Is Home A Game?
by Godzprototype, HSM filmmaker
Is Home a social gaming platform? Or can it be a game entirely?
These two questions come up all the time, certainly in this publication. And they have been debated repeatedly, over the years. Are Home’s social elements going the way of the dinosaurs? Can Home as a whole be a game played by its user? Lets examine these two questions.
Xi was a huge experiment which was so successful that people still talk about it to this day. As has been cited before, it is the one experience Home ever offered that truly turned it into a game. One of Xi’s features was a team maze; this gave that game playability, much as Siren Lounge did, where players joined together at the beginning and helped each other get through a maze to the end. This game is still popular.
But Xi was designed as a limited-run experience. And such Alternate Reality Games are conspicuously expensive to produce. So if it made Home itself a game, it did so in an unsustainable way. So let’s dig deeper.
Lockwood’s Sodium Hub had everything that could be thought of to grow a social experience, and is still very popular. Project Velocity increased Sodium’s social experience by including racing to an already excellent design, introducing multiplayer gaming and taunting. Meanwhile, over in the Hellfire corner of Home, Novus Prime is a special experience. No other place in Home offers this type of environment. Though the game itself was based on getting your name to the top of the leaderboards, its zero-G simulator in the associated personal estate offered users a chance to experience something that could not be duplicated anywhere else in Home, save for the Novus Prime public hub itself. It is Novus Prime which sold me on the concept of Home — not because of the game itself, ironically, but because of how it reinterpreted Home.
Home is a platform for games. In itself it is not a game. It is a place where gamers get together for various excursions and to try new things out. To share in gaming experiences together, or various meta-games such as decorating personal estates in such a way as to provide unique experiences. We see this in the groups or clubs that get together to play meta-games of their own creation all the time. And I believe that’s what Xi was. Mercia seems to work towards this experience. Journey, which was not a Home-based game, gave the gamer that played it something enriching and meaningful to take away from it — because the game itself was secondary to the experience of meeting other people to enjoy it with. I had to include this reference in this article because I believe for some of the people who frequent Home daily, this is a most desirable quality in Home life: to be taught a thing and share the lesson.
The things that allow a person to still feel connected to other people in some way, yet create intrigue and interest shared: that is the true value in what Home as a whole is. Norse wrote an article called You Are Here. Being a person who never really interacted a whole lot with the public, who — via Home — went into making films with a lot of people, I have seriously felt like I could use a map too! Take the “you are here” system, and create something so immersing, and complementary to all users that when they shut there machine off they actually take something enriching away from it.
If a video game is about moving from Point A to Point B, then the strength of Home lies in harnessing the desire for players to help each other move between those two points. The experience of doing so should be more important than the rewards earned for reaching the destination. Very few Home games create this effect properly, which is why they tend to be little more than flavor-of-the-month distractions with minimal replay value. Interestingly enough, Digital Leisure’s poker tables have the right idea; the game itself is not so important as the act of enjoying it with others. And in this way, Home shines.
Creating games that provide a singular experience have their merit. Most gamers probably play a Home game for about a week, unless they are engrossed, or it provides a shared experience. It kind of bothers me a bit to see games that take you away from the social elements Home has always been about. And while these newer games provide a more immediate need to divert attention spans, I know a few people who have mentioned that gut-tightening feeling from seeing elements come into Home that would take away from the social elements we enjoy so much.
The question here is this: do we go for the short and dirty, or build on the castle? Are the social elements in Home being cashed in, with little return? Or can Home be built in such a way as to compliment its users’ behavior patterns, and their own ability to communicate? I am rooting for the team that makes Home bigger and better. I don’t use Facebook. Never really cared too much for those kinds of games. I came to the PS3 because it is better than the rest. It is a personal preference. It is an experience I will never forget. Home has already won.
To create mini-games is important in the short term. However, creating a game that truly involved you and your friends, with all communications intact, would only make this experience really grow in what Home has always been: a place for gamers to go and interact.
Inasmuch as I can tell for the gamer at large, most only play for the thrill of what a game offers at its core. Rewards are cited as a frequent motivator to drive user engagement with a game, but let’s also acknowledge that video games existed for decades prior to trophies, achievements, rewards and a gold-star sticker from mommy. Rewards are a cheap way to keep someone grinding, perhaps, but all it does is prolong the inevitable. If the game itself is not sufficiently interesting to play — and replay — it is doomed to bleed to death. Dragon’s Green and Conspiracy are two examples of this.
Make the Home experience *itself* more exciting.
For game developers, I imagine finding the right recipe hurts. We don’t always make perfect food, no, but the great chefs don’t give up. They look at it from a different perspective. If there is one difficult lesson which Home 2012 has taught us, it’s that you can throw a ton of money at a Home game and still not be guaranteed a good return on your investment. Home has realized its vision of becoming a gaming platform, yes, but that must inevitably lead someone to look at Home itself and ask, “Is this all there is?”
Facebook is a good template to look at here. Facebook games can provide ridiculous amounts of revenue, and Facebook is a social gaming platform — and, yes, there are some people for whom Facebook is largely synonymous with a particular game or two — but gaming is not the heart of Facebook. Strip out the social elements from Facebook, and ultimately what do you have? A collection of incredibly simplistic “games,” most of which you would be ashamed to admit you spent money on.
Look at the industry at large. There’s a massive shift towards casual, mobile and social gaming right now. Blame the current console generation’s longevity all you want for the “mainstream” gaming industry’s current decline, but you’ve missed the point if you cling to that. The reality is that gaming is more relevant to us when tied into social activities. The game itself is not so important as the act of enjoying it with other friends. We are in an electronic culture that increasingly isolates us from spending time with other human beings; these games, therefore, are simply the medium for us to connect, one human to another.
