Phil Harrison's GDC keynote - Home, LittleBigPlanet & more

[-tkf-]

That's the core of it, isn't it? Add in a trophy case and potentially nauseatingly overpowering corporate sponsorship and I think you've summed it up.

You did notice the Games right? Bowling and Pool in 3D and what look like 4 or more classic arcade machines, nothing stops them from keeping adding that stuff to the world. Just as their Sports example showed with basketball stands. Golf should be easy to add in such an enviroment, simple car games, darts, strip poker etc etc. And this is just games. The singstar example where you would meet up with your friends to see share your singstar performances, your best lap in GT. The "virtual" cinema for user provided content and of course sponsor stuff. It was mentioned that you could tag a wall with HTML so it could show a WebPage, hell even CNN could have place in there

 

[Mordecaii]

That's the core of it, isn't it? Add in a trophy case and potentially nauseatingly overpowering corporate sponsorship and I think you've summed it up.

If you want to oversimplify things, then I suppose that World of Warcraft can be summed up as dressing up your character, mindlessly slaughtering things, and chatting. And if that's all it was, then the game would not be what it is today.

Home is a way to share experiences with others, whether they are friends from real life, online friends, or complete strangers. It's a place to enjoy yourself with mini-games, show off the things you've accomplished in a game, and create your own virtual living space. It's a place to interact with others (through chat, cooperative games, sharing of media, etc). It's a place to check out what's new or coming for the PS3 in a much more interactive way than a simple 2D interface. It's potentially a way to experience things not even hinted at yet (such as a virtual amusement park as mentioned by someone earlier in this thread). Basically, it's a way to bring people together in a virtual space for entertainment, social interaction, and other purposes.

So basically, my point is this: If you want to oversimplify Home into dressing up a character, decorating an apartment, and chatting, then it's a shame because Home is really so much more.

 

[Asher]

Far from it: http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=944510&postcount=5

It's different from Xbox Live. Try to look beyond feature set.

I'm completely baffled. I viewed the video and I'm viewing your post, and I'm not sure what's so exciting about this. Home brings the PS3 Network theoretically on par with the capabilities of XBL (or close to, seeing as I don't think you can do anything functional in-game yet).

It's simply not groundbreaking. Home is a combination of some of the features of Xbox Live with a cutesy Second Life-ripoff interface. I would jump up and down with excitement, but I've tried Second Life and I know how much of a novelty this thing is.

 

[Asher]

If you want to oversimplify things, then I suppose that World of Warcraft can be summed up as dressing up your character, mindlessly slaughtering things, and chatting. And if that's all it was, then the game would not be what it is today.

If I were to oversimplify World of Warcraft, it's about dressing up your character and obtaining social status in an online world. The game is what it is today because it's addictive and it's easy to get into and it provides that sense of social status to its players better than any other MMORPG out there. It is in no way comparable to Home or Second Life.

Home is a way to share experiences with others, whether they are friends from real life, online friends, or complete strangers. It's a place to enjoy yourself with mini-games, show off the things you've accomplished in a game, and create your own virtual living space. It's a place to interact with others (through chat, cooperative games, sharing of media, etc). It's a place to check out what's new or coming for the PS3 in a much more interactive way than a simple 2D interface. It's potentially a way to experience things not even hinted at yet (such as a virtual amusement park as mentioned by someone earlier in this thread). Basically, it's a way to bring people together in a virtual space for entertainment, social interaction, and other purposes.

So basically, my point is this: If you want to oversimplify Home into dressing up a character, decorating an apartment, and chatting, then it's a shame because Home is really so much more.

It's not more though -- you keep describing it where I can see you are thinking it's more, but you're just enumerating features that are not specific to Home (eg, chat, cooperative games, sharing of media, see what's new and coming soon, mini-games, etc).

Think of this from a higher level -- the only true difference between Home and XMB/XBL is the fact that it's 3D with avatars.

You may be very thrilled with the idea of hanging out with people in the virtual world to experience all this stuff, but I'm going to bet that if you are, you haven't played on systems like Xbox Live for all the years I have. People are rude, offensive, stupid, and mostly annoying. The only reason I put up with it in online games is due to the multiplayer aspect. I am not enamored with the possibility of watching a movie trailer in the room with a bunch of teenagers calling eachother "faggot" repeatedly, but that's just me.

 

[Carl B]

What *I* think is cool about Home, is that you can share the media/photos on your HDD with others - ostensibly your friends - in a seemless manner integrated into the feaux world surrounding you in Home. To me, that's just cool. You can set up your personalized photos as art, TVs running your videos, and wallpaper based on some GIF you found. None of this requires paying Sony anything, and all the while you can have your playlist coming in to fill your house with music.

