Helping friends or strangers navigate and achieve things while playing a game or being in Home, to me is a reward in itself. But the rewarding part is that individuals make those choices on their own by tapping into their own honor. To me this has to be voluntary. To make it mandatory dilutes how genuine it should be.

In the Hub the other day I saw a young man whose status said feeling sad. When I asked him why he felt sad he explained that his girlfriend just broke up with him and that nobody would talk to him. He felt lonely. As I’m apt to do, I started offering advice. Before I could finish typing my first sentence, three other people stepped up. Two guys and a girl. They invited him to hang out and dance with them and chat. We all offered some encouraging words and within a few minutes everyone was trading friend requests. I asked the lonely young man if it made him feel better knowing that strangers cared enough to get involved which he replied ” yes, very much”.

Nothing gives me more hope about the future of Home then seeing random acts of genuine kindness not motivated by scores or trophies.

Should home be a game? In my opinion it should be an experience based on the choices you make personally. Let the knowledge that you did something good be your reward. Putting out the effort to make Home a better place if your trophy. And the names of the good people on your friends list be your score.

There are plenty of games within Home design to be games. Developing the social aspect isn’t necessarily something the developers need to do, that responsibility is ours as a collective group which in my opinion is the definition of social.

John Ardussi, and his team seem to want to build towards the same goal of making Homes games more integrated in the social aspect of what Home was in the beginning with the Action Distric, Cutthroats, and even the Playground and it’s HORSE game.

I am not taking away from what is being created these days in Home. But! Working towards building games that included people on your friends list, or creating things that involve the community as a whole will only play more to Homes own strengths. What it was attempting at the beginning.

Create experiences shared with a friend, or a total stranger. When having that experience is separate from your friends all you can do is talk about it when you get back from it.

It isn’t the same.

As you said though Ted, the pendulum will swing back. Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas will no doubt have many social activities, and games that play more towards having unique memorable moments with someone.

Nice article. How ironic that Home itself can be a much more immersive game than any of the actual games that developers foist upon us. I still enjoy using Home without finding much appeal in any of these big-release Home games that keep appearing.

That said, I’ve always enjoyed Home more as a social platform than a gaming platform. As noted in the article, Home games serve as short-term distractions but lack much staying power. It speaks more to the platform’s limitations than any lack of effort on the part of developers. If I felt compelled to spend any significant money on video games, it certainly would not be spent on Home games. Others may enjoy the Home-gaming experience. So be it.

That’s the beauty of Home. You can make it as you like it.

The idea of Home actually being a game is an odd one to me, since I’ve always seen it as a distraction between games. You spoke of Journey and the way it connects its players; there’s a reason the characters cant have a physical impact or effect on each other. While making the game there found if players had the ability to push each other around at all, some people would do things Luke shove others off cliffs or down crevices. This doesn’t surprise me at all; there seems to be an inherent need for violence when in a virtual environment in any setting, because of the lack of RL repercussions? Or maybe some folks are just mean. My point is, a lot of Journeys development period was taken up by the question “How do we get players to just be nice to each other”? And the answer was to take away nearly every interaction, especially physical contact.

With all that said, the most fun you can have in gaming is usually with a friend, or friends. But as gaming evolved, we’ve somehow made it a more solitary pursuit. Until the net exploded all over our faces! But teaming up with someone half way across the world still isn’t the same as a two-player game played side by side, IMO. Homes connectivity and the way it joins its users up on the other hand, is rather unique. I know there are other places you can get a similar experience from but because Home is based on a console where EVERYONE has exactly the same hardware, everyone gets the same experinceaces -- or more or less.

So the idea of making a game of Home isn’t a million miles away. I think they should be looking at the social elements of games like Animal Crossing, and the “addictive” elements of RPGs. No one particularly likes grinding, but it can give a great sense of achievement if the rewards for doing so are good enough -- like the personal space from Aroura. But about the social component, in AC (Animal Crossing) came from helping each other rather than competing, and I think this is where Home’s games might be failing. AC had trees you could plant and eventually grow fruit from, great for some quick in-game cash but here’s the real kicker; you could only grow ONE kinda fruit unless you had a visit from a friend who’d trade you a few different fruits for yours so you could grow new, more expensive fruit. Sometimes you’d only get one tree from say, six fruits but that fine, coz once you had that one new fruit a whole exotic new orchard wasn’t too far away. The game ran in real-time too, so growing stuff wad no easy task.

I suppose what I’m saying is, a game of trading commodities mixed with a way to tend to those commodities could easily fit into the current Home engine, with zero strain on it. This would get people on the social side AND make Home a game without the need of SUPER GUNS, POWER UPS, GET TGE EDGE ON YOUR OPPONENT! Yadda yadda yadda…

Central Plaza, the Mall, all has removed in favor of re-skinning with “the Hub”, which doesn’t aesthetically appeal neither interest me. A waste of space and memory, if you ask me.

This article is a fine example of what Home has missed and where it can lead into the future. Good article, Godz.