A funny thing happened during the transition from last generation consoles to the current. Companies that appeared dead in the water have suddenly taken the world by storm while the console king apparently decided to abdicate without much of a struggle. Now, unlike the current rigueur de jour of Sony bashing I’m not even going to go much into detail about how the mighty have fallen. There are enough fanboys out there assailing the former console champion and just as many diehard supporters. What I will point out however, is that Sony’s Playstation Home Beta that was finally released on Dec 11 after almost three years of development is a true indication at how dyslexic the company has become.

On the face of it all Home can be construed either as a giant leap forward in online social applications or the biggest misreading of on-line portals ever devised. This seems to be the fundamental problem Sony has run head first into during this generation. The PS3 has been designed to be the “anything goes” multimedia center of the future. With the most powerful architecture, blu-ray integration and online hub capabilities the system, on paper, sounds as if it has everything covered. However, this seems to be the case of spreading your resources too thin, which by all accounts has contributed to Sony’s lack of focus on any one given area.

Home, as a concept, sounds like it could be enticing to casual gamers and those who have never been involved in on-line social applications. It is, as planned, a more robust world than Second Life that has greater integration of entertainment mediums such as video games and movies. It is apparent that Sony is trying to tie all their entertainment divisions together in Home to form and accentuate the synergy between their different brands. That is a noble goal to provide a unified space in which to hock their wares while encasing it in an on-line social network.

Installing Home, while it had a few quirks, was fast and easy. Just turn on your PS3, select Home and let the relatively small 77 MB install work. I was presently surprised that the initial installation only needed 77MB but was quickly put off as the next few screens informed me that I had to reserve 3GB of free hard drive space for future updates. Still, unless you are one of the unfortunate PS3 owners who own the now discontinued 20 GB model, this is not so bad.

After it installed I did struggle for about an hour or so as I could not connect to Home servers but as all mmorpg launch days this was not so startling and nothing more than a minor inconvenience. Finally, getting logged in and past the rather long-winded legal disclaimers you get the chance to create your avatar.

Sony has taken the opposite route of both Nintendo Miis and Microsoft Avatars. Instead of super deformed cute representations of yourself, Sony has settled on trying to make their characters as real life as possible. There are tons of options available to customize your toon but to make one truly stand out will take a lot of fiddling around with layers of menus and slider controls. Die hard gamers will no doubt have no problem here but casual gamers are going to be a bit intimidated by this and probably just stick to the basics like changing hair styles, skin colour, hair colour and a few facial features. Whether or not by design or because it was launch day and people wanted to get into Home as quickly as possible I found that every character looked eerily similar once I left my apartment. My initial impression was akin to when I was playing Lineage II and realizing everyone had basically the same body with only a few design choices for different faces.

Although the character creation was robust it also firmly foreshadows the developer’s target market to a fault. No matter what you do there’s no way to change the relative age of a character that seems to be set to the early twenties. There’s just no possible way to make a younger or older character as those options are missing. This strikes me as slightly odd and narrow minded and it makes the entire experience seem as if you are living in area of town right next to the University Campus. With everyone looking similar it’s like a bad nightmare straight out of a science fiction movie where everything is tightly controlled – shades of an Orwellian future indeed.

Another factor that contributes highly to this feeling of similitude is the relative lack of clothing and apparel currently available. It is quite disconcerting to open your clothing options and seeing only six different types of tops and pants. No matter what you choose you are bound to find many people in the same ensemble the moment you step into the world.

After your character has been created and saved to your hard drive the game immediately places you in your sparse apartment overlooking a very detailed marina. Though your apartment feels incredible sterile the view outside on your balcony is stunning and an indication that Home might be able to provide you with a flair for fantasy even though it’s firmly rooted in reality. It is too bad that at this point you can’t go into said Marina but there’s always hope for the future.

Though your apartment is sparse that’s to be expected as this is where, I suspect, most of your upgrading will come in the future. Sony has indicated that upcoming trophy support and item purchases are coming down the line which will provide you with ways to spruce up your joint. Trophy support where you can show everyone how proficient you are in various games is certainly a novel way to boast your prowess and can provide a compelling visual elan to do so unlike Microsoft’s achievement points which merely just show as a number on the screen. However, whether or not people really want to walk into your apartment to see your trophies is another matter that cannot be answered until the feature is implemented. It just seems like Home is adding an unneeded layer of complication for you to check someone’s trophies.

When you are feeling satisfied that you’ve checked your apartment out you can walk to the door and leave and are immediately (after a short load) deposited in the central plaza area. This is where you begin to feel the true potential of Home yet are immediately presented with a multitude of quirks and conundrums that make you begin to think something is amiss. Now, this is still technically a Beta so many features are not implemented or are available with stripped down features so there’s room for improvement but for a product with three years of development time there’s much head scratching to be found.

