I Have A Best Friend in PlayStation Home
by NorseGamer, HSM Editor-in-Chief
One of the resort chains I served as a manager for was absolutely insistent upon using Gallup for damn near everything. Which, hey, that’s fine; Gallup has some excellent tools. Their StrengthsFinder is very useful for examining somebody’s personality. Their Strength Coaching certification teaches valuable personnel management skills. And so forth.
But there was one tool which used to bug me: the Q12 employee engagement survey.
It’s not that the survey is bad — although it’s not necessarily applicable to all environments. No, the problem I had with it was due to just one of the twelve questions:
Do you have a best friend at work?
I hated that question. To me it made no sense; it’s entirely feasible to have colleagues and even good friends at work, but a best friend? Is that really necessary?
As it turns out, I’m far from the first person to have battled Gallup on this. The problem is, any experiment with rewording the question and softening it didn’t produce predictive, measurable results which could be correlated with employee engagement. Like it or not, there was a very clear distinction; if you can honestly state, “I have a best friend at work,” your engagement with your company is through the freaking roof — to the point where the work environment itself could be degraded, pay reduced, bosses replaced with martinets and so forth, and there was still a higher likelihood you’d stick around.
There is a certain amount of truth to it, though. I know I’ve continued to work in environments that were unpleasant simply because there was someone I enjoyed hanging out with so much. You’ve probably been in a similar position. And this got me to thinking: is that the real hook to PlayStation Home?
I can’t really blame Sony’s strategic decision to turn Home into a gaming platform, even at the risk of alienating that core group. Frankly, I wonder if Home would still even be open for business if they hadn’t. Keeping Home up and running requires some fairly significant overhead, and there’s no reason not to try to make money off of it. Besides, as we’ve seen, micro-communities pop up around gaming experiences within Home: you have a community centered around Novus Prime, another around Sodium2, another around Cutthroats, et cetera.Think about it. Home is, at this point, five years old (if you go all the way back to the beginnings of closed beta). It was originally conceived as a social network for gamers. The catch with this is that the PS3 doesn’t come bundled with a keyboard, open mic was abused by trolls, and gamers are used to playing games and being given instructions to follow. Thus, the idea of hanging out in a 3D chat room appealed to a core group of people and left everyone else cold.
So it’s time to ask: do you have a best friend in PlayStation Home?
Not a good friend. Not a close friend. A best friend.
It really does make a difference, doesn’t it. And ironically, it’s the one aspect of Home user engagement that’s completely out of Sony’s control. They can build the world, yes, but they can ultimately only sit on the sideline and hope that you make that connection with someone.
Because here’s the harsh reality: without that social glue — without that connection to someone — Home doesn’t have a lot of staying power. Home’s game designers eternally search for the magic bullet that will make users stop comparing their games to their AAA-rated disc brethren; the answer lies in designing games which allow best friends to play cooperatively and/or competitively with each other against other users, and socialize whilst doing so.
One of the subjects that fascinates me, and I’ve studied it for years, is why people leave Home. Why they finally decide that they’ve had enough. Why someone who’s so intensely involved in Home suddenly decides to pack it in. There are a few primary reasons that seem to come up repeatedly:
- Loss of status. If you’re preoccupied with trying to be “someone” in the community, that ego drive becomes the motivating reason behind your public actions, no matter how speciously it’s disguised. The departure inevitably comes when there is no further status to be gained, or when something threatens it which causes a person to leave in order to save face. I could comment further on this subject, but it would be unkind.
- Loss of influence. This may sound redundant, but it isn’t. Status is overt acknowledgement from people whose opinions you value. Influence is the unstated belief that what you say and do matters in the greater scheme of things. Given the growth in Home’s population, and the general perception of SCEA community management’s greater distance from Home community matters, a sentiment I’ve seen repeatedly pop up from many of Home’s prominent early adopters, either overtly or in their behavior, is that they just didn’t feel like they mattered any longer. They felt anonymous in the larger community, and thus left.
Loss of friends. This one is the most emotionally poignant. If you’ve been using Home socially for any length of time, chances are high that you can recall losing a close friend. Hell, just look at the changing face of the Sony forum; go back even as little as a year and see how much it’s changed. Voices and names which were once so prominent, who were fun and entertaining to listen to, have fallen silent and moved on. And, a year ago, we were saying the same thing about the people who left even earlier. It’s the inevitable cycle of change.
