Home Unpossible Home

Okay: so after a long week of heavy issues and morbid topics that have gone unwritten about on R&K but have been weighing on our minds – a week kicked off by sitting through a melodramatic high school play about teenager suicide – I just want to paint a lighthearted picture for you guys.

Start with a bowling alley. It’s crowded with a large gang of people who are new to the game. A large room full of chitchat. Sitting in one of the alley booths is a young man with ball cap and glasses, hands folded in his lap, just staring into space.

“Would you like to play a bowling game?”, says a young woman who sits next to him. They start a game and the girl gutter-balls her first turn. “That’s a difficult shot.”, she says in a strangely preprogrammed way.

The ball-cap man then gets up and bowls a strike. He sits down.

“My cat’s breath smells like cat food!” he says.

The girl takes her turn. Knocks down three pins, gutters her second roll. “Your cat?”

He gets up and rolls another strike. “My cat’s name is Mittens!”

At this point the girl’s kind of annoyed. “Your conversation skills could use some work.” Knocks down three, picks up a spare. Ballcap Boy rolls another strike – his third in a row.

He sits back down. “My special shoes make me sad.”

This goes on for the rest of the game. In the end, Ballcap rolls seven strikes and three spares to win the game with a 225 or so, to the girl’s 55. In disgust she gets up to find someone else to play with. In another minute or so, two other guys sit down with Ballcap.

“Would you like to play a bowling game?”, one asks.

Ballcap doesn’t look up. “The inside of my nose is salty.”

And so on and so forth. Welcome to Playstation Home, Sony’s new social networking system for the PS3.

Home is basically a Second Life-like interface for the PS3, allowing Playstation Network users the ability to create their own virtual apartments and go socialize in a virtual town square, see virtual movies and play virtual games and shop at a virtual mall. That sort of thing. They just FINALLY – after how long in development, two years? – rolled Home out in open beta on Thursday. With the Home servers absolutely slammed all day on Thursday, Friday was the earliest I could try it out.

It’s not bad – still definitely in its infancy, but amusing and easy to use and a different way to interact with other PS3 online players. And after such a heavy week, I needed some cheap entertainment. So I went virtual bowling.

Took me about twenty minutes to figure out the basic game dynamic and how to roll strikes on a regular basis. Then that got boring, so I started chatting up the other players. In Home, when you text a message, it appears over your head in a little speech bubble for everyone else to read. For a little while, a sincere attempt at conversation proved interesting, but ultimately there’s only so much to say to a fellow virtual bowler you’ve barely met.

So then I started talking in only Ralph Wiggumisms.

And thus, found hours of amusement gold! Bizarre, random, confusing, twisted fun – and when I ran out of authentic Wiggumisms, I just started mixing them with weird abstract one-liners of my own:

“The panda conspiracy is real.”

“The voices tell me the end is nigh.”

“Do you smell dead bunnies? I smell dead bunnies.”

“A leprechaun tells me to burn things.”

“I have stickers on my helmet.”

There’s nothing quite like getting your butt whupped by Weird Word Salad Crazy Guy.

I love general audience, anonymous online social networking – it’s great for endless hours of entertainment, harmlessly screwing with people for cheap giggles. (Remind me sometime to tell you the story of Candice Ann Burkett, MySpace and the Daytona Ale House.) I like to introduce a bit of abstract, random oddity to people’s lives. It’s fun.

Next time, I think I’ll try Home Bowling, chatting up nothing except bad – yet obnoxiously insistent – golfing advice.

“You lifted your head. DON’T LIFT YOUR HEAD!!”