I confess not being nearly as impressed by Sony’s Home initiative as the others in the audience. One gets the sense that they were inspired by Second Life, but instead added something much more like the Sims – effectively adding a casual gamer’s front end to a hardcore game console.

One of the charms of the Second Life experience is the ultimate customizability of the place. What I saw was limited in a typically Sonyesque fashion. As Phil Harrison crowed about thousands of potential visual appearances, he hit a random button that would move his cheekbones two pixels up, narrow his chin a teensy bit and darken the skin color a hue. Sure, furries aren’t for everyone, but Second Life’s infinite customizability (or even Sim’s more limited possibilities) leave it in the dust.

And of course, the other problem is that the product seems more intent on selling me things than actually being fun or entertaining. A quote from the presentation: “The banner ads are actually on banners!” He also talked at length about how you could run movie trailers on the Sony Brevia TV you placed in your virtual apartment.

And creativity appears, so far, to be harshly limited. Players are limited to being able to change out their wallpaper, and perhaps drop a picture of a penis in a picture frame. The tools to create the really cool spaces will be reserved for the corporations. Imagine a Second Life where the ONLY cool pads were those run by Reuters, Nike and Coke.

I’m also infinitely wary of any ‘advances’ that are actually less convenient than their previous iteration. Instead of choosing a movie to watch in a list (like XBox Live), I have to walk my avatar to a movie theater? I have to hunt for my Trophies (i.e. Microsoft Achievements) in a 3D room as big as the Matrix Human Battery scene? The World Wide Web conquered the world because it was fast, convenient, and location could usually be ignored – why are we trying to add time and difficulty back into the usability equation?

I’d love to try it out and be proven wrong. Of course, that’s not likely to happen anytime soon at a six hundred dollar price point, so I guess I’ll just have to wait a couple years. It’s a shame, because the game they demo’d – LittleBigPlanet — was SUPERCOOL, and made the whole presentation worth the sit down.

Original comments thread is here.