You're not welcome at Home

Home isn't where my heart is

Just a quickie - I've recently treated myself to a PlayStation 3. I was looking forward to trying out PlayStation Home. An interesting concept, rolled out to great fanfare a while back, not really knowing any PS3 owners enough to really find out more about it I recently downloaded it to see where it had got to.

My impression

I'm amazed by the poor introduction of Home.

The avatar creation tool was limited. Home come I'm able to make pretty good versions of myself using a Wii and an Xbox, but not using Home. 

After a very brief hello, that really didn't enlighten me as to Home's purpose, I was taken to an empty apartment, told a little about it before returning to the main screen once more. I really felt I'd been left adrift by Home. Not welcome almost. If Home isn't going to show me around, explain it's purpose or make me feel welcome, I really fail to see why I should bother with it.

I've now had my fill of Home, it failed to ignite my imagination. I recently read a great article about effective ways to make a tutorial, the introduction to Home (I can't even bring myself to call it a tutorial) definitely isn't one. The Home intro needs to:

• Explain its purpose clearly
• Show users how to do the purpose
• Offer access to further tutorials about each aspect of Home, that players can access whenever they want

As it stands Home expects players to invest precious time and effort learning what Home is for and how to do anything.

I've got no plans to be going Home any time soon.