First off, I’m a long time MMORPG player. I was there when Everquest launched and played till the level cap before even the first expansion. I played Final Fantasy XI as a red mage till I got all my artifact armor and then switched to Lineage II and even RF Online. Finally, I’ve got five level 70 toons in World of Warcraft (all heading to 80 now with the release of Wrath of the Lich King) as well. With all this experience under my belt I was still not prepared for the cacophony of sheer sexism and underage hormonal bile that I found in the first 10 minutes in Home. I am actually astounded that it was so prevalent here even though I’ve played a ton of MMORPGs.

Simply put I can’t stand playing on-line games with a male avatar. Chalk it up to just not liking the male character models (especially WOW where all the human males look like 50 year old geriatrics). Then again maybe it’s just my desire to see the female form on screen. Hey, if I have to spend months of my life grinding away at levels and making money I might as well watch a shapely female form on my monitor than a lumbering hulk of muscle. If anyone remembers the Dark Elf females from Lineage II you’ll know why I chose to make one for that game!

Regardless, I’ve only encountered one occasion during all those games where some idiot tried to “hit on me” and even then a quick brush off or ignore will usually cause the fool to leave. Not so in Home. The moment my female character appeared in the plaza I was bombarded with many “can I please be your friend?” requests. No matter where I walked around the area some prepubescent moron would end up stalking me. Nearly every time I remained stationary yet another fool would come up and try to virtual molest me by using the included canned emotions and gestures. This stuck me as incredibly weird. I’ll chalk this up as being yet another odd consequence of launch day but if it persists I can imagine the real female gamers might just go create male characters in order to avoid this childish behavior.

It gets exceedingly asinine when someone follows you all over the world for no apparent reason. I remembered walking into the virtual cinema to see the trailers playing on the virtual movie screen and sitting down in a chair and I had a plethora of guys sitting next to me trying to ask where I came from. You’d think these people had never seen a girl before in real life – clichéd visions of nerds stuck in their mother’s basement flooded my mind. Surely, it couldn’t be this bad. Still, that’s not Home’s fault but rather a social problem but even my limited time in Second Life was not this grating. Admittedly, I logged on a few days later and the amount of times I encountered these juvenile antics was markedly down but still present. I pity female gamers if this keeps up.

Then again this bad behavior and constant cursing laced with racial epithets might very well be culturally based as I never encountered this once when I logged on the Japanese version of Home. There I could run around without incident. I’ll leave this social perspective on different Home regions and cultures for another day.

Home is split into numerous different areas. As mentioned before you get your apartment and the central plaza but connected to this are the mall, cinema and bowling alley. This is a virtual world after all albeit seemingly sterile and polished. The graphics are pleasant and detailed enough but at this moment there’s really not much life to it which is surprising as all the locations are chalk full of characters milling about. As forum posters and video game outlets have remarked the atmosphere is weirdly chilling in a Logan’s Run / Gattaca / Aeon Flux / A Brave New World kind of vibe. Everything seems too perfect and analogous, a feeling accentuated by everyone looking and dressing alike. To be fair, as content is added characters will no doubt begin to look different.

This does bring up new apparel, furniture and even estates. While there is no doubt Sony might get developers to add some of these items as unlockables in some future games, at present, the only way to get new items is to buy them with real world currency. That’s right, if you want a new pair of pants you’ll have to pay roughly 50 cents to 1 dollar. I’m not going to fault Sony for trying to nickel and dime consumers as other on-line worlds have already done so. Even Microsoft’s Avatars are rumored to be getting the same treatment in future add-ons. Still, 50 cents per clothing item is a bit steep in my estimation for what amounts to nothing more than eye candy on your TV. You are in no way forced to buy anything but if you don’t you’re going to look like everybody else. With scant few clothing options in the first place this virtually guarantees that it is going to be a long time before your character begins to even remotely look different.

Also, as a side note to Home developers, if you intend to stick with this route please make sure to make clothing that is distinct enough from each other. There’s no point to make fifty million colour swap jeans. The same thing applies to furniture. I have a hard time justifying buying a chair just to stick in my virtual home unless you are a player who constantly invites friends into your space. Even then, I have an inkling that your friends would call you various derogatory names for spending your cash on virtual bar stools.

Home’s developers have also made some odd design decisions that detract from the experience even though they are actually mimicking reality. Take the bowling alley or video game arcade machines they have included. At first these seem like interesting distractions you can monkey around with until you realize this is one area where it is too real – if someone is playing the arcade game or every bowling lane is occupied you have to wait in line to play. Waiting in real life is a royal pain in the posterior. Waiting in a virtual line is doubly painful. It makes no sense whatsoever to test a user’s patience when you are trying to make an immersive and enjoyable virtual experience. Yes, it mimics reality but it’s mimicking something no one wants to indulge in. It would make more sense to instance the arcade games or bowling so that you can join or start a game at any time. All this does is cause user frustration leading people into ignoring these features entirely. Alienating the user base is counterproductive and if it continues less and less people will want to log into Home for fear of boredom.

Making matters worse are the games and activities themselves. If you have the patience to wait or just get in with plain luck you’ll find these games as nothing more than pedestrian efforts. In other words, the end product doesn’t justify the time you spent in a virtual line. You’d find a better use of your time by just inserting a blu-ray game and playing after a short minute loading time.

