PlayStation Home And Porn - No Problems

Via Eurogamer, a post on the 'semi-official' ThreeSpeech blog essentially saying that Sony doesn't see porn as an issue for the upcoming Home PS3 service. Sony's Phil Harrison was on the other end of the blog's questions, and after reminding us that avatars won't be able to interact, it will be easy to blacklist people, and they will have lots of filters in place: "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 [porn], 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."

Wow. I'm impressed.

[Runefox]

I think that this is an incredibly mature, forward-thinking thing to say, coming from the inherently egotistical corporate giant. While it sounds like I just like my pr0nz0rz, which may or may not be true (you, the reader of this drivel, decide!), I honestly do believe that censorship, even in pornography, is the exact opposite to being beneficial to society as a whole. I'm all for cordoning off the areas and age-checking, however.

That said, on a completely unrelated note, apparently Firefox doesn't underline the word "pr0nz0rz" as being a spelling mistake. Hmm.

Sony shouldn't care

[cowscows]

I think Sony's best bet is to not really worry about what individuals are doing on their service in terms of porn, and just make sure it's possible for a parent to fully lock out their kids from the home service if they so desire. Trying to monitor what everyone's doing isn't realistic without taking out just about every way that individuals can customize their "homes." And once you've done that, then what's the point?

They should just not care, and let people make out of it what they want. Sure, it'll probably end up just like Second Life with better graphics, but pretty much anything with significant user created content is 95% crap, and a large percentage porn.

Maybe all Sony's going for is a glorified chat room. If that's the case, then I don't see the initial excitement about it lasting much beyond release. If they're instead trying to tie in to more of the myspace/flickr/blogging mindset, then they're going to have to give people some free reign to be creative. And yes, that means there's going to be a lot of people trying to do dirty things. But you know what, give the customers what they want, and they're going to be more willing to give you money.

Re:To rephrase the question:

[Cadallin]

Here's a hint: If your kids are still so young that they need this kind of supervision, DON'T give them unsupervised access to on-line social networks, or the internet at all. You are the parent. It is YOUR responsibility. Don't want them surfing for porn? Don't let them surf the internet unsupervised! Because if you think Net Nanny et al are infalliable, boy are you in for a surprise. Gaming is an ADULT hobby. If you are letting your child have unsupervised access to Multiplayer Online games, you are giving tacit approval to whatever anyone wants to put out there. Your Responsibility, Your Problem. Not Mine, Not Society's.

Re:Sony shouldn't care

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yeah, I've read all that. But I don't think it's going to work."

Of course "it's going to work" you tool. It's working right now. Home is already live for internal developers and third party developers already have access to the dev tools which are incredibly easy to use to generate content for Home. It is simply a matter of using your existing game assets or new assets and tagging things like surfaces for video or images. Developers are already in the process of building their custom spaces.

Very soon both third party developers and some PS3 users will be downloading and running the beta. So only a fool would try to claim Home isn't going to work. The response to Home has been insane.

Looking at your post history it is clear you are just a console troll trying to hide it a thin layer of feigned interest in the service. Go play minigames with your Wii.