Phil Harrison, porn, PlayStation Home, and Second Life

Phil Harrison was interviewed by Three Speech the day after his keynote speech at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2007. The interview covered several things, but the interview immediately focused on PlayStation Home and porn.

• Parental control. Like the PlayStation Network, parents can control whether kids have access to Home or not.
• Private spaces of PlayStation Home. Private spaces are unmoderated. Harrison compares this to emails and video chat.
• Actions in public spaces of PlayStation Home. There are animations to shake hands or to do some other appropriate social action. But there won’t be any inappropriate acts.

If there are any problems, you can always blacklist people who creep you out with porn or other things:

Three Speech: What about uploading porn from your PS3’s hard-disk to your private space? And maybe inviting people you don’t necessarily know back and them being slightly offended by what they see, then going to a moderator?

Phil Harrison: 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 that, 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. However, if somebody feels uncomfortable about an encounter on Home, itÂ’s very easy for them to ban that person from their friends list…

The rest of the interview talked about shortcuts in your avatar’s virtual PSP (so your lazy avatar doesn’t have to physically walk across the expanses of PlayStation Home), and 3D bookmarks (a 3D screenshot of the place at Home where you were standing), virtual cinema (short trailers are OK at Home, but full movies are better viewed via the XMB).

PlayStation Home is fundamentally different from Second Life. There’s one point we’d like to focus on, and that’s where we’ll end this coverage of Harrison’s interview (for more, you can click the “Read” link below).

Home is very different from Second Life.

You have to remember that Second Life is all about user-generated content. Sony, on the other hand, is a world leader in entertainment technology and content (movies, TV, music, etc.). PlayStation Home is, to use Harrison’s words, “a lot of the framework for entertainment to take place in,” and PlayStation Home will have some degree of user-generated content, but in the end, PlayStation Home is one big show for us to explore, enjoy, look at, and listen to. And that makes Home resonate with Sony’s commercial role as a multimedia entertainment giant.

Phil Harrison was interviewed by Three Speech the day after his keynote speech at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2007. The interview covered several things, but the interview immediately focused on PlayStation Home and porn.

• Parental control. Like the PlayStation Network, parents can control whether kids have access to Home or not.
• Private spaces of PlayStation Home. Private spaces are unmoderated. Harrison compares this to emails and video chat.
• Actions in public spaces of PlayStation Home. There are animations to shake hands or to do some other appropriate social action. But there won’t be any inappropriate acts.

If there are any problems, you can always blacklist people who creep you out with porn or other things:

Three Speech: What about uploading porn from your PS3’s hard-disk to your private space? And maybe inviting people you don’t necessarily know back and them being slightly offended by what they see, then going to a moderator?

Phil Harrison: 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 that, 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. However, if somebody feels uncomfortable about an encounter on Home, itÂ’s very easy for them to ban that person from their friends list…

The rest of the interview talked about shortcuts in your avatar’s virtual PSP (so your lazy avatar doesn’t have to physically walk across the expanses of PlayStation Home), and 3D bookmarks (a 3D screenshot of the place at Home where you were standing), virtual cinema (short trailers are OK at Home, but full movies are better viewed via the XMB).

PlayStation Home is fundamentally different from Second Life. There’s one point we’d like to focus on, and that’s where we’ll end this coverage of Harrison’s interview (for more, you can click the “Read” link below).

Home is very different from Second Life.

You have to remember that Second Life is all about user-generated content. Sony, on the other hand, is a world leader in entertainment technology and content (movies, TV, music, etc.). PlayStation Home is, to use Harrison’s words, “a lot of the framework for entertainment to take place in,” and PlayStation Home will have some degree of user-generated content, but in the end, PlayStation Home is one big show for us to explore, enjoy, look at, and listen to. And that makes Home resonate with Sony’s commercial role as a multimedia entertainment giant.