I don't know, but I don't think this has been done elsewhere - correct me if I'm wrong. The community features, 3rd party embassies (as I'm calling them), minigames, theatres, stores, etc etc... all of that wraps up into something I feel unique.

Now - maybe some people disagree with me. That's ok.

Let's try to keep the deathmatches to online gaming though, and not forum discussions. Some people (on both sides of the fence) are letting themselves get *way* too riled up here over this thing.

 

[patsu]

I never said it detracts, it just does not compensate for the lack of other features...such as a unified friends list.

Phil mentioned that unified friend list will not be in PS Home 1.0, but it's coming
They will do fine as long as they paint and execute their grand vision. It is futile to harp about 1 missing feature.

The only features Home provides over similar features that can be exposed via the XMB interface is that of the Second Life-like environment. And all I'm saying is there's no real point to hyping that up, as Second Life is similar in its business model to what Home will be like, and it's far from a runaway success.

As I said, Home is interesting but it's far from a system-selling feature.

Wrong and wrong. Home provides the all-encompassing community environment. In short, the "similar features in XMB interface" is provided exclusively by the Home infrastructure. It's part of Home. Without Home, XMB is just a minimalist UI (without the Home icon).

And SecondLife does NOT have the same business model as PS Home. The former charges tier (land) fees, monthly subscription and eCommerce. It is similar to Xbox Live's subscription + eCommerce model. It only shares the same visual elements and some community dynamics with Home.

I'm not including this in my discussion of Home because all of those things are items the competitors already have and will ideally be available via the XMB as well.

I'm referring to the 3D environment aspect of Home, which is the differentiating feature of Home vs XBL.

In a community play, the whole is more than the sum of its part. Stripping it apart to analyse does not make sense. Focusing only on the 3D environment is missing the point altogether. You have not understood the essence of Home yet.

EDIT:

I'm completely baffled. I viewed the video and I'm viewing your post, and I'm not sure what's so exciting about this. Home brings the PS3 Network theoretically on par with the capabilities of XBL (or close to, seeing as I don't think you can do anything functional in-game yet).

It's simply not groundbreaking. Home is a combination of some of the features of Xbox Live with a cutesy Second Life-ripoff interface. I would jump up and down with excitement, but I've tried Second Life and I know how much of a novelty this thing is.

Read the "Net Gain" book on the social and business dynamics. Your business points in this thread stand on loose sand (e.g., claiming that PS Home has the same business model as SecondLife). For the nth time, PS Home only shares similar visual elements and some community principles with SecondLife. Other than that they are day and night. Try to see this point first, or we will go in circle if you keep misrepresenting Second Life and PS Home.

Comparing Xbox Live and PS Home is also strange because the latter has much more deeper community, social, and business elements while the former has much better operational and tactical feature set. Of course both have their own community of users, but the approach and experiences differ wildly.

XBL is an eCommerce and online gaming platform/infrastructure (e.g., cross game friend list and what not) with a blade frontend. PS Home is a shared entertainment experience with online gaming being an organic part of it.

 

[Carl B]

I am not enamored with the possibility of watching a movie trailer in the room with a bunch of teenagers calling eachother "faggot" repeatedly, but that's just me.

But what about watching a filmed technology demonstration concurrently with a couple of your B3D friends? Say on my virtual 80" Bravia at che XBD's?

And afterwards, we can flip it to Gremlins. Meanwhile we'll have the fine beats of my electronica collection going during our post-film poker game.

 

[rounin]

I'm not including this in my discussion of Home because all of those things are items the competitors already have and will ideally be available via the XMB as well.

I'm referring to the 3D environment aspect of Home, which is the differentiating feature of Home vs XBL.

I was confused because you included the trophy case argument, which is something XBL already has.

But thats part of the problem. Some of the features I mentioned aren't available with competitiors and probably never will, at least to the same extent. For instance, with the theater, you can guarantee you'll never see the movies from at least 3 movie studios debut on Live even if they implement one.

The 3D environment also allows for much more customization and personalizing of your space just by the virtue of being 3D. It allows for tie-ins that work with gaming within these spaces, such as the previously discussed clan meetings.

On a whole HOME is something new and like Patsu and many people already mentioned, stripping it down to small components makes no sense. Imagine somebody stripping Live down to just the friends list or messaging list and saying these features are insignificant. Even worse, someone could compare it to Steam and say its only marginally better. On the whole, this isn't true.

So you can create persistent friends lists that work throughout all games, and are supported ingame?

