PlayStation Home full of immature jokers, unlike other virtual communities

[wraggster]

It's not been good month for Sony. Layoffs, poor holiday sales for the PS3 and a wee bit of hacking over at PlayStation Home surely have the electronics giant hungry for some good press, which has made the newest PR kerfuffle over at the nascent online service quite unfortunate. According to Ars Technica, Home has become something akin to the nightmare futurescape of The Warriors, a service "incredibly unwelcoming to women, with female players quickly mobbed as players dance around them or type sexual come-ons... a disturbing look at the worst part of human nature." This is heady stuff, but as the company is quick to point out, the thing is still in Beta, and it's still evolving -- hopefully, as it becomes more popular the free service will move itself out of the adolescent ghetto. In the mean time, they've been rocking a bit of good old fashioned censorship, banning words like "gay," "Jew," and "Hell" -- perfectly understandishable if you've ever spent a minute on any online gaming service, but highly uncool if you're trying to build any sort of inclusive social network. In the meantime, what's a homosexual Jewish Satanist to do? There's always Second Life...

http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/30/p...her-virtual-c/

[Stone Temple Pilots]

One word. Ridiculous.

[F9zDark]

Did anyone NOT see this coming? I mean seriously...

Resistance had quite a few girl gamers in the community, most active on the forums, but even they agreed it wasn't a light hearted decision to "come out". Most refused to use a headset because the male gamers would simply berate the $#@! out of them. Although their forum avatars were for a few, images of (supposedly) themself, they were in agreement that being a girl and playing that kind of game was difficult.

I have seen, so far, two girls in Home (granted I haven't played that much). Both of these girls were quickly mobbed by at least 5 males. But what kind of measures does one take to eliminate this?

Unfortunately there isn't much to do. The best I can come up with is essentially a "shield" that blocks a certain radius around the player unless people are "invited" into this personal space. But the ramifications of such a system would make it totally worthless of the hassle. (ie, how long until all the females band together and simply block a whole area of home?)

These women should simply report every person who says anything negative to them or starts dancing around them. At the end of the beta, all those chauvinist pigs would be rid of and (hopefully) only male players who actually want to use home for means other than improving their virtual life's sexual prowess will remain.

[Triv1um]

My girlfriend plays Home, and she loves it. Haha.

To be honest, its really funny watching her play it, because everything that post says is true.

[wolfy4me]

well ... I have both system (XBOX 360 and PS3)... and guess what ??
I'm playing 95 % of my time on XBOX 360 !

Really, only one word for this "HOME" project = shabby !

[Malksta]

Xbox users are coming to PS3

Oh shi-