One Home, Many Rooms
by NorseGamer, HSM Publisher
It’s amazing to realize how quickly we forget things which we once poured vast amounts of time and energy into. On a whim, I decided to research one such example with a simple Google question:
Whatever happened to AOL chat rooms?
Enter.
Back during the mid-nineties, I spent an enormous amount of time involved in AOL chat rooms. Yeah, I’d had some fun with GEnie and various other sites in the early days of the consumer-facing internet, but let’s call it like it is: the vast majority of the American population got introduced to the internet via America OnLine.
It was, at the time, revolutionary. Via the garbled noise of a dial-up modem running at some ridiculous slow speed, your world and sphere of people you knew suddenly exploded from your geographically-limited base into a chorus of faces whom you would never meet. Personalities, aspirations, hopes and dreams of people from wildly disparate backgrounds, all communicated via electrons.
We take it for granted now. How fast we’ve adapted. Think back to how it was then.
What’s interesting, though, is that just as no one ever saw the complete Battle of the Bulge, so it would be hard for one person to wholly summarize the AOL experience. It was simply different things to different people. I usually frequented the science-fiction areas; my definition of the AOL experience was hanging out in chat rooms and message boards, talking about sci-fi TV shows. There were vast other areas of AOL that I never, not once, entered.
Yet I’m sure that there were just as many people in those areas as there were in mine. People for whom the AOL experience was, say, discussing horticulture. And there was probably no cross-pollination between the two groups. Same AOL — but wholly different experiences.
The same is true of PlayStation Home. It may be one Home, but there are vastly different experiences within it. For instance, isn’t it amazing to think that some people actually define their Home experience as a “fam” mafia simulator? To them, “Home” as an experience is a place to meet with a specific group of people and perform fam-related activities. Back in the very early days of my first forays into Home journalism, I was sent out on assignment to run with a fam and write about it, much like Harlan Ellison’s Memos From Purgatory. It fascinated me: to these people, their definition of Home was completely circumscribed by their group identity with a select number of other users, and the activities they did together. To them, that was Home; take that away, and their definition of Home evaporated.
(It is perhaps important to remember that humans are still inherently a tribal species, instinctually following behavior patterns in order to create psychological comfort in the face of random chaos. Home, as a social metaverse with no purpose, is a truly fascinating sociological experiment to watch. Hence why I’ve stuck around in it for so long.)
Another example of this would be the various groups that have sprung up through Home, based on a specific game or activity. One such group we’ve profiled here at HSM is the Black Hat Squadron, a Novus Prime enthusiast group. I imagine that, to them, the Home experience is primarily based on activities centered around Hellfire’s first gaming foray into Home. Another group that comes to mind is LAIR, which focuses on creating user-generated Alternate Reality Games for Home. I imagine that, to them, Home is viewed as a canvas upon which to create.
All these different groups — all using Home at the same time, but all with wildly disparate definitions of what the Home experience is.
Remember when this was it for Home games?
One personal example: I joined Home the same week that Lockwood released the Sodium Hub. To me, Sodium was Home. It made sense to me: a persistent world with an internal currency, jobs, socialization, and a really catchy single-player game. Had Sodium not been around when I first joined, I frankly might not have stayed in Home; much as I love the idea of a 3D virtual chat room — it’s basically an AOL chat room with a snazzy GUI — the lack of cohesiveness to the environment and the sense that no actions taken mattered in any way created a sense that there wasn’t much reason to be there.
This is why, by the way, Jack Buser was exactly correct when he pointed out that if you put a bunch of gamers in a room and ask them to start talking to each other, that doesn’t necessarily happen. Games themselves are the glue which serves to unite groups of people. The catch, though, is that Home itself isn’t designed as a game; this is why some still hail nDreams’ Xi as Home’s high-water mark, because it was the one time when Home itself became a game and created a unified purpose for all users to experience together. It is, perhaps, why Granzella’s Kikai Machine Empire is so lauded, since it’s the closest thing that’s come along in Home which could replicate that magic. Such lightning may strike again with Digital Leisure’s upcoming Western Village.
(One interesting aside: the EOD viewership numbers are, to put it lightly, eyebrow-arching. And it makes sense: being able to watch free movies and listen to free music with your friends makes the Home social experience extremely entertaining. It’s one of the reasons why LOOT started holding movie nights every weekend.)
It’s just interesting to me how Home as an experience is defined and viewed so differently; it may be one Home, but it contains many, many rooms.
I do wonder what sort of legacy Home will leave, when we get to the point of looking back on it the same way we currently look back on the heady days of AOL. Final Fantasy XIV has some social customization elements that would likely be very appealing to a Home user. And anyone who’s seen the trailer for GTA Online probably had the same reaction I did when they got to the part about buying virtual real estate, customizing avatars, utilizing content creation tools, etc. — that moment of thinking that this is what a Home of the future would (or should) look like.
So many rooms in this one Home. No wonder it’s held our attention for this many years!
August 17th, 2013 by NorseGamer | 5 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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Great article. While I have experienced many different areas of home and make a point to explore new places, my experience revolves around the casino. Lots of fun and the regulars there are pretty tight knit.
LOL! Yes Home was a one room experience to me for a long time. It was certainly the case when we founded The Black Hats.
Novus did for me wath the Sodium Heb did for you. I had no interrest in chat at that time. Never been in a chat room before. I do remember old bulletin board on in green monochrome thou…
I don’t play as much now and I venture a little more in the Home universe. But I know there’s always a place I can call home within Home.
MY station
Nice read Norse. Yes Home is a lot of things to a lot of people, but when you boil it down it still all comes to the same common element in most cases, people.
The reason we come here and the reasons we stay may vary, but it is the people who are the glue that sticks and pulls us back. I would not come into Home if it was a solitary experience. I might have at first when I tried it, but I would have never stuck around long enough to buy my first things if I hadn’t met a great group of people right away.
I think this is true for many of us, all the more reason it is so important for us all to greet new people with open arms and show them what Home is truly about.
True Burbie, I think I’d be going a lot less if it wasn’t for my friends in there. Although I do like to people watch quite often, particularly in Home, where people just do (almost) whatever they want.
The Sodium bar was the place fir me and our group for nearly a full straight year, every, single, day. We just couldn’t get enough of each other! Some of us even met up in RL because of it.
As a lone male who likes seeing humanity at its most raw and “free” though, Home is amazing for just observing; I’ve spent countless hours just wandering its “rooms”, watching this person react to that circumstance, or this group interact with that.
It’s like Jerry Springer and Jerremy Kyle both had an affair with Judge Judy and Home is the unwanted child lol; there’s no drama like Home-drama!
Its part of my playstation experience, I’m very much of the opinion a lot of users missed out on using home to do loads of other social things on other games. As an example how long have we had horses on home, 8 months. I was riding horses and being cowboys with my friends from home, 3 years ago on red dead redemption. We would cruise round in cars in Midnight club with designs created by us. Not race just sit parked at the beach talking on headsets showing off our latest designs. If we wanted to drive round in the same car or fly, gta came to our rescue. If we wanted to dance or hang out at a bar it was back to singstar rooms or scorpios. We’ve hunted each other on uncharted 3, we’ve survived the terror of dead island together. We’ve had friends come and go, ive met people through home orientated web sites. For me home has a part to play, but the whole experience of online gaming and the social aspect of that is what makes the experience great