Will you feel at home in PlayStation Home?

Winda Benedetti Citizen Gamer • E-mail

If there's one thing that Sony's new Home experience proves, it's that if you give people an opportunity to interact with each other in an almost totally anonymous virtual world, they will do one of two things:

A)     Act like creeps

B)     Dance like they've never danced before

OK. Perhaps some of them will do what they were meant to do – which is hold polite conversations with one another and invite each other to play video games and otherwise share their mutual love of all things PlayStation.

But believe you me … if you walk into Home wearing a female avatar (because, you know, you actually happen to be a female in real life), you better be prepared to be approached by packs of dude avatars who will, literally, surround you and say things like:

"u r hot"

"nice rack"

"you look hot"

"are you a guy or a gay?"

"you are hot!"

"hope you don't mind being the meat in dis sandwich"

That last comment they'll say while performing what can only be construed as some kind of digital mating dance. The running man. The robot. The body pop. Yes, they will perform any and all of these dance moves in very close proximity to your avatar and with great persistence.

Last Thursday, Sony launched the open beta for Home – a 3-D virtual world that anyone who owns a PlayStation 3 can visit for free. It is at once a grand, fascinating experiment in virtual community and social gaming … as well as a theater of the absurd.

It is a place where people get together and connect over the games they love … and it's also a testosterone-fueled meat market where the men massively outnumber the women. It is absorbing, cool and frequently hilarious. But it also feels, at times, like a world where the madhouse inmates have been set free to run amok.

Welcome Home
“The interest in PlayStation Home has been off the charts,” Jack Buser, Sony’s director of Home, told me earlier this week, though he declined to reveal any specific numbers.

A visit to Home during this, its first week open to the public, certainly reveals a place bustling with visitors – even into the wee hours of the morning.

What Buser will say is that, "Home was born out of this need for a social network for gamers. The idea was that we could provide this extremely realistic, immersive environment that would allow people to get to know one another. When you meet someone in Home, and you hang out with them … you really start to feel like you know this person. And that was our hope – to enable people to form deep relationships."

Sony Your home inside of Home comes with a spectacular water view. But if this harbor-side apartment starts to feel a little cramped, you can always pick up an additional summer home for a mere $4.99.

To that end, when you start Home for the first time you'll be introduced to an easy-to-use tool that allows you to build a virtual version of yourself  to represent you in this virtual world. You’ll also be given a private apartment (with a water view no less) to decorate as you choose.

But the meat of Home is in the public spaces where you and dozens of other players can run around, chat with each other, and explore.

There's a bowling alley where you can knock down pins or shoot pool with your fellow gamer. There’s a theater where you can check out trailers for movies and games.

Scoot over to the mall and you can buy a new shirt or new pair of shoes for your avatar for a mere 49 cents. You can also purchase a swank summer home for $4.99. Sony is counting on these micro purchases to add up to mega business … but just in case buying stuff isn’t your bag, the mall features an alcove where you can play chess against other Home visitors.

Meanwhile, there are several locations created around themes from specific games. For example, there's Sully's Bar – an atmospheric watering hole from the game "Uncharted: Drake's Fortune” that doesn't have a drop of virtual booze but does have some locked doors that can be opened if you sleuth your way through the clues scattered ‘round the place (or, easier yet, if you do a Google search for the unlock codes). The locked doors lead to other "Uncharted" themed rooms – all of this designed to provide some entertainment … and to pique your interest in purchasing and playing the game.

But perhaps the most popular socializing space is the central plaza, an outdoor environment complete with a reflecting pool and performance stage. It is here that you'll find your fellow Home visitors discussing important topics like the tenuous state of Russia/Georgia relations or the pros and cons of a $14 billion auto industry bailout.

Oh, who am I kidding. Mostly you'll find people dancing … and hitting on each other … or doing both at the same time.

Do the locomotion
Buser says they initially gave the avatars the ability to perform a few dance moves, thinking it would be sort of like giving them emoticons. “We really did not expect for it to become such a popular aspect of the Home experience.”

Popular is an understatement. Stroll through Home and you’ll find people spontaneously getting their groove on in just about every possible location – the central plaza, the bowling alley, the theater. You’ll find them dancing the salsa around the chess players in the mall. You’ll find them doing the cabbage patch behind a rusted out train in the “Far Cry 2” themed space.

During a late-night visit to the central plaza, I came upon some 20 people lined up around the reflecting pool performing the running man dance and desperately trying to convince passers-by to join them. Check out YouTube and you’ll see that trying to form the longest conga line possible has become one of the more popular pastimes in Home.

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