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Home Firing Line: An Adults-Only Home Debated
by Orion_NGC1976, HSM team writer, and Dlyrius, HSM guest contributor
Oftentimes, NorseGamer mentions the TV talk show Firing Line as one of his favorite shows. This long-running talk show featured William F. Buckley, Jr. as the host. Buckley was known for politely discussing and debating issues with his guest, unlike many talk show hosts today that treat their guest with opposing views very rudely.
A good writer will see all sides of the debate and address them in their writings. I try to do that in the articles that I write, but oftentimes I fail to see something that may have been obvious to someone else.
I then struck on the idea of doing an article with another person, with each person debating a side of the issue. I mentioned this idea to a couple of people and Dlyrius was eager to try my experiment.
There are many Home topics that are hotly debated in the Sony forums, so there was definitely not a shortage of topics from which to choose. We decided to debate whether Sony should create an “Adults Only” restricted area in Home. The new area would have adult content and situations, bringing it more inline with the adult content that can be found in other online virtual realities — Second Life, SeduCity, and the like.
Dlyrius will be laying out the argument for having an “Adults Only” area in Home, and I will be laying out the argument against. We will then rebut each others arguments. Hopefully, this little experiment will turn out as a good exercise in exploring this many-faceted issue and bring to light some things that neither one of us considered.
Dlyrius:
There are numerous adult virtual worlds on the internet these days. In fact, the web has never been a place of censorship, and that is the way it should be. While most of those sites are pretty much about sex, I feel Sony could create a tasteful place for those of us who are simply tired of worrying about – or dealing with – the kids on Home.
Home is supposed to be PG-13, but anyone that has been to any of the three Midway areas, the new x7 Club, or checked out the nDreams Amazon clothing line knows that line has been crossed multiple times, and in a big way. Scantily clad women (and sometimes even men) overrun Home all the time, so why not just face the facts and create an “adult” area? Putting what is nothing more than a band-aid over the “sensitive” areas doesn’t mean it is “kid friendly.”
Let’s look at a few facts:
- Adults spend thousands of dollars on Home. Mixing all age groups is fine most of the time, but adults (and the younger generations) really need a place to just be what they are. If I wish to go to a virtual bar and order a mixed drink while I smoke a pretend cigarette, I should be able to do so. It isn’t like these things don’t already exist on Home. Godfather’s has a bar and there is even a smoldering butt wafting delicate curls of smoke into the air from an ashtray. It’s perfectly normal to see teenagers acting as bartenders there as well. What kind of message is this sending to children?
- Adults like to have normal conversations. We don’t appreciate some twit interrupting our conversations with a barrage of censored profanity, or a face protruding from our nether regions because some kid thinks it’s funny. Sure, we could take these conversations to a private space to avoid these problems, but why should we have to? Doing so completely undermines the “social” aspect of the Home network. You can’t meet new people if you are secreted away in a private space just to have a decent conversation within your age group.
- Adults don’t enjoy being forced to babysit the offspring of other adults. The number of unsupervised children on any social network is astounding, and it isn’t right that the responsible, moral adults that inhabit these areas have to constantly be on the lookout for predators who may be assaulting these kids.
- Adults do not like being harassed because they are adults. Personally, I never lie about my age on Home; after all, I earned every single one of my almost 53 years on this planet, but most adults feel the need to lie simply to be left alone. When I am asked, the reactions to my age can lead to something as stupid as trolling me because of my age, to more serious accusations that I am a “cougar” or a “pervert” only visiting Home to take advantage of children in a sexual way. Neither could be farther from the truth, but that is the way most of the younger generation views anyone over thirty on Home.
Sure, it would be easy to say, if you don’t like how Home works, go somewhere else. Well, sorry folks, we chose Home for a reason, and while I don’t know the percentages here, I think its reasonable to say that Sony does not want us taking our money elsewhere just to escape the PG-13 world they have created for their users.
You might say that enforcing this age verification process would be impossible to pull off. I don’t think so. It would be fairly easy to offer an “adult” PSN card – like the PlayStation Plus card – we could purchase for a one-time fee at any location where regular PSN cards are sold. Like any other adult item for sale, they would simply require the store clerks to verify age with some state issued identification before completing the transaction. In return, we receive a code for some virtual item to add to our account making it simple for the servers to identify us as adults.
Sony has already developed a way to separate the “haves” from the “have nots” with x7, as well as the beta test they used before opening the new Home core update for public use, so I don’t think it would take much more to add this feature. I am also reasonably sure that, if asked, the adults on Home would be more than happy to provide Sony with ideas and suggestions for how we would like it to look and what kind of activities we could enjoy there. I think it is also safe to say that if Sony did provide a public area like this on Home, with proper marketing, they could increase their adult audience with leaps and bounds generating even more income from new older users.
