A new virtual world: Home by Sony
May 28th, 2007 by vi
… Virtual consumption and consumer aspiration are at the heart of Sony’s plans for Home, a new virtual world which will be released as a downloadable application for the PS3. Sony has shown off some footage of the world, which allows users to interact with their friends online using avatars who look very much like the mall rats you see in Gap adverts, trainered and T-shirted babes and hunks posing about in casual attitudes with faux-skater cool. It’s all very clean-cut, corporate and safe. Users can furnish virtual apartments, invite their friends around to watch videos and game footage, and do simpler versions of many of the things already available in existing virtual worlds such as There.com, Second Life, and Kaneva.
I was fascinated to watch Home being dismissed by one of the editors on the 1UP show, a brilliant video podcast on gaming. The 1UP show is a delight: a well written, cleverly crafted, funny and entertaining soap opera that wittily frames excellent video game reviews within amusing vignettes and scenes about the games-mad twentysomethings who are livin’ the dream as full-time games reviewers in the US. They’re young, hip, and in San Francisco, and have all the appropriate geek obsessions: relentlessly informed and passionate about games, in a world in which people stage interventions because you’ve not been playing World of Warcraft enough.
In the latest episode one of the characters in the show is extremely dismissive of Sony’s Home. There is nothing exciting or glamorous to her about these unimpressive “mall wandering douche bags” she has seen in the demo footage. In fact, she says, “If I saw these people in real life I would walk the other way.” This made me want to wave my hands about in frustration. Of course she feels that way: she’s got one of the hippest gigs in town, and the world that Sony is offering in Home couldn’t be more vanilla or boring to her. It’s as tragic in its way as that image of the fake Nike sneakers or the forlorn excitement of the Ford Aspire, a fantasy of unironic suburban cool. But to a teenager in Japan, or China, or Eastern Germany, or Russia, or Penrith for that matter, Home may end up representing everything that is sharp and exciting and engaging about truth, justice and the American way: a chance to turn into one of the characters on The O.C., if only virtually, for a few hours a night, in the privacy of your bedroom or at a desk in an internet café.
There’s a kind of virtual consumption involved in writing Nike on your no-name sneakers – you can’t have the thing, but you do your best to manifest the notion or idea of the thing. Virtual worlds like Home and MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach may enable people who can’t afford the experience of being hip young Californians or wealthy suburban teenagers to get some virtual real estate in the empire of cool – to write Nike on their sneakers, if you will. There will be teething problems and technical issues, it will bump along and nobody will notice for a while, but my guess is eventually Sony or someone else will figure it out, on a shocking, massive, global scale.
At this point these platforms will become hugely important as a way for teenagers all over the world to participate in the American fantasy life at a fraction of the cost of the real thing. We all know that the world doesn’t have enough resources to allow everyone to pimp their own ride or grab their own condo, but it only costs a few cents to enable people to pimp a virtual ride or build a virtual condo. The rich and the spoiled in the West won’t see this coming: we’re too distracted by our real toys to see the deep hunger in the world, a hunger that perhaps only virtual toys will be able to satisfy. It may be sad, or it may be ironic: but think for a moment about Sony’s language here. The company is offering the children of the world a virtual Home, and it is one that will ultimately exist to define them by their consumption. Is that really the kind of home we want them to dwell in?
Cited from Times Online.
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