BLUE MAG

During today’s session of the 2007 GDC (that’s Game Developer’s Conference, for those of you not in the know), Sony announced its implementation of a 3-D virtual world coming to the PS3.

“Home,” as it’s being called, takes the core elements of “Second Life” and integrates them into the second-rate Sony Online service. “Home” will allow PS3 owners to create their own virtual avatar and exist in a virtual world, where each user will get a virtual apartment, to virtually entertain other virtual friends while virtually denying you any life at all. Virtually.

Check out the video after the break.

Inside apartments, users will be able to showcase trophies earned by playing games (ala, Xbox Live’s Achievements), host photo slideshows, screen home movies or other media downloaded to the PS3. So those of you who never got to have that raging kegger at your house, can now do so from the comforts of your own living room- and cleaning up puke is as simple as flipping an off-switch.

Apparently, users will be able to meet up in “Home” and then get into an actual game to play together. For those of us without an apparent excess of time, the implementation of “Home” seems like one more obstacle that needs to be hurdled before actually playing a game with other people over the internet. Add to the fact that while “Home” is allegedly free, a cyber-world of this magnitude has got to be pretty frickin’ expensive to maintain, so expect an onslaught of advertising and branding in this Utopia.

Sony hopes to loosen the grip that Microsoft has on online gaming. Xbox Live is a fantastic service that just keeps getting better and more streamlined. Get in, get your game on, get out. Isn’t “Home” the antithesis of “Live?” Is a console crowd really interested in something that’s been a PC niche?

Sure the idea of a user-created world might have some initial interest to a guy like me; but I’m a person with a life that doesn’t need “Second Life,” “The Sims,” or any other reality simulator in order to experience reality- I go outside. I play games to escape reality- not to re-live it. So plugging into a cyber-world in order to sit on a virtual couch before I play games just seems a little redundant after the initial “gee that’s neat” effect wears off.

So say we all?