This is the great strength Home has, at the core of its original concept — and, quite frankly, it has been largely squandered. Norse has argued in the past that the major benefit of turning Home into a gaming platform is that it broadens Home’s appeal to those PlayStation users who lack a keyboard, headset, and/or the social skills to communicate effectively. And perhaps this is true, but this strategy relies on trying to attract users to the Home platform for its games, when its games cannot match what PlayStation’s own disc-based brethren can offer. Besides, Journey showed us that one can have a highly-addictive “social” game which requires only the most rudimentary level of communication. So what, then, is the appeal to a “conventional” PSN gamer to stick around with Home? The games do not measure up, nor are they interested in the social scene.
As Patrick Klepek wrote in Giant Bomb over a year ago, it’s like Sony’s been trying to sell the entire PlayStation Network user base on Home by ignoring the people who already got it. The core Home user base is given plenty of gaming attractions, yes, but little evolution of the social interface that attracted them to the platform to begin with, beyond core updates which provide more resources for third-party developers. Frankly, one has to wonder exactly how much interest SCEA itself still has in Home, above and beyond deriving revenues from it as the platform provider. As IrishSiren stated in her last article, it feels like Home is a dinner party in which the host itself couldn’t be bothered to show up. And that’s a shame, because Home in its present form still has several years left in it, and even as various third-party developers shift some of their own resources to game development outside of Home, there is still clearly a significant amount of development for Home itself in the works.
The solution to Home’s problem may indeed lie in game design, and by turning Home itself into a game. Since it appears that this will not happen from Sony, who seem distracted by other projects and initiatives, my only advice — and it’s directed to the third-party content providers — is this: the games you design don’t have to try to push the envelope in terms of technical complexity for Home (indeed, given that it seems like not a single game can launch in Home without server stress bugs, simplicity ain’t a bad idea). They just have to make the social experience of Home itself, within a gaming context, sufficiently rewarding to repeat ad infinitum.
I don’t want to buy a game in Home. I want Home itself to be a game. So don’t try to sell me a game; sell me a new way of enjoying the game I’m already playing.
October 22nd, 2012 by Godzprototype | 9 comments
Godzprototype is learning the art of creating Machinima, and would like to share it with you. Hope you enjoy.
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Home has set itself to always be a social network on a console. They were off on a great start but only to introduce games for “others to have something to do.” I believe that in the end, I’m definitely down for a few games but they strayed too far away from the subject of what Home really (and truly) is about: connecting with others.
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.
Good question Bill. Doc and I have “talks” about the same thing. I call it a game and he says a social network. But one thing I do know that if it wasn’t for one of the games inside of Home we wouldn’t be where we are today. And another thing, I’ve met a lot of very nice people on Home and most of the time we are just hanging out talking. That is why I think Doc is right on this one. I know I can’t wait to see what is in the future for Home. I am always waiting Monday to see what is in the update, then share with friends what’s coming.
Another good article Bill!
Really great read there Godz *pats on back*
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…
I loved this article Bill. You are very right, Home is much more than just a game, yet it needs to become more like one in order to reach its full potential. The best games that it has to offer already are the ones that require player interaction, like any of the multi-player ones. But to truly tap into Homes strengths they need to devise games that bring more than just friends into it. Tycoon has started that with their ability to let people you don’t know visit your town, but since that provides no real interactive participation, it is only a start that shows the potential out there.
The questing we did last Christmas was one way they could expand upon this idea. If they made quests that required participation with others, that would be a start in the right direction. I know of many instances where I helped or I saw others helping total strangers complete those quests. This social interactivity is what needs to be sought after and pushed to bring Home to its full potential. Great read.
“All of Home’s a game.
And all the men and women merely players.”
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.
nice article bill^^, i m aggree with the point than Home/games must be re-thinking! try to imitate disk/game is the worst and poor idea than sony/devs have had!
they should watch carefuly on JPhome: events, games, spaces, all these aspect are designed with “SOCIAL” purpose and goals,is this politic don’t allow gains for devs?
frankly i dont think so, but i think the american way of buissness dont interest much jp users and more and more of their fervent aficionados…
short views, imediat profit,are never good for “quality”.
personaly i m more and more tired and disapointed by this “home”,devs & sony, never forget who keep you in life!listen to us or your soul will finish to sink more deeply more sooner you think….
This is a great article Godz. I think if Home is to be ultimately successful it must be a 50/50 social/gaming thing. In the beginning it was much more a social experience, and now today it feels that Home has overcompensated and become more a gaming experience. I also think the pendulum will eventually swing back again. If Home is to much a gaming place it won’t be able to compete with regular games, and if it is to much a social place it can’t compete with social media. It must keep that balance to be the amazing niche thing it is.
From a purely social aspect LOOT seems to have gotten it from the beginning. They keep working towards a very specific goal that makes Home socially interesting, and realistic.
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.
I enjoyed your article Bill! I see Home more like a sports bar or Buster’s and Dave’s.People can go to a sports bar to just socialize or to play a game or do both. Actually they can even do neither. Just set a corner nursing a beer and watch other people. That is a form of freedom. If home were to become a game in the true sense, then it kind of takes away some of that freedom. Having games with in Home that use social engagement promotes interaction which I’m all for. But forcing interaction by making it mandatory to team up with a friend or stranger to complete a task remove some of the freedom that I love in Home.
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.