All Things Digital

Skip to main content.

Voices

Voices

from other Web sites

Play Station’s Virtual Home Is Less Than Hospitable

Mike Musgrove

“Dude, this place is quiet,” says one avatar, a rather generic-looking 20-something guy, as we lurk on one side of the Home central plaza, watching virtual people go by on what appears, on my television screen, to be a sunny day in a modern town center. “This could get boring fast,” texts another in agreement, a speech balloon popping up over his head.

This month, Sony introduced a virtual world to the PlayStation 3 in a move designed to intrigue the gamers of the world by giving them a virtual place to mingle and hang out. Fire up Home for the first time and you can build your virtual self from scratch, selecting everything from facial features to the clothes that will cover your digital body. After that, off you go to wander around advertising-laden movie theaters, malls and bowling alleys, to meet and converse with your fellow PS3 fans.

Read the rest of this post

Featured Video

Jackson vs Bean from Patrick Boivin on Vimeo.

About Voices

This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."

We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.

The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.

That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.

So here is exactly what we do: Read more »

About the Site

Because the site is wholly owned by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, we aim to adhere to the journalistic standards of the best of the mainstream media. But, because it is run autonomously as a small online startup, we aim to exhibit the fresh thinking and nimbleness of the best of the new media. We want to be first, and sassy, but also well sourced and accurate. We will offer lots of opinion and analysis, but plenty of fact as well.

Read more »