listen to a very cool station on board. I also own the space apartment and the the studio… all of which are astounding in their own right. I am just starting to fiddle around with the camera -what a very cool thing.
I agree with KrazyFace -I love the wacko write up- very interesting, and eye-catching. But I pose this question to you Krazy- Whould you write us something that was silly and fun one day?
I am not a film maker as you know, more of the acting type, but all of this new added tech is getting my interest. I may have to consider buying a studio just to play around with it and see what is possible, if and when I have the time, lol.
Possibilities…………..
When LOOT develop a HD version of their classic camera and make it Portable..You know where this is going right?.
They are just OUTDOING themselves all the time. They are just too talented.
The Cheekster is just jealous