Home’s Origins
by Burbie52, HSM team writer
The other day, while perusing the front page of the HSM, something tweeted by Jersquall caught my eye. I clicked on the link and was amazed to find the original Q&A document that Sony had released for potential developers in Home back in March of 2007.
It is a fascinating read, I must say. I think it bears a closer look, to compare what actually has occurred within Home to what the original intentions were.
The first part of the document is just a simple introduction to what Home is: a social platform dedicated to gaming and gamers. What stands out here is the game launching idea, one that while used somewhat in Home, seems to have become secondary rather than the focus of Home. How often do you see people do this anymore? Do you do it yourself?
The next idea they pushed actually came to pass. Many developers have created and now run their own public spaces or lobbies within the community and Home has grown by leaps and bounds because of their input. nDreams, Lockwood, Irem and Hellfire were some of the first, and these have been joined more recently by Digital Leisure, Juggernaut, Granzella and finally Heavy Water, who have been so much a part of the background development of Home that it’s a welcome change to see them flying their own flag. Sony themselves added several places to their original Central Lounge, which of course became Central Plaza.
Then we reach a subject that is still rather prickly within the Home community: the Hall of Fame, otherwise known as the trophy room. It was a place intended to show bragging rights for trophy hunters in outside games, but it was never implemented within Home. So lets examine why this never came to pass. The first thought I have is how would this even take place? As stated in the document the games involved would have had to build a sort of link within their trophy structure to Home directly. This means that some developers would and some wouldn’t, so the trophies displayed wouldn’t necessarily have been a true representation of the player’s accomplishments.
The next thing that comes to mind for me: why is it even a necessity? If someone wants to compare trophies with you, all they need to do is look at your profile or compare trophy lists on the XMB, and they can do it easily. I think they decided this would be a much easier way to show accomplishment than creating a a virtual room for them, and also much more accurate given the limitations of furniture memory in Home.
Also there comes the question of size, and how this concept would be actually implemented. For example, there are some people who have very few trophies because they are more into Home than outside gaming, yet there are others, like my friend King Chile, who have so many they would have to have a space the size of a public area to display them at all. His count currently stands at 9282 trophies; how do you display that? And secondly who would really want to look at all of them to see what he has done? It would take hours, and I doubt that many people, even friends, would be all that interested in seeing it.
The next thing they talk about here is the ability to purchase products in Home, something that quite obviously has happened in a big way, so no reason to talk about it much. But the next one is very interesting to me: the ability to buy tickets for outside broadcast events like concerts and sports while in the Home community. This idea hasn’t really happened at all. We have had representations of sports like the Feva Arena, and there have been non-ticketed events like watching space shuttle launches and the virtual E3, but except for the free-to-watch Macross Concert in Japan, nothing like this has come to Home at all. I guess they decided it wasn’t going to be profitable enough for the developers or the producers of these types of things to attempt sales in the Home community.
Macross concert in Japan
The next thing discussed was the ability to give rewards, which of course has happened a lot. Then the use of Sony’s wallet system to buy things inside of Home. It is interesting to note that they say people would have to do all transactions outside of Home at first, but of course that changed quickly.
The ability to share bookmarked favorite spaces is next. If they mean the ability to follow a friend, then of course that has already occurred, but if it means something else, I am not sure. I think the ability to follow others has always been there, so I wonder what else this cryptic passage could mean.
It it the last part of this section of the document I find the most interesting. It states that users will be given the tools and ability to create their own spaces and content. This has come to pass through Blueprint and Tycoon in a sense, but we still can’t make our own items at all, like people in Second Life can. This may have to do with the memory capacities of Home itself, and perhaps we will see this change when it migrates to the PS4 at the end of the year, something I truly believe will happen eventually.
The rest of the document deals with commerce and partnership issues and policy and isn’t for us as consumers, but there are a few notable items there that do affect us. The first is that they state that Home will be made available on other mobile devices, this leads me to believe that they fully intend to have it on the PS4 as that ability has not been mentioned yet anywhere else.
The second thing mentioned that is interesting is their support for outside products through commercials within Home; this has happened a few times, like when Ford came in, but like I have said in previous articles, I think they need to do more in this realm to help support Home, though they clearly state later in the document that it will always be kept at a “palatable level”.
They also reiterate their intent to allow us to create our own content, and not only that they say we would be able to “auction” our content off to others, be it things we have created or things we no longer want. This has never come to pass, and at this point I doubt it will, at least not on the PS3.
This document is a fascinating look at what Sony intended for Home at the start, and though much has come to pass, it is quite obvious that they created something that became much more than they thought it would. Home is a huge social platform that is used by millions of people to interact with each other all over the world, and most of it isn’t about gaming anymore. Marriages have come from it and many great relationships with people we would have never had the ability to meet if it didn’t exist.
Sony, you have done all of us a great service in the creation of such a wonderful place. And for that I will be forever grateful.
March 3rd, 2013 by Burbie52 | 6 comments
Burbie52 is a 62 year-old published author and founder of the Grey Gamers group within Home. Born and raised in Michigan, she has lived there her entire life, with the exception of a twelve-year residency on the Big Island of Hawaii. She enjoys reading and writing, as well as video games, especially RPG's. She has one son in his twenties.
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I really liked this article Burbie. It shows a kind of “freewill” of something.You can shape and lead something, but many times it follows it’s own path.
Sony obviously didn’t do several of the things listed and I wonder why, but in the end it doesn’t matter because Home followed it’s own course. Great Read!
I believe the intentions were there to jump start many things listed but long term plans changed them. user created items could had changed things drastically. keeping up with that might of been to much for Sony to do. The auction house could of been done to support user created items and supported sales outside of Home in many areas. I also strongly believe the release of certain ”things” were delaid so that Home was not crammed with to much at once. new dances, the ability to build your own spaces and even Core update goodies.
Nice read and break down . Thanks.
I am glad someone reads my tweets burbs
delaid? Is that some term from your hood?
and nice article, this was something that I really am glad I read.
My delayed post here.. Sue, I looked for a edit button.
I enjoyed this article, but it touched on a soar topic for me. I remember when the Feva Arena launched for the Fifa World Cup. I thought that it was a sign of things to come, a place where soccer fans from around the world could come together and enjoy some games and i loved it. The Cup came and the Cup went as did the Feva Arena. But then the Home Make Over Sony Edition occurred and sports fans were treated to an area specifically designed for sports and sports games with its own stadium. But the stadium was a tease. I sits as an inaccessible area while there are major sporting events happening ie: the Olympics, Super Bowl, MLB World Series, Rugby Workd Cup, Stanley Cup, Wimbledon, Champions and Premiership Finals, the list goes on and on. I thought that Sony would have done something with this area by now and from what Sony had originally planned for Home it would be right in line for it. I remain hopeful with the oncoming PS4 we can see some great things come for that area.