“Had our ancestors been asked to predict what would happen in an age of widespread prosperity in which most religious and cultural proscriptions had lost their power, how many would have guessed that our favourite activities would not be fiery political meetings, masked orgies, philosophical debates, hunting wild boar or surfing monstrous waves, but shopping and watching other people pretending to enjoy themselves?”

–George Monbiot

by NorseGamer, HSM Publisher

This is probably the strangest article I’ve ever written at HomeStation, because as I write it there’s just no way that I can avoid the fact that I’m a Home developer now — and once you’ve gone behind the curtain, a lot of “why aren’t things like this?” questions are answered with, “Oh, NOW I get it.” Of course, you can’t reveal those specifics, because there’s four metric tons of NDA paperwork and an unmarked white van parked outside your house.

But a question came up at a recent HSM production meeting which has been rattling around inside my skull, and try as I might, I can’t quite banish it:

“Did all our (the community’s) feature requests effectively kill the magic of what Home was?”

At first glance, this seems like a ludicrous question. I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who would argue that Home 2007 was a superior product to Home 2014. It’s important to not rose-tint the past: Home, when it launched, had precious little to do and even less in the way of built-in functionality. Over the years we’ve become so accustomed to the farrago of services and features piled atop Home’s core architecture that it would be jarring if they were all suddenly removed.

And yet.

It does seem to be a sentiment that’s unusually pervasive throughout the community. I don’t necessarily agree with it — I remember what Home was five years ago, and I vastly prefer Home today — but to an extent, I can understand it. Just as I find myself spending time replaying games like Vanguard Bandits — a ridiculously simple PSOne S-RPG — from time to time, so too can I see people looking back on the experiences they used to have in Home and think that Home today is missing something. And no, they might not be able to give specifics. If you were to ask me why I prefer yesteryear’s games (with their crappy graphics, annoying music and more) over some of today’s offerings, all I could do is shrug and tell you that the experience is just better. It’s an intangible, in the same way that you’d prefer an evening dinner with Jennifer Saunders instead of, say, Tamara Beckwith.

Look at Home now. A sea of time sinks, all vying for your attention. As Jersquall pointed out, Home has given us damn near everything we wished for. And here we sit, at the epicenter of a living room carpet festooned with completed Lego sets, complaining that there’s nothing to do.

But, for some, it was so much more fun when that carpet was strewn with Lego pieces everywhere, and the manual was nowhere to be found, wasn’t it.

Here’s the problem, as I see it: because Home in its early days had so little to offer, it attracted a specific psychographic core userbase. As Home has grown and matured, it spent years chasing after a much larger audience, largely at the expense of people who were already monetizing what it was.

Let’s take glitching as an example: while glitching is the result of bad code and should be fixed, the core user behavior behind the activity should be examined. In this case: people want to explore. So glitching’s largely patched up now, allowing for more robust gaming experiences which should in theory attract a larger crowd, except that there’s a core group of (monetizing) people who now feel hemmed in — that they can only explore within prescribed limits. Motivation gone.

(I should point out, by the way, that I’m referring to some of yesteryear’s minor glitches, nothing more serious or damaging than that. Glitches of all types are bad and need to be fixed. But it did create an interesting meta-game that people enjoyed.)

Let’s take another example: fams. In a social metaverse with no clearly defined purpose, people will naturally segregate themselves into tribal units. That’s basic sociology. But then what? Action drives unity, satisfying both the need to belong and the need for significance. And so we see these occasional ridiculous fam wars in Home, if one is so inclined to go looking for them. On paper, the solution is to remake Home into a gaming platform, offering up separate districts build around gaming genres, and create a central gathering place which psychologically encourages people to move along, rather than stay put and congregate. The catch, though, is that this again undercuts the ability for core monetizing social users to achieve the motives that are driving them. What’s the use in belonging to something if no one else outside your group knows or cares about it?

