Sony to invite PSP and cellphones Home

Stan Beer
Saturday, 10 March 2007 06:10

Your IT - Entertainment

Sony has made clear its intentions to be at the forefront of community gaming by floating the idea that it may bring its "Game 3.0" 3D online social networking platform Home to its PSP handheld and cellphones. The company's announcement this week at the  Game Developers Conference that it will launch Home on PS3 by 2008 has caused a stir in gaming circles.

Phil Harrison, president of worldwide game studios at Sony, set gamers buzzing at GDC when likening Game 3.0 to Web 2.0, he announced that Sony would create Sony Home for PS3, a virtual world for gamers, similar to the increasingly popular Second Life. What he didn't say, however, was whether Home is going to be an exclusively PS3 product.

That question appears to have been answered with Sony stating on its DevNet service that aspects of Home are being considered (read will definitely be available) for the PSP and and cellphones.

Like Second Life, Home as described by Sony will create a virtual world where participants use Avatars to represent themselves and set up their own personalized virtual home to which they can invite guests and share gaming experiences. Once again like Second Life, there will be virtual common meeting areas.

Participants will be able to communicate with each other through instant messaging and voice and the blogosphere is alight with the prospect that Home may well become a virtual commercial world for the gaming industry, with companies setting up their own virtual offices.

The vision portrayed by Sony shows that the company considers that gaming has the potential to go well beyond the current point and shoot, action oriented and puzzle solving games that currently flood the gaming space. With Home, Sony intends to make gaming a community based activity, with gamers sharing experiences and interacting with each other in an instantaneous online space.

The Sony move constitutes a blurring of the lines between gaming and social networking and could further moves in that direction by both Microsoft and Nintendo.

It also challenges Microsoft's 'gaming anywhere' concept of being able to access your Xbox 360 gamer profile and play games wherever you are, even if on a PC or through a cellphone, although Microsoft only seems to have made the Windows Vista online gaming service compatible with selected Xbox 360 online games and not much else as yet.

In a world of connected 'play anywhere' experiences, handheld games consoles like the PSP and the Nintendo DS nowadays offer Wi-Fi as a built-in standard. But if Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have any say in the future of gaming, which they certainly do, the social gamer networking future is set for a rapid evolution that will stun us all with its depth, realism and power.

It's all very exciting, but just as the Terminator movies teach us to build laws into robots and also a manual override, the moves towards social gaming network holodeck style utopias teach us to heed the lessons of 'The Matrix'.