Home and the Seven Deadly Sins
by SealWyf, HSM Editor
The topic came up in an HSM staff meeting. Someone had heard that there had been objections from the hyper-religious to having Harry Potter in Home.
It was Satanic, they said. It was sinful.
We were surprised, and a bit incredulous. Someone asked, “Why would people like that be in Home in the first place?”
The question puzzled me. I had never thought that Home itself might be seen as morally reprehensible — a virtual-reality bed of sin and corruption. But Home is full of human beings, and humans are prone to moral failings. In it a way it would be surprising if there were not sin in Home.
The varieties of immorality were codified in the Middle Ages as the Seven Deadly Sins — Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy and Pride. Why precisely seven? The Medieval mind was attracted to meaningful numbers. The number of sins could just was well have been six, eight, or twenty-two, but seven is comfortable, even if some of them now seem to overlap.
The Medieval mind was also embedded in a feudal universe — one that was based on a hierarchy of authority. Times have changed, and what was once a sin may now seem like a virtue. So the Seven Deadly Sins can now be seen as an amusing relic of an outdated mindset, like Tarot cards and the British royal family. But they can still serve as a rough framework for reprehensible behavior. Human beings have not changed all that much since the Middle Ages.
So, without further ado, here’s my take on the Seven Deadly Sins, as they apply to PlayStation Home.
Lust
Lust, as a sin, applies not only to sex, but to any strong desire. Home certainly has its share of desires, but it’s sex we think of when we speak of lust, so that’s where I’ll focus my attention.
Sex is part of Home’s culture by design. Despite the intention that Home should be safe for 13-year-olds, there often seems to be a running competition among developers to show as much skin as possible. And Home’s users are only too happy to take them up on it. But virtual nudity is not really the issue here. We can each choose to embrace or reject it. The real problem is people forcing their real-world lusts and fantasies on others.
Home is full of people, usually young males, who are looking for love (or at least a hot mic-and-cam session) in all the wrong places. Sexual trolling is one of the hazards of Home, and can range from persistent dancing on top of your avatar, to virtual faces stuck in your crotch, to suggestive PM’s and XMB notes. Any person who chooses to come into Home as a female will have to deal with this.
Understand we are not just talking sex here. Dressing up in skimpy bikinis is more of a fashion statement than a sin, and there are plenty of consensual romantic relationships on Home. The problem is forcing lust and unwanted attentions on random people.
Whether this behavior is actually about sex is a valid question. Like much real-world sexual violence, Home sexual harassment is probably more about dominance than sexual desire. But, whatever its psychological underpinnings, this definitely falls into the sin column. It’s also against Home’s Terms of Service. And, if you do it, you can be banned.
Gluttony and Greed
Gluttony is the sin of consuming to excess, to the point of satiety and waste. It’s usually applied to food, but can be any form of excessive consumption.
We don’t have actual food in Home, but we do have other goods that set themselves up to be desirable, and we can become obsessed with acquiring them. In this way, Gluttony in Home merges with Greed (which is usually applied to the excessive desire for money and material goods), and so I have combined them here.
The weekly Home update cycle feeds the Gluttony-and-Greed frenzy. Indeed, that’s exactly what it’s designed to do. Every week brings a new flood of publicity from Sony and the third-party developers. PR releases spread through the Forums and the blogosphere, and tantalizing images appear on the developers’ Facebook pages. Sometimes items appear first in another Home region, or in the preview section of x7, further building up consumer desire.
The publicity drumbeat swells in a grand crescendo until Wednesday morning, when Home comes back online from its weekly maintenance, and new content drops. This is when the PSN cards come out and we all go to the Mall, evaluating the new content and deciding where to spend our real-world cash.
Most of us end up with buyer’s remorse afterwards — if not for every purchase, at least for some of them. Or we may enjoy an item for a week, and then forget it, dropping it into the darkest corners of the inventory Storage bin. Those of us who have been on Home for a while have hundreds or thousands of items we don’t care if we never see again. They just sit there, cluttering up memory, and wakening a vague sense of regret whenever we are forced to look at them.
This regret — the guilt of unneeded acquisition, the remorse of foolish spending — is why gluttony and greed are sins rather than merely financial inconveniences. To avoid them, we all need to be careful shoppers. This is where Kassadee Marie’s regular “On a Budget” columns can come in handy. But, mostly, we just need to exercise some self-control. I know — that’s easy for me to say. When it comes to Gluttony and Greed, we’re all sinners.
Sloth
Sloth is not just laziness — it is neglecting things that need to be done. The core of the General Confession in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (or at least the edition with which I grew up) states, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us.” You can’t find a better definition anywhere of the state of sin.
The real moral hazard of Sloth lies in the existence of Home itself, or indeed any form of gaming. These things can be addictive, and they can pull you away from real-life obligations. Running Orbs in Aurora may sometimes be tedious, but it’s way more fun than doing the dishes.