For example, playing GT4, you can pull up the XMB, go through your universal friends list, and invite any of your friends to race you online?

Unified friends' lists have been one of the most requested features for PSN. It is safe to assume (by common sense no doubt ) that they will be working in including it as a feature integrated into HOME. I haven't rewatched the video in detail, but I think you can access something like XBL through the virtual PSP.

Whether it will be available in GT4 and other games that are emulated through BC will depend on implementation. I highly doubt that it will - after all, these are not built with internet play in mind and asking for such a feature makes as much sense as me asking if Live allows people to play Halo 1 together on Xbox360 or even worse, one of the many unsupported Xbox1 games. Or did you mean GT5?

 

[Gradthrawn]

On the contrary, it's long-term. Sony is already losing money and investors are not too happy about it. This is a business, and the profits do need to be made. Sony is losing lots of money on the hardware, and the money is to be made via software. Similarly, Home itself is free but the content will, by and large, not be free. It's the same business model we've seen in terms of hardware -- it's about providing a platform at a discount then making money off the content.

This is just were we're going to disagree, I guess. You seem convinced this thing has to make money, and as such, almost everything has to be "premium." I'm suggestion their business plan for it may be different. They may have goals for it that don't include profitability but are equally valuable to them. Not to mention no one here knows exactly how much content has to premium if this were to be profitable. Number of expected users, expected purchase rate of premium content, and expected price of premium content would have to be known, or approximated, on top of the cost of the servers (support, maintenence, etc) to even get a good idea about it.

I never said it detracts, it just does not compensate for the lack of other features...such as a unified friends list.

With that clarification, I understand your point. Universal friends list across all games is an important part of this, to make some functionality work well. But in no way does that imply that Home is not about community.

The only features Home provides over similar features that can be exposed via the XMB interface is that of the Second Life-like environment. And all I'm saying is there's no real point to hyping that up, as Second Life is similar in its business model to what Home will be like, and it's far from a runaway success.

You just proved my point! You said Home is not about community over functionality, but now you're saying all it offers over the XMB is a Second Life like environment! Are you saying Second Life is not about community and social interaction?

I'm also unconvinced of your argument about how this is about community over functionality.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Unified friends' lists have been one of the most requested features for PSN. It is safe to assume (by common sense no doubt ) that they will be working in including it as a feature integrated into HOME. I haven't rewatched the video in detail, but I think you can access something like XBL through the virtual PSP.

Whether it will be available in GT4 and other games that are emulated through BC will depend on implementation. I highly doubt that it will - after all, these are not built with internet play in mind and asking for such a feature makes as much sense as me asking if Live allows people to play Halo 1 together on Xbox360 or even worse, one of the many unsupported Xbox1 games. Or did you mean GT5?

Lol, excuse my typo, it should've read GT5.

I just think it's important to note that at this time, there is no univeral support for friends list between PS3 games, so it's not accurate at all to say it gives you all teh matchmaking abilities of live. All this other stuff aside, this is the core of what makes an online community easy and comfortable to use, and if it's missing it's a big loss.

Common sense does say they will fix this problem, so I can live with assuming this will be the case down the road Though it certainly remains to be seen whether it will be implemented with the ease of use and completeness of XBlive, where instant game invites are built into every single game through the OS.

 

[Zassk]

After looking at "Home" I was wondering could Afrika be something like that ? A collaborative , free roaming , ever expanding world in wild ?
Or maybe you can hunt animals in Afrika and then have trophies in your "Home" ...
I know everyone noticed Afrika when it was shown but since we have almost had no info about it. Looking at Home , it opens up lot of possibilities.

Now that would have been truly innovative, and far more interesting to me.

 

[Asher]

I don't know, but I don't think this has been done elsewhere - correct me if I'm wrong. The community features, 3rd party embassies (as I'm calling them), minigames, theatres, stores, etc etc... all of that wraps up into something I feel unique.

This has been done, I think, in numerous cases. The Second Life does a lot of that, and Microsoft had a program called "3degrees" that offered realtime media sharing as well. They were all much-hyped features, but once the hype fell nothing was really left.

 

[Carl B]

Stop trying to deny the awesomeness that is post #467 Asher.

 

[patsu]

This has been done, I think, in numerous cases. The Second Life does a lot of that, and Microsoft had a program called "3degrees" that offered realtime media sharing as well. They were all much-hyped features, but once the hype fell nothing was really left.

Specific features have been tried elsewhere. None has done it in the scale like this and provide them for free.