Orion:
What would an “adult access only” PS Home be like? I would imagine that the answer to that question would be as varied as there are users on Home. Some probably envision it as merely a place to get away from the kids and be able to have intelligent conversation, without being rudely interrupted by some kid doing the Rave dance in their face. Undoubtedly, many others see it as bringing Home closer in line with social relationships that can occur in other online social worlds, such as Second Life.
Although I am writing the argument against having an adult area in Home, I am far from a prude on the subject. I have no qualms about Home offering adult content. It is the access control that has me most worried. How do you ensure access to only adults? That is the big question.
Home already fails miserably in the regard of limiting access to those of the appropriate age. I routinely encounter people, who claim to be under the minimum age of thirteen. When I encounter an underage child, I suggest that they have their parents with them at all times. Few say they do, but most do not.
Gideon wrote an excellent article showing how underage children could be watching content on Crackle that is not age appropriate.
I do know that parents can create sub-accounts for their children, to control the exposure of their children to content that is not age appropriate. As a parent, I have created a sub-account for my son. However, this still has it limitations as being an effective filtering system.
There are two main controls – blocking chat and blocking content. Blocking chat is an all or nothing. With blocking on, there is no way to communicate on Home. This is a very inflexible control, which should be implemented in a granular fashion, such as having options for blocking video chat, blocking chat room access, blocking Private Messaging, or blocking text chat individually. That way, you could block all forms of communication except text chat. Since it is a very inflexible control and most teenagers would want to communicate in Home, chat is probably never set to off. This creates it own problems. With chat on, sexual video chatting would be possible. I have heard from others and have seen first hand solicitations for dirty video camera chat sessions on Home.
Blocking content disallows a person from entering many of the spaces in Home. For example, one of the spaces my son is restricted from entering is Godfather’s. This is a very effective way of limiting where a minor can go in Home. This is the way Sony has implemented restricting where minors can go in Home, but how effective is? There are still kids roaming around in places that would be off limits to a user of a restricted access sub-account. If parents used sub-accounts with parental controls, then these spaces would be free from teenagers.
Why is this not a reality? Many parents may be unaware of the parental controls on sub-accounts, they may feel that there is no need to set the parental controls for their children, or maybe they just don’t really care. Without the parental controls being set, a minor would have all the access of an adult. Since there is already a failure in keeping kids from areas in Home that have been deemed to be not suitable for teenagers, how would they be kept from entering this new adult area of Home?
Even with sub-accounts, there are ways to get on Home with adult access. Many parents are gamers themselves. If, for convenience, they have set up their PSN account to save their password, then their children can log onto Home as an adult anytime, using their parent’s account.
I don’t fault Sony for this failure; it is the nature of the electronic medium. How do you electronically “stamp” someone as an adult?
To get onto some adult content sites, such as Second Life, it only requires you to simply state that you are of an adult age, which of course does not have to be true. Of course. there are clauses in the TOS that state that they can terminate anyone, if it is discovered that they are under age. In the online world of the Internet, there simply is not a good way to reliably verify a person’s age. Since there is no way to verify a person’s age, this fragile system breaks down real quickly.
Let’s hypothesize for the moment that we have gotten past this monumental hurdle of regulating access to only those who are of an adult age. This doesn’t guarantee a place void of juvenile behavior. Just because they are adults doesn’t mean that their behavior will match their age. While on Home, I have witnessed behavior from adults that were worse than what we see from teenagers. There are plenty of adults on Home that view messing around with people’s minds as a sort of game.
If there were to be more adult sexual content added to Home in this new area, it would undoubtedly attract a seedier group of users. Home already has its share of people who prey on women and teenage girls. A couple of women have confided in me about encounters with sexual predators on Home. I’m afraid that with a sexually adult area within Home, this would only attract more of these predators. If minors found a way to get into this area, it would be an even more dangerous place for them.
Sony’s image would need to be taken into consideration. What would creating an adult version of Home do the Sony image?
Dlyrius’ Rebuttal:
Let’s begin this rebuttal by pointing out the only real argument given by Orion is that Sony is currently unable to enforce the thirteen-year-old age limit given by the TOS to enter and use Home. The fact is this is very true; I personally ran into one eight-year-old, two ten-year-olds, and an eleven-year-old within my first hour in the Hub at the time of this writing. Not only were these children extremely rude and totally clueless, it was very easy to see that there was no parental supervision happening on their side of the screen. All they did was use profanity, and express a desire to have sex.
It isn’t my job to babysit, or spend half my Home time putting under aged children on ignore. I do that enough now with the legitimate aged users. I would report them, but I have yet to see an option in the reporting system exclusively for under-aged players.
