by NorseGamer, HSM Publisher

For years, people have struggled to define the PlayStation Home experience. But there are aspects of Home which are unique (or, at the least, highly refined) and very appealing which can be quantified. I don’t know when the next gaming experience will come along that shoehorns them all in together in the same way that Home does, but if we break them out and discuss them individually, perhaps some future game will offer one or more of these elements.

I. Estates: the user-friendly level editor.

Perhaps the biggest lure of Home is the idea of living inside a video game world, and being able to manipulate that setting in some way. The best example of this is within personal estates and clubhouses.

Up front: one of the biggest mistakes made in the history of Home, in my view, was setting the prices for virtual estates at only five dollars. Virtual estates take a lot of time and money to create, and more importantly, they are the benchmark of the Home economy against which the valuation of everything else is compared. Further, given the significant percentage of virtual goods which are tied to estate ownership — furniture, active items, etc. — I firmly believe that setting estate prices so low at the onset permanently damaged Home’s economy. Yes, you might argue that fifteen or twenty dollars is a lot for a single scene when you compare it to the price of a disc-based title, but given the multitude of hours of enjoyment a scene provides over the years, it’s a bargain. Besides, the marketing spin is obvious: Home gives you the ability to customize an entire video game scene to your personal tastes. Now if that ain’t worth twenty bucks…

Anyway. Moving on. Being able to easily manipulate a scene is enormously fun, and Home offers an unrivaled level of customization for a console gaming experience. In particular, the ease of the UI is a major selling point; whereas in something deeper like an RPG Maker title, which really does take a lot more work to learn the tools, Home’s interface is a masterpiece of intuitive display. (Granted, the actual scene editor that’s part of the HDK is infinitely more complicated.)

Go back and add up how many hours and hours you’ve spent decorating and redecorating estates and clubhouses. It is Home’s preeminent meta-game.

I’m not sure how this can be easily translated out of Home; would a glorified Scene Editor sell as its own game? Perhaps, given the Share features of the PS4, there might be a use case here. In order for it to work as a stand-alone experience, though, the scenes would have to have a lot more functionality built into them. The great downside of Home’s scenes is that once you’re done creating your masterpiece…it just sits there. And suddenly life in a video game world seems all too hollow. A stand-alone video game experience would need to solve this. The whole point of level editor is to run the level once you’re done creating it, after all.

II. Avatar customization.

Frankly, I think we’ve all gotten a little spoiled with just how good Home’s avatar customization tools are. After this many years of working with them, we keep asking for more and more customization options — which isn’t a bad thing, since a social MMO like Home should be very deep on this front — but all it takes is a quick jaunt through other console games which are lauded for their avatar customization features to find that Home, even after this much time, is still way ahead of the curve.

Personally, avatar customization is a big deal to me. Not every game has to have it, no — I have no problem running around as a specific character, when the narrative requires it. But there’s no denying the fact that if I’m given the option to play a game as a character of my design, I’m gonna take it. In particular, Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon’s Dogma are decent on this front, although both fall short of Home. And even newer MMO experiences, such as Final Fantasy XIV and Grand Theft Auto Online, still don’t measure up to Home’s avatar creation tools.

Avatar customization (beyond simple costume packs as DLC) adds a tremendous amount of work to a game’s scope, and outside of RPGs and MMO experiences, it’s not that much of a value-add. Thus, I doubt we’ll see anything as robust as Home’s avatar creation tools for quite some time to come.

III. Glitching.

Before diving in: let’s make a clear distinction between harmless glitching and malicious user behavior which compromises the system or adversely affects another user. The two are most assuredly not synonymous.

I’ve never personally gotten onto the glitching bandwagon, but I completely understand its appeal: the meta-game of trying to escape from the confines you’re supposed to play in, and what might lie on the other side. In a conventional video game, absolutely no part of it should be vulnerable to glitching; while the same may be technically true of Home, it is also true that glitching in Home revealed that one of Home’s most appealing pseudo-features is the ability to violate the normal rules of physics in a virtual world.

At the office, we’ve sometimes talked about the idea of creating and releasing a deliberately “broken” scene — as an obstacle course for users to explore. It’d be a nightmare for Sony FQA to test — we’d have to supply detailed instructions on what the space was supposed to allow — but our gut instinct tells us it’d be a bestseller.

The challenge with programming and designing a game experience in which the normal laws of physics don’t apply is that it adds tremendously to the technical logistics of a project. Home glitching started as a sort of happy accident (to borrow from Bob Ross), and while as a developer I understand the need to have root causes removed which allow glitching to happen, there is something about the magic of user exploration and going where one ought not to which makes Home so unique.

I’m sure there are other aspects of Home which are responsible for its enduring appeal to the core group of social users who continue to populate it; what’s interesting to me is that conventional gaming isn’t one of them, insofar as I can see. The magic of Home is when Home itself is turned into a game, and it’s a unique experience that I haven’t quite found anywhere else yet.

Share

3 Responses to “Quantifying the Magic of PlayStation Home”

1. Gary160974 says:

   May 22, 2014 at 5:41 am

   Avatar and estate customisation is a massive part of portraying virtual life, home and homes pc counterparts such as second life and imvu make a massive deal over it.. So do certain games like the Sims. All apart from home though have the ability to show your estate creations off to the community built into them. And homes counterparts such as second life and imvu have a far greater customization of avatars but these customizations tend to be micro transactions. Clothes wise again for a small fee I took a picture in home and put on a t shirt in IMVU. These little meta games are great fun and will be part of users virtual life’s. It’s a great feeling when you create a public space like I did on another virtual world and get traffic all saying how good it is. Certainly any pc based virtual life will have these. Glitching is uniquely home as nearly every other virtual world I’ve been in, is either too restricted or has too much freedom. When you can fly like superman or can only stand in certain spots there’s no real way to glitch. Although the customisation isnt uniquely home as I said before it’s probably the biggest reasons why any of us visit virtual worlds. That and the other users.

   Reply
2. Kassadee Marie says:

   May 23, 2014 at 7:21 pm

   I think $5.00 was the perfect price for those cookie-cutter box estates, but as soon as more features were offered the prices should have gone up more than they did. As an example, LocoIsland is easily worth $10.00 on it’s own. By now estates with features such as those offered by Granzella or Game Mechanics would be easily accepted with a $20.00 price tag.

   Reply
3. Aeternitas33 says:

   June 16, 2014 at 7:33 pm

   Estates, avatar customization, glitching… while all of these are things which can be monetized, not one of these explains why I became a regular Home user. All of these things can be used to create a house, but they can’t, in and of themselves, create a “home.” People make a Home.

   Reply