The one true insulation from this, I believe, is whether or not you have a best friend in Home. Because humans are, ultimately, social creatures. This publication contends that you have to be slightly damaged in some way — emotional, mental, physical, etc. — to truly “get” Home’s long-term appeal, but the key is to examine what exactly there is to get. And the answer is quite simple: each other.
At its core, that’s really what Home, like any good social MMO experience, is selling us. It’s simply selling us each other, in an increasing variety of ways. Long after this publication has ended — long after Home itself is reduced to a footnote in our lives — what will remain are simply the memories of what we did to and for each other.
It is those memories we crave. So that, at the end, we can hopefully look back on things and at least smile fondly in remembrance of the good times.
I look at our coverage of all the new stuff that comes out every week. Wonderful stuff. Brilliant stuff. But ultimately just stuff. What matters is how we use it to enjoy our time with each other. And developers should strive to remember that no one buys anything in Home just because it’s cool, or flashy, or innovative; they buy it because they can see how it will enhance their time with their friends.
Ultimately, however, it does come back down to us. And so it is worth asking that Gallup question: do you have a best friend in PlayStation Home? Because those of you who do, I’ll wager, are far more satisfied and engaged with Home.
December 4th, 2012 by NorseGamer | 9 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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Bingo! Nail-on-head. I have a best friend in Home yes. Like you said, not just a good friend, or a close one, but my best friend. Last time I had a ‘best friend’ I was a kid, I met him when we were 7 and eventually parted by life and its changing rivers we all must follow when we were 18-19. Eleven years might not seem much, but for our age it was nearly the whole of our lives that we’d shared.
Another 10 year’s passed before I would let anyone as close as that again.
But it happened, and in the strangest of places. A place without true existence, without boundary of ones true self. Yep, Home. S2 racer to be precise. I’m a pretty good judge of character, and I generally make my own decisions about things in my life, what I mean by that is I tend not to ask for much advice on things -- I see things clearly enough. But that’s my hallmark of a best friend; someone I value enough to actually listen to, and entrust with the problems of my life to want to seek their advice. It’s more than just that though, the guy I’m talking about is about the most amazing man I’ve met in my life. Where he’s come from, where lives, the stuff he has to deal with on a daily basis -- I cant have anything less than admiration for him. It’s maybe a reflection of the struggles I see that bonds it -- I’m not entirely sure. But I’ll say this; even though we’ve never “really” met in the real world, if it came down to it, I’d trust him with my life.
Yeah Norse, you got the bull’s eye. As long as he’s around, I won’t be leaving Home.
I’ll be lying if I say my BEST friend is on home. I met Martin in high school we were 16… 26 years ago.
But I do have some really close friends on home. When I think of leaving home, or whiping out my friend list because it start to feel like a burden. I look at those few names and think. I can’t do that.
I met some amazing persons on home. When they spend a few day on a disc game, I miss them. Yes friendship is the reason why I’m still logging on daily, even if feel more like being alone.
I don’t know. One I feel more comfortable with than anyone else. Others not friends but who I admire because of what they say or do, communication or music, even if I don’t know them well.
Growing up I had friends of which three I felt most comfortable with. Knew them for years after and though we hadn’t seen each other in years we could talk about something as if we had just seen each other the day before. But there were other friends too through the years when I got older. Sometimes friendships end. One in the Army I haven’t heard from since then but we had some things in common.
On the internet there were friends who either went their own way or died, kind of like real life.
But there was one who was one of the best friends I had ever had even though we never met. Music was part of the key, we were in tune as she might say. She died.
Sometimes I think on friendship never mind, that Eric Von Zipper was right when he sang I Am My Own Ideal. I might have said that jest to be funny but there be a bit in truth in it.
Ya’ made me think, Norse. There’s something to be said for that.