From a business standpoint, all of the decisions which brought Home to this point make perfect sense: patch and stabilize the system, reinvent it as a gaming platform to attract a wider audience, and then retrench into social commodities/services once you hit a maturation phase instead of a growth phase. The catch is this, however: because Home had no clearly defined hook — seriously, it’s not good when people keep asking, for years, “What IS Home?” — it had no clearly defined path to monetize and self-sustain. This wouldn’t have been an issue had Home, instead of the XMB, been the GUI for the PS3. Then Home, conceptually, would have made perfect sense: you boot up your console and you’re Home. From Home, explore whatever external game you’ve purchased — and even game launch with friends — and then return Home when you’re done to hang out and socialize. Granted, this would have more or less required always-on connectivity, which is why Home was, conceptually, at least one full console generation ahead of its time.

Had Home been the true centerpiece of the PS3 user experience — because you automatically would’ve been inside it as soon as you booted up the console — then this would be a very different conversation. Lord knows, there’d be no shortage of advertisers lined up for the freemium service. Remember that virtual Ford dealership from a few years ago? Yeah. More of that — and beyond.

But, sadly, that’s not what happened. As a result, Home needed to have specific reasons to go to it, instead of everyone simply starting off inside it. And that, to me, is Home’s greatest challenge: the difficulty in creating sufficiently enticing reasons for someone on a disc-based gaming console to go out of their way into Home. The solution, unfortunately, would have required a massive financial investment and nearly a complete clean-sheet redesign of the service.

What’s that solution?

Simple. Home itself should have been a game.

No, not a gaming platform. A game unto itself. With an internal currency, tasks, achievements and rewards.

Look at the social behavior of Home’s core userbase. They’re trying to turn Home into a game. Through glitching, fam fighting, interior decoration, et cetera — people are generally playing social meta-games inside of Home over longer periods of time than the more formal games Home has to offer, because the motivation is to make Home itself a game. And up until very recently, this really hasn’t been overtly catered to beyond fashion and furniture. The core behavioral drives — the desire to explore, to belong and to feel (and be seen as) significant — have largely gone ignored. The reason for this, from my perspective, is simple: reworking Home to be a proper social MMO would be too prohibitive, both in terms of cost and logistics, to pull off. That sort of stuff has to be planned from the very beginning.

This, by the way, is not a criticism of the people at SCEA/SCEE responsible for Home today. I know them and work with them. It bugs the hell out of me when I read someone say, “Oh, they don’t care about us.” That’s a crock of BS. They’re good people with a driving desire to make Home the best it can be, working with what resources are available to achieve those ends. No, this goes all the way back to Home’s initial conceptual rollout and earliest development. To quote Joe Straczynski, the avalanche has already started; it’s too late for the pebbles to vote.

This inherent weakness in Home — its lack of a centralized gaming experience unto itself — has really become evident in the last six months. Grand Theft Auto Online and the reworked Final Fantasy XIV, as MMO experiences, offer a lot of the gaming elements which Home lacks (in particular, the PvP element which is so crucial). And with precious few outlets for in-world user-generated content (this publication being one of those outlets, we’re proud to state), which is a staple of most social MMO experiences, it really does create an interesting dilemma.

To Sony’s (and in particular HPG’s) credit, they’re doing what they can within what’s available to offer up new features that cater to these core needs. The challenges system is an excellent addition. The media reader, likewise, helps make this virtual world feel like a living, breathing, dynamic environment. And there’s some interesting stuff on the 2014 roadmap for Home which I think will excite a lot of core users. Beyond that, though, I keep wondering how to further recapture that certain intangible magic of Home’s earlier days. It’s an odd paradox: the less you give to someone, the more they seem to do with it. Slash, the former Guns N’ Roses guitarist, largely taught himself to play guitar by training on a broken instrument that had only one string. So he learned how to take that one string and make music out of it. Now add in five more strings, and it’s easy to see why he’s one of the best guitarists on the planet.

