Sony’s virtual world PlayStation Home is live. I’ll save my general review for later; what I can’t help but throw my hands up at is Home’s incorporation of virtual lines. What kind of design choice was this? If everyone else in the virtual worlds industry managed to avoid them so far, why couldn’t Sony?
Sure you can play classic arcade games inside of Home, but you’ll have to first line up to do so. Maybe they were really taking the concept of a real arcade to heart? Going for a true sense of realism. However I think it was less ambitious and just a way to combat the sense of emptiness that plagues many virtual worlds.
As Jack Buser, director of the Home, sees it.
“Home” will be pointless if no one’s in it, if its central plazas are empty. Buser said they won’t even launch “Home” — an event scheduled for this fall — until they meet their goal to “have a kind of community to show people around.”
So instead of an empty world you get plenty of people standing around in lines. What’s people’s opinions on virtual lines? Penny Arcade captured it perfectly in their comic - A Penetrating Look. Another common reaction I heard was:
Brings all the frustration of the real life in the virtual.
Trying to fight the emptiness by creating virtual lines, that is a drastic and poor design choice.
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