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PlayStation Home And Porn - No Problems
Via Eurogamer, a post on the 'semi-official' ThreeSpeech blog essentially saying that Sony doesn't see porn as an issue for the upcoming Home PS3 service. Sony's Phil Harrison was on the other end of the blog's questions, and after reminding us that avatars won't be able to interact, it will be easy to blacklist people, and they will have lots of filters in place: "Well I'm disappointed that you would use those as the first questions ... I think Home should be used for a much wider and more beneficial scope than [porn], but I think that people can express their creativity inside Home in a wide variety of ways and it's not necessarily for us to dictate what that should be."
This is actually quite interesting as Sony refused to release Porn on the betamax format, which some argue was a deciding factor on the adoption of VHS. Granted, this isn't a format war but still interesting...
Yeah, I've read all that. But I don't think it's going to work. Almost everything you've listed there has been solved in simpler and more convenient ways already on the web.
If this place is basically just a big online marketplace dressed up as some sort of graphically rich virtual shopping mall, I don't think consumers are going to flock to it the way they hoped. When I want to spend money on stuff, I want to find what I'm looking for, enter my credit card, and get whatever I'm buying as quickly as possible. Having to run my virtual avatar through a store and window shop to find what I want might be fun the first time, but it's not something that is going to keep me coming back for more.
"Persistent Worlds" are not made interesting just by the fact that they're persistent. They're made interesting by the fact that the players can seriously modify what's going on. It allows creativity, showing off, and hopefully leads towards collaboration. I don't care what sony is providing third parties, unless that third party is anyone who owns a PS3. Because otherwise it's just another way for companies to shove their wares in front of me, and the internet already provides me with lots of easy, efficient, and varied ways to shop.
If they're going to provide some real creative opportunities, then that's awesome, it could be a lot of fun. But my original point was that if they provide those opportunities, lots of people are going to find ways to turn it into porn/sex/etc. You can't keep that from happening without either locking down the content creation to the point where it doesn't really exist, or having moderators constantly policing everything that's made. Both of those will drive away the creative types that would find such a thing interesting in the first place.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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