Thus Home is ridden with a lot of design issues that are worrisome. It exudes and showcases what has turned out to be Sony’s Achilles’ heel during the transition to the current generation. The PS3 is the do everything machine and you can easily ascertain each of Sony’s entertainment divisions’ hands in its development. From the inclusion of Blu-ray to placate the movie / DVD arm to the hi-def HDMI output to match Sony’s latest plasma and LCD TVs the system has been designed with media domination in mind. The problem is that it seems that some divisions are not communicating well with others.

Take the arcade/bowling game waiting. A quick call to Sony Online that works on Everquest and Everquest 2 would have easily solved it. Everquest 2 is highly instanced and the people working on it have skills that have been developed painstakingly through the years. This is a group experienced in on-line worlds so it’s odd that they apparently have not been extensively consulted to make Home a better experience.

Home, for all its planned splendor, also seems too segmented. The developers have heavily divided each different part of the world from each other causing a high amount of obtrusive loading that takes you away from the virtual world it is attempting to create. Walking from your apartment to the mall and having to wait longer in loading then it takes to walk the distance is a major pain. Even looking at Everquest 2’s highly instanced zones one can see that each one is huge, filled with a plethora or buildings and/or scenery. In contrast, Home is made up of small areas that require constant loading. This modular approach might make it easy for the developers to add more building content in the future but it would be a real mistake if you are perpetually forced to walk wherever you want to go through a maze of loading screens.

It seems Sony has taken the wrong page out of Microsoft’s old playbook by adding extraneous features and glitz onto an interface that should be simple and elegant. It is fascinatingly ironic that Microsoft’s latest NXE patch has streamlined its online component whereas Sony’s Home has added unnecessary bloat to its XMB interface. Let’s say I want to watch the movie trailer for Twilight. What methods do I have to quickly get what I want? If I have access to a PC I can merely go on-line, probably to Apple’s site or Yahoo movies and either stream the trailer or download it. If I have a Xbox 360 or PS3 I can go to the PS Store or Microsoft Video Marketplace and with a simple click let it download to my console. Now, if I wanted to do it in Home I have to start my PS3, boot Home, walk my character to the virtual cinema to join other people on-line and wait for a less than hi-def trailer that I can’t scale to full screen slowly load. What is the point? Instead of taking mere minutes I have to go through an obtrusive process to eventually see a worse quality version of the same product.

So this begs the question, who or what is Home designed for? It’s easily apparent that those looking for quick and easy access to features will stay far way from this interface. So who will indeed use it extensively? This is a real mystery that no one in the press has found a credible answer. I don’t really know if Sony itself has a clear vision. There’s no doubt Home has become the public whipping boy for the press who have more or less derided its very existence since the first info on it was initially released. The ambition to create a virtual social network is definitely there but the application is adding multiple layers of confusion to wade through to get to easily accessible features. In the age of the Wii and Apple’s minimalist design aesthetic it’s a wonder that Sony has decided to go in the complete opposite direction by investing copious amount of funds to what boils down to a 3D interface that is both user-unfriendly and worse, slow to navigate. The only people who will definitely get a kick out of this are those who are clamoring for a fully 3D environment to see their characters in kind of like a high-tech version of IMVU chat. Even a chat program such as IMVU has more features and user customization than Home has in its current state although both use microtransactions to charge for items. In IMVU’s defense it has a huge array of, let’s say kinky or more risqué, clothing choices. At last check it had over 1.5 million items in its catalog.

Sony’s foray into social networking might attract some users to initially try it out and I’m willing to let it grow and mature as the months go by. Nevertheless, the core elements on display in this open Beta don’t bode well if all that will be added are more buildings and item customization. There are some serious design problems and stumbling blocks present which belie the long development cycle as many of these should have easily been rectified in the Alpha stages.

The concept of a virtual world has been around for many years now and there have been many attempts to create and sustain one. Although Second Life is the standard bearer it’s not exactly a shining beacon of fun. Playstation Home is still in its infancy so there’s plenty of room to grow but virtual worlds should be inherently more enjoyable and provide users with activities and features not available in the real world. Part of the allure of gaming is that it takes you away from reality and places you in fantastical settings where you can be a hero/heroine and save the universe or discover new worlds. Then again, you can be an all-around bad ass if you want ala Grand Theft Auto and mow down innocent bystanders for no apparent reason if that floats your boat.

If all a virtual world does is impersonate reality by having you wait in line you might as well go stand in front of the nearest wall to achieve the same level of gratification. Heck, even a game like EA’s The Sims that has your virtual characters taking a shower and eating dinner provides more escapism since it gives you the ability to mess around with societies' mores by having lesbian/gay couples or giving you the ability to make your character’s bladder explode by denying access to the latrine. Let’s hope that Home’s developers realize this and turn their attention to things that are more than the mundane. If not, Home is going to be a ghost town filled only with pockets of all male on-line chat parties.