I've been playing with Home for a month or so, and I think it's the most realistic-looking implementation yet of a 3-D world — more startling even than Linden Lab's Second Life. (Though in fairness to Second Life, Home is far more limited in scale. There's not much more than a shopping mall with a theater, a bowling alley and an apartment complex. That will change over time, of course.)
Starting today, owners of the pricey PlayStation 3 — there are nearly 17 million of them worldwide — can download the software for free via Sony's PlayStation Network, which connects the game consoles on the Net so users can play one another. Sony is calling the rollout a "beta," meaning Home is still being crash-tested, so buyer beware. That said, this is a pretty stable environment, and I think referring to it as a beta test is a little disingenuous, or a heavy-handed way of saying that Home is a work in progress. Trust me — Home will always be a work in progress. It's a software platform, and will forever be updated. Sony has said that it intends to add and remove features based on whether users use them. (See TIME's list of the top 10 video games of 2008.)
After downloading the software to your PlayStation, you log into Home and create your virtual character, whom you'll pilot around. Using your PlayStation controller, you've got a seemingly infinite array of choices to customize your human. Everything from the height of the cheekbones to skin color and hair (color, texture, length) is customizable — within limits. Want your character to be 8 ft. tall? Forget it. Humans are sized like the real deal. No really enormous noses, either. You want your character to be as obese as a tech-gossip blogger? Sorry, only the slightest of beer guts is permitted in Home. And if you want to create a female avatar, she's got to look like something from Playboy, circa 1968. No Kate Moss here.
Home's aesthetic is like Larry Flynt meets Lake Woebegone: All the men are strong, the women big-breasted and the children — well, there are no children because that would be really creepy.
Your avatar can walk or run. You can go to a bowling alley and bowl too. A drop-down menu even lets you dance, everything from the robot to salsa-style. You can chat via text (clicking out messages SMS-style with the controller or using any USB keyboard) or attach a USB microphone and talk. But beyond that, it's pretty much like a day at the mall.
Sony's obsession with verisimilitude is oddly out of place in a virtual world. And you see that same fixation repeated endlessly throughout Home. It's as if the Sony guys, watching some of the abuses at Second Life, were worried about what would happen if they gave control to the users. But hasn't the past decade, and the past five years especially, been about putting the user in control? Even the iPhone, which comes from the controllingest control-freak company of them all, Apple, is an open platform upon which any developer can build applications. Home could definitely use some of that Web 2.0 thinking.
Yet Sony ignored the whole user-generated thing and has instead created an environment that's as closed, locked down and totalitarian as "the Village," where the Prisoner dwelled. Everything here is too perfect, from the mall, where you can shop for real virtual jeans, courtesy of Diesel, to your virtual home within Home, a gorgeous, modern apartment that you can fill with virtual furniture from the likes of Lignet Roset. Seriously —Diesel and Lignet are among the many who have signed up to be Sony's partners here, and Home is a platform for them to hawk their brands.
If Home catches on, Sony will generate revenue from its partners and provide video gamers a place to hang out, play new game demos, watch trailers of upcoming titles in the virtual theater and even watch real movies from Sony and partner Paramount — and who knows who else. Sony could surely use the money; its PlayStation 3 division has lost nearly $3.8 billion over the past few years. The PlayStation 3 costs $400 and is getting thumped by Microsoft's Xbox, which is twice as popular, and Nintendo's adorable Wii, which has sold four times as many units for the month of October. So a lot is at stake here.
Home could work too. But Sony has got to lighten up and let its users take a bit of control. Open up the platform and understand that people want to feel as if their Home is their castle — not Sony's mall.