But even in Home, Sloth is an issue, though it goes by a different name. Because Soth is also the curse of of Boredom — the lack of anything to care about, or energy to go out and find it. How often have you seen people complaining in Home that they are bored? How often have you heard them excuse trolling behavior by saying “I’m bored!” (or “bord”, or “board”.)
This epidemic of boredom must be a great frustration to Sony and the developers, who have gone to a lot of trouble to build this playground for us, and stocked it with games and virtual toys. How can we possibly be bored here?
To which I would reply that boredom is, in my opinion, the result of social isolation and lack of goals. If you make friends in Home, time will fly. If you set yourself a goal, you’ll always have something to work toward. And your time in Home will seem pleasant and eventful.
And if that doesn’t work, you can always turn off the PS3 and read a book.
Wrath
It seems like everyone in Home is angry about something.
I see a lot of this, being a member of the Homeling Collective. Because we are different, and stand out from the general crowd, Homelings attract a lot of hostility.
Our haters come in two flavors. First, there are the casual trolls, who are quick to label anything unusual as sinister. “Why do you object to my role-play?” I ask them. They focus on the surface differences — we dress alike, so we must be a cult. We have no hair, so we must be cancer patients. Such people are merely uninformed, and they can often be brought around with patient, intelligent, respectful conversation.
But the second, more dangerous population of the wrathful is the dedicated haters, those who have a definite bone to pick with the Collective. These “principled trolls” are usually ex-Homelings, the ones who didn’t fit in, and either quit or were ejected. But, instead of moving on, they continue to find us responsible for their failure.
The Collective is not alone in being a target. Wrath is directed toward many populations in Home — “noobs”, members of rival fams, women in skimpy outfits, glitchers, people who disagree with your politics, and anyone who is perceived to be cheating. Being angry about something is simply part of the human condition.
Wrath is intimately connected to the sins of Envy and Pride, with which I conclude this survey.
Envy and Pride
I have combined these sins, because they seem to me to be twin sides of the same coin — the need for self-esteem, grown to toxic proportions. Home, like all gaming, encourages pride by celebrating winners. A leaderboard is Pride made manifest, and Envy is what you feel in any position below the top.
There is nothing wrong with a healthy sense of accomplishment, or the desire for greater glory. After all, these emotions are what gaming is all about! If you didn’t envy successful gamers, you would not strive to improve your own play. If you weren’t proud of your own achievements, there would be no point in doing them. And this was true even in the Middle Ages, when people fought real-life “games of thrones” for real-life kingdoms.
It’s fun to win rewards and climb the leaderboards in Home, just as it’s fun to chase trophies in other games. It’s when pride and envy grow toxic that they become sins. They can lead to misery and obsession, neglect of real life obligations, and even cheating.
Pride is not alone in this tendency to corruption. In general, sins are normal human needs and desires gone bad — focused on inappropriate objects or swollen to unhealthy proportions.
Lust is the toxic form of a healthy sexual desire, Gluttony and Greed are extremes of the normal appreciation of food and other material objects. Sloth is the extension of the benign pleasures of relaxation. Wrath can be appropriate as a healthy righteous anger. And Pride and Envy are the perversions of the human need to succeed and excel, to be the very best at what you do.
And so, despite awakening these needs in us, Home is not really a hotbed of sin — it is a hotbed of humanity, with all the good and bad sides of humans laid out and on display.
Perhaps that’s why we love this place so much. Home lays bare our deepest human desires. And, in doing so, it reflects and comments on the real world.
April 16th, 2013 by SealWyf_ | 6 comments
SealWyf is a museum database programmer, who has been active in online communities since before the Internet, and in console gaming since the PS1. In games, she prefers the beautiful and quirky, and anything with a strong storyline. She is obsessed with creating new aesthetic experiences in PlayStation Home.
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Yes! I love this article. What a brilliant piece!!
Home is hardly evil. And I’m not a Harry Potter fan but I’ll say, Harry Potter is just about the farthest thing from evil or Satanic.
WOW! this is a great article, I never thought about it when meeting ppl in home but I’ve met all of these ppl. lol
My Harry Potter experience was watching kids and adults standing in line to read! At a time in America when our literacy rate was in the red, people began reading again. I can’t see it as a bad thing.
I’m always amazed at what people decide to find objectionable. But then I’m amazed at a lot of things.
Great article!
The comparison to Harry Potter and evil is as ludicris as how violent video games make people violent.
That by playing,or viewing it in someway connects you to something sinful.
Home is awesome! We get to at least in some part make believe.
I wonder how many people think they sin when they dream? Or blog about that to anyone.
This should be required reading for everyone in Home who has ever questioned this issue. I hope you will put a link to it in the Forum.
Fantastic read!, love your descriptions of all the many types of sins and characters that you will meet on Home.