I too have a best friend on Home. And an overwhelming majority of my good friends are on Home and many of them are staff members of this magazine. I have grown less and less social in real life. But I become more and more social in Home. I have worked at TV stations that paid very low and didn’t treat their employees that well. But the employee stuck around because we were family, closer than friends. I have talked for many hours of my shrinks about my life on Home. And they tend to agree with me. The friendships I make on Home are just as real as the ones I would make in real life. The emotions, the interaction, the love and the experiences are just as real as anything I could experience in real life. The only real difference is the difference between 2-D and 3-D. I can not reach out and touch my best friend in a tangible way but I can on an emotional level and with love and with humor and even with drama.
when looking up the definition of friend or friendship, nowhere does it mention the environment you must be in to achieve that.
I have lost friends on Home. One by death, a few by disagreements or misunderstandings and some from growing apart. All of these affected me in my real life in a real way. I have a dear friend that is on hiatus from Home that I miss dearly. My best friends real-life commitments has kept her off home quite a bit and I miss her.
Some may argue that home is just a game or a gaming platform, some may say it’s a social network like Facebook or even Twitter. To me Home is aptly named.
The answer to that question is yes for me. I have a couple of very good friends in Home and have actually been able to become a best friend with at least two of them, though they may not see me the same way, I don’t know. These are people I can talk to about the real world stuff I have going on and feel free to do so. We have had very good conversations about a lot of different things, the trivial to the important. I feel I can trust them, though we have never met and probably never will. In a way that gives me a freedom I don’t have in life with my real world friends, but I do have a couple of best friends in real life as well.
The difference is that my “virtual” friends understand Home and all of its complexities, and since it is also a big part of my life right now it helps to have that as well. My real life friends don’t get it at all.
Great read as always Norse.
Yes, & I thank gawd for that blessing daily.. sometimes more. I am still amazed I went thru my life/ soany yrs, thinking so-n-so was my bff.. & to get so hurt/betrayed.
To have found like minded, generous spirits, with such kind souls, & SO much in common with me has been.. well, frankly a godsend.
& I have PSNHome to partially, yet seriously Thank for that.
Kudos on the well written article.
~min
Great article Norse. I do have a best friend that I also love. She is a great person in real life as we communicate outside of Home. But she is a person that has made Home mean so much to me. We do things together and have so much fun. There are the down times when something goes wrong in real life for one of us and we remember that we are together outside of Home. It is fun to roam the new places with that person, and it gives some places real meaning. I have been alone here in Home, and it’s a fun place when you walk alone. When you get a friend though, or a love, it is 10 fold better. I do feel bad for those that are with out friends, and need them, I have bbeen in that time of a lonely walk.
Norse I kind of think that you have a narrow view of why some one would leave- if I were if I were offered a chance to sail around the world or even race for a living I doubt I would give dropping my ps3 a second thought- or if I got a chance to be acoorespondent writer- or if I was going to go to law school or med school or grad school… I would leave for financial reasons as well- if I was marrying an executive and needed to manage a household- it is very importan to remember hat PSH is not thereal world for most of us- I have met many people on PSH that I am very close to but most of them I can contact by other means besides PSH -- and I guess I have always sort have been abnormal because I met my best friend in real life at my job- she hated what she was doing and moved on -I was happy for her -- I stayed because I like what I do. But working together was not the deciding factor in our relationship- in the same way, though home facilitates my good friendships it is not the decideing factor in my maintaining my personal friendships. And because I have a social net work on the outside I dont think I need home exclusively for a social life. -- just a thought.
A very nice read Norse. I do like these articles that rekindle dormant thoughts that get forgotten along the way, that help us to remember things that are starring us right in the face on a regular basis. I do have meself a best friend on Home, always warms the heart to see this person trundle along into the Home world. But is this someone I would stand up and say ‘I am Spartacus!’ for? Well… hmm… maybe. -sips coffee and reads the fine print- At any rate, a best friend on my friends list this person is. Someone who, when the real world environment is starting to overwhelm, I can go to and forget the world for an hour or two (and even when it’s not.) From a chance meeting, to many conversations and emails since, it’s been a joy to share thoughts and nonsense, and look out for each other with this individual. I may never get to meet this fellow human face to face, but I’m thankful for the bods at Sony who thought this Home thingy would be a good idea, and giving myself and many others the chance to interact in this way. Thanks again Mr Norse!