The closest effort I have seen was in the 90s where Creo (a french company ?) did a 3D virtual world with eCommerce and integrated gaming. You needed to download a think client to do it, and it was slow and somewhat painful too. It was also based on subscription model.

At that time there was no digital media distribution too. They also did not have 3rd party developers/publisher support like Sony. It's a one company, closed world approach.

 

[Asher]

Phil mentioned that unified friend list will not be in PS Home 1.0, but it's coming
They will do fine as long as they paint and execute their grand vision. It is futile to harp about 1 missing feature.

It's perhaps THE most fundamental feature of online communities...to argue otherwise is missing the point of communities altogether.

Wrong and wrong. Home provides the all-encompassing community environment. In short, the "similar features in XMB interface" is provided exclusively by the Home infrastructure. It's part of Home. Without Home, XMB is just a minimalist UI (without the Home icon).

I'll clarify this again: I'm not talking about many of the XBL-features Sony is adding to PSN and sticking under the "Home" monicker. As far as I'm concerned, "achievements" et al. are functions of PSN. "Home", in this context, is the 3D interface.

And SecondLife does NOT have the same business model as PS Home. The former charges tier (land) fees, monthly subscription and eCommerce. It is similar to Xbox Live's subscription + eCommerce model. It only shares the same visual elements and some community dynamics with Home.

Second Life is a free download and free to play, the subscription is only for people who wish to own land. That's really a minor distinction, as it doesn't have a large effect on the community (eg, the people). The fact that you think the SecondLife requires a monthly subscription certainly explains why we have a fundamental disconnect here -- I don't think you've ever tried it.

In a community play, the whole is more than the sum of its part. Stripping it apart to analyse does not make sense. Focusing only on the 3D environment is missing the point altogether. You have not understood the essence of Home yet.

The essence of home is adding features that have existed for years on Xbox Live -- which is great -- and then adding a Second Life clone on top of it. That's all this is.

Comparing Xbox Live and PS Home is also strange because the latter has much more deeper community, social, and business elements

How can a system without a unified messaging system, without a unified contact system, and without unified voice communication have deeper community and social elements? You have very strange definitions, ones that curiously suit your argument.

 

[dobwal]

For instance, with the theater, you can guarantee you'll never see the movies from at least 3 movie studios debut on Live even if they implement one.

Sort of like how you can't buy Sony PC with windows on them?

 

[Scott_Arm]

I have been chided for my utilitarian view of Home earlier in this thread, but I just feel that Home is XMB++, and is not as revolutionary as people would like to think. As Asher has stated, the only thing that differentiates Home from Live is the 3D interface with some mmo social networking functions. All of the other functionality could be exposed through simpler and more traditional interfaces. I'm not sure why people are really excited about virtual stores and advertising. I thought people bought Tivo to get away from that. And we all have access to virtual stores through web pages, they're just 2D. The visual technology involved in Home is very impressive, being able to stream video content on to virtual TVs in real-time etc. But is it really better or revolutionary or just different and evolutionary? The service is not a bad thing in any respect. It has a lot of great functionality, but that functionality has been available for a long time in other places. I just don't think it's the revolution people are proclaiming it to be. It will certainly not become the next Google, Myspace, Flickr or anything like that, because it is only available on a closed system. I would have been very impressed if Sony had come up with an intuitive integrated social networking concept that combined all of those ieas through a more traditional interface that could, for certain functionality, be accessed by people outside of the sony network. It would also be a more sound approach to attract new customers by enticing them to join in the rest of the functionality.

 

[Asher]

Specific features have been tried elsewhere. None has done it in the scale like this and provide them for free.

All of the programs I've mentioned who had these features were free...

Scale is arguable.

 

[Todd33]

How can a system without a unified messaging system, without a unified contact system, and without unified voice communication have deeper community and social elements? You have very strange definitions, ones that curiously suit your argument.

I think you are making assumptions about something that isn't out yet. Maybe we should wait until the beta before we cry about features you think it doesn't have.

 

[Asher]

But what about watching a filmed technology demonstration concurrently with a couple of your B3D friends? Say on my virtual 80" Bravia at che XBD's?

And afterwards, we can flip it to Gremlins. Meanwhile we'll have the fine beats of my electronica collection going during our post-film poker game.

I can see why you think this would be cool, but there's several problems with this from my perspective:

1) Insightful commentary is best made while not in real-time. I prefer reading to hearing, and I prefer thinking to speaking. Real-time commentary on videos is something I actually abhor (eg, at a movie theatre)
2) I really don't think streaming video will be acceptable quality to me, as I'm used to HDTV resolutions
3) I'm not a fan of your electronica music