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."
Then you have a problem.
"N'uh, it's my turn with the sex box, and her name is Sony"
Monstar L
I think that this is an incredibly mature, forward-thinking thing to say, coming from the inherently egotistical corporate giant. While it sounds like I just like my pr0nz0rz, which may or may not be true (you, the reader of this drivel, decide!), I honestly do believe that censorship, even in pornography, is the exact opposite to being beneficial to society as a whole. I'm all for cordoning off the areas and age-checking, however.
That said, on a completely unrelated note, apparently Firefox doesn't underline the word "pr0nz0rz" as being a spelling mistake. Hmm.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Because everybody's playing with their Wiis.
Duh.
I think Sony's best bet is to not really worry about what individuals are doing on their service in terms of porn, and just make sure it's possible for a parent to fully lock out their kids from the home service if they so desire. Trying to monitor what everyone's doing isn't realistic without taking out just about every way that individuals can customize their "homes." And once you've done that, then what's the point?
They should just not care, and let people make out of it what they want. Sure, it'll probably end up just like Second Life with better graphics, but pretty much anything with significant user created content is 95% crap, and a large percentage porn.
Maybe all Sony's going for is a glorified chat room. If that's the case, then I don't see the initial excitement about it lasting much beyond release. If they're instead trying to tie in to more of the myspace/flickr/blogging mindset, then they're going to have to give people some free reign to be creative. And yes, that means there's going to be a lot of people trying to do dirty things. But you know what, give the customers what they want, and they're going to be more willing to give you money.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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...