Of course, the age group 13-21 are almost as bad, but I expect that kind of uncouth behavior and disrespect from them (which in itself is a pretty sad window into our current society). Unfortunately, this makes finding willing subjects for the predators on Home much easier. But I digress, while I do care a great deal about these issues, that isn’t part of my debate.
In Orion’s argument, he stated a great deal about the sexuality that currently runs wild on Home, as well as the lack, and/or limitations of parental controls. On those points, I totally agree. But as I stated, it is not our job to supervise or raise other people’s children on Home. Besides, I seriously doubt it is the so-called “adults” conducting the majority of these trysts and orgies. Out of all the adults I have befriended over my two-plus years on Home, very few have even showed a slight interest in these activities; in fact it is quite the opposite. It is the “kids” who declare publicly that this is all they want to do, not the adults.
It is nearly impossible to carry on a conversation in public without some “horn-dog” coming up and hitting on anything that moves (or in some cases, doesn’t move). In fact, every adult I have discussed the subject with expressed a desire to escape this juvenile lust-fest for an environment on Home were we could just have fun, chat, play games, or what have you. They would also like to have an area to go to be free of the “fam” recruitment, “emo” teenagers, and general trolls that are all too familiar on Home.
Within my argument, I stated a very simple solution to verifying the age of a user wanting to gain access to the proposed adult sections of Home. So problem solved there. As for some slipping through because they are not being supervised: yes, it is going to happen.
There is nothing we can do about what happens on the other side of someone’s screen, or within their family dynamics. But in using an age verification system like the one I suggested, I feel Sony would greatly benefit both financially and with their public image if they were to offer such areas to users. It is a well-known fact that most gamers are over the age of 21, and according to the latest ESA report on the videogame industry, the average age of the most frequent game purchaser is 35. Giving mature users a place to escape the prepubescent pimple crowd would be a blessing and greatly appreciated, and I can almost predict this is a marketing demographic Sony could totally add to their target market list, which would increase their revenues.
It is also a fact that us “old timers” were there when video games were invented, and we have some serious hardcore gamers in our ranks. The current marketing strategies used target males between what 18 and 24. Instead, let’s start targeting baby boomers here. There are millions of us out here – with lots of disposable income – looking for something to do, as we find ourselves too old to go out drag racing and running around till all hours of the night.
I see no reason why new games couldn’t be made that interest that group as well as the slash and kill games the kids love. Personally, I would love to see something like Gran Turismo, but with drag racing instead. How about some 50’s- and 60’s-themed public areas? Good old rock and roll would keep me coming back time and time again. These are the types of places adults would hang out and spend money in. We sure aren’t dead, and Lord knows it’s not likely we will be anytime soon.
So forget all the sexual implications Orion used as an argument against an adult area on Home. Instead, remember that we paid our dues, we earned the right to not have to hide in a private space just to carry on a conversation or have some fun playing games with our friends.
Orion’s Rebuttal:
Dlyrius has outlined several reasons for why she would want an adults only Home.
- Some areas in Home don’t provide a good environment for children.
- The desire to have uninterrupted adult conversations because of “horny teenagers” presently doing rude things to other people’s avatars.
- Not having to worry about other people’s unsupervised children
I absolutely agree with the first item, which can be accomplished with the parental controls that currently exist. The second item assumes that it is only children that cause these bad experiences, which has not always been my experience. Especially with age bias, I usually find that it is people in their early 20’s that harass older users for being on Home. I have met some really respectful children on Home, and many adults who act like children. Many of these well-behaved children I have met are under the age limit for Home. With the third item, I must ask: do we really want to abandon the children on Home to be left entirely unsupervised and vulnerable?
Dlyrius expresses a desire to have a place that is simply devoid of children, and I can truly sympathize with the desire to have a “kid-free zone.” What she is asking for is already available in today’s Home, if parents did the right thing by creating sub-accounts for their children with content blocking turned on. The success of Dlyrius’ solution to require the purchase of a special PSN card to access the adult Home also hinges on the parents doing the right things, and it has been my experience that they often don’t do the right thing.
At my local game store, I frequently observe adults buying MA rated games for underaged children, even after being warned by the sales clerk. I know that this is the fault of the adults for buying age inappropriate games for children, but it highlights that there is nothing to stop a child from persuading an adult to buy a PSN card to access Home, as they presently do with other MA rated games. How many minors does one encounter while playing MA rated online games? From what I hear from friends and see on YouTube videos, they abound with minors.