So far, the best idea I’ve got to try to monetize the Home nostalgia dollar is to release a deliberately “broken” estate — something which initially looks conventional, but comes with invisible collision barriers and all sorts of odd hidden areas, replete with Easter eggs that conveyed virtual rewards if found. It’d be a nightmare for Sony QA (whichever developer built the scene would have to include very detailed instructions and schematics on what’s supposed to be “broken”), and from a design standpoint it certainly wouldn’t be cheap to pull off, but it would also create a video game experience with mass appeal that you just couldn’t find anywhere else, and that’s what Home could really use.

Huh. More than sixteen-hundred words into this, and I just realized that a lot of what I’m trying to say was conveyed much more succinctly by Ron Moore’s scene from “Relics,” when Scotty and Picard compare the experiences of being on their respective Enterprises. I guess it’s as good a way as any to wrap this up.

Here’s to Home. Though Home is just one part of my daily production duties at work, it’s still a warm-fuzzy when I launch it on a dev kit and see that logo light up. Even after all these years, Home’s still going strong, and long after it’s gone at some point down the road, there’ll never be anything else quite like it. Cheers.

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4 Responses to “Too Many Features?”

1. Burbie52 says:

   January 22, 2014 at 10:54 am

   I agree largely with your assessment here Norse. As I have become embroiled in my first “true” MMO, FF14, I can see what you are saying about the lack of ingame money and the ability for users to create within a gaming structure. Even when what you create has limits, you still get a lot of satisfaction in doing it and selling it in the market.
   Home has all of its meta games, many of which I enjoy, but without any reward for what you create other than those given by users themselves through the gift machine for your efforts and your own self satisfaction, it can get old and Home’s creative abilities are very limited.
   Of all of Home’s meta games I think that decorating, fashion and especially glitching apartments are the most creative. You are given a set bunch of tools and you have to be creative to make the final results your own.
   I do hope they consider porting Home to the PS4, but if not I will still use it until it ends and I will be happy for all that it gave me while it lasted. I will have FF14 and other games to get involved in as time goes on, but like Scotty in the clip, I will also be happy to move on when I have to. Good read.

   Reply
2. Godzprototype says:

   January 22, 2014 at 4:33 pm

   Whatever happens, I am glad to have had all the experiences I have had in Home. Both with all the people I had the pleasure of experience with.
   The developers I have come to know and appreciate.
   I will be watching those developers in their new endeavors with all of the best.
   Glad to call you friend Norse. Great clip there!

   Reply
3. Gary160974 says:

   January 26, 2014 at 8:47 am

   People forget home is a business first and they need to make money. This they dont care attitude comes from too many developers treating users like friends and then when something goes wrong treating the user like a customer. If a developer truly cared they would fix they spaces that have issues. But its not cost effective to, so they don’t. But this also effects the choice when you want to do something on home as you have to either search it because itd been neglected and forgotten. Its broken, it takes too long to load. The changes home has made have been to drive it in a certain direction but away from what makes a social chatroom successful. Every online game out there can be social. I’ve sat on the beach in midnight club in my done up car. I’ve rode across RDR as a posse all with friends. Why would I go on home takes 5 minutes to load, goto space takes 5 minutes to load to pay to play an inferior game which could take several minutes to load. Social chatrooms of this are more successful the simplier they are, home just keeps getting complex.

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4. Danger_Dad says:

   January 27, 2014 at 4:30 pm

   ;^) This was a good read, Norse. Thanks. Especially, anything with a Star Trek reference is welcome.

   :^/ I recall that a huge portion of what I enjoyed about my earlier days on Home had been finding ways to be more creative with my furniture layouts. Thinking outside the box, if you take my meaning. But patch after patch to Home’s core have taken some of the utility out of my layouts. My designs had been dependent upon features that were later removed.

   I agree with your main thesis that less is more. Give a child a videogame, and he has to follow its rules, as the game enforces them. But if you give him a box of crayons, he’s free to draw anything, not imposoig any limits on himself at all.

   ;^) Heh. If he’s young enough, not only will he not stay in the lines, he may even leave the page altogether, drawing on the walls…. Home needs more of that.

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