Upon receiving my Home beta invite this week, I couldn’t wait to finally get a glimpse at what the Home experience was all about. After a quick install and a bit of trouble getting in, I got my first look into Sony’s new world. My first impression was that it was pretty unreal. I’ve pretty much played only console games my whole life so I’ve never played an MMO, I’ve also never been on Second Life, so this was my first time to see that many people in any online arena at once. The layout is somewhat of a Sony utopia where huge screens playing ads for video games dominate a very pleasing landscape. A theater, mall, and bowling alley all with fully interactive or soon to be fully interactive pieces give me the feeling that Home, while pretty cool now, has the potential to be great. They have made a cool online world where there inhabitants all have at least one thing in common, they all own a PS3, and are, therefore, easier to advertise games to than any other group in the world. I’m not at all saying that’s a bad thing, in fact, more power to them. If a company can come up with something that is beneficial to themselves and the consumer, then kudos. In short, I think Home will be huge for Sony and for many, many PS3 owners.

However, my initial jubilation was soon cut short by a sad realization for me. You see, with the NXE and my Home beta invite arriving in the same week, I realized something, I’m an anti-social gamer. It dawned on me that I had no interest in my friends’ Xbox Avatars and I tended to spend a lot of my time in Home running from people that might try to talk to me. It’s not that I’m an asshole, in fact, I think it’s the opposite, I just didn’t feel like talking and I didn’t want to be a dick to anyone by not responding when they tried to start a chat. And, then came another sad realization as I wondered why I didn’t want to talk to these people and thought, “Am I too old for this?”

At 31 years old, the fact that I am among the older gamers is not lost on me. That, however, doesn’t bother me and I feel like I’ll be playing video playing video games on my death bed. But, Home feels different for me. Not just for the fact that hanging out at the mall with my friends is something that I don’t do anymore, but just the general realization that most of these people in the Home universe were probably, and in many cases quite a bit, younger than me. That doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t have common gaming interests, but still, a 31 year old man starting up a new friendship with what could be a 12 year old just seems a little weird, and in Home‘s text chat, there’s no way of telling the two apart unless I start every conversation with, “So…how old are ya?” which immediately makes me a creep.

This also got me thinking about some of the future features promised in Home where you can invite people back to your virtual apartment and share pictures and videos on your virtual TV and picture frames. What could go wrong with that? But, I’ll leave that paranoia for the soccer moms and just hope that Sony will have a good way to monitor this.

Anyway, all misgivings aside, I still think Sony is really onto something with Home. It is something that is completely new to consoles and I applaud the new. And who knows? Maybe, with time, I’ll come out of my virtual shell and try to meet people. Maybe there are more gamers my age hanging out at the mall than I think. In fact, maybe, I’m not that old that all…aaahh, who the fuck am I kidding.