What many people have been asking for with an “adult” version of Home goes beyond just having a place to converse that is free of children. They wan a place to have adult relationships that match the real world — holding hands, hugging, kissing, snuggling, lying together, and emulating having sexual relations. If an area is created to accommodate adult relationships that match the real world, then all the more for a need to make sure that minors don’t have access. If we can’t keep kids out of adult rated online games already, I don’t see how one would be able to keep them from getting an adult rated PSN card for access into an adult rated Home. It would most likely do nothing to keep out the troublemakers that Dlyrius desires to deny access.
Dlyrius’ idea of having a special PSN card for Home fails in other ways as well. It would mean that by default, adults would have restricted access. The beauty of Home is that it is a free gathering place for PS3 users. Having a charge for access goes against the model of giving free access and then charging for content within Home.
Many probably would pass on paying for access, as the default Home still would have most of the games that you see today in Home and you would still be able to meet with friends and converse. So, why would one purchase the adult version of Home? To be able to get to Godfather’s? I don’t think so. You would have to have “adult” content to attract people to pay money to access.
My feeling is that if the paid adult Home was only to have a place for adults to meet without children, then Sony wouldn’t be able to get enough people to pay for it to cover their costs of creating and managing it.
So who made the stronger argument? Clearly, there are no perfect solutions to this issue, no matter what side your opinion falls on. That said, perhaps there are perspectives that neither Dlyrius or I have thought of in this debate. If there are, please leave them in the comments below.
November 19th, 2012 by Orion_NGC1976 | 7 comments
Father, husband, dolphy racer and sometimes Home world traveler.
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I seriously don’t desire an “adults-only” section on Home simply because it would break the balance of having an “Adults Only” rating to their product, which Sony is totally against.
I’m fine with what Sony has to offer thus far. Socially, however, is different. For one, Home is too broad to actually tailor anything to “just adults” these days, as minors and pre-teens can gain access to content that is suited for adults. We can advise the parents strongly to watch their young, but the fact is they won’t. Far-fetched statement, but it’s pure fact, no matter how much I even preach this. It’s all we can do, right?
I think an adult area would be all right, but I wouldn’t want any content to be too over the top sexual. I think we would just like some areas where we could go publicly and still escape hormone ridden kids out there. The card idea is workable for sure as a means for access,but I think if we have to pay for it, there should definitely be some sort of item attached to it. I have actually had this discussion with a lot of different people and most of the adults I know would love this kind of choice.
I think that education for parents about what Home is and the kind of materials that are already here that are not underage appropriate would be a good idea though. I think that Sony should at least put a flyer inside each PS3 box that is sold that would inform parents about Home and that they have those parental controls to utilize. I am talking about a separate brightly colored piece of paper inside the box with a big READ THIS! on it. They could also have a window pop up when we log in with info on it.
Great ideas and article guys. Can’t wait to see what you decide to do next.
I would love to see an adult area. It’s hard enough trying to find the older people on Home as it is now. But as far as what Jin Lovelace said about Sony would only get Adult ratings could be resolved by creating the same space for both but having an adult pass could prompt you on which one you would like to go into Free-for-all or Adult area only. It doesn’t have to be all spaces with this option just a few would do.
I’m not opposed to a adult area in Home at all, it’s a great idea. What I am not down with is anything to give Home a bad name, and I think this would. Just like Second Life reputation started circling the drain when the adult stuff became the rule rather than the exception. Home isn’t perfect. but it’s a place I want to see be around for a long time. Great article guys!
I have thought about these questions for sometime. For me at least the answers to these debates seem obvious.
Most of us are adults in Home. The balance Sony has is pretty good. I think the rest is up to us.
There are plenty of adult things in Home. If an adult area were created, and we had our adult PSN cards to get in. Would you act lude just because you had a small comfort in buying a card that told Sony you were an adult?
Or would you just act like one all the time?
I guess what we have so far is all in how we wear it.
What we do with a space, and so far I have only seen a few “adult” deco type of spaces.
I don’t think you really could find any reasonable control system for something like this.
Being balanced is the smartest thing Sony could do with the way things are setup currently. But that is just my own opinion.
Most kids have a full blown adult account anyway to play COD etc so they will still be able to get in if they wanted to. Trust me when I say Ive seen an adults only area in second life and it wasnt good. do you wanna be my girl friend becomes fancy a ( ill keep it clean ) There are a lot of over aged freaks out there that in an adults only space everything and everyone becomes game because the shackles are off. I say dont go there.
Interesting article! It certainly got me thinking.
I don’t want an adults-only Home. It would be difficult to police, and while Dylrius’s concept of a special-access PSN card is a good one, it would be an extra barrier to Home, and one which I think I might not bother with (or, at the very least, I wouldn’t have bothered with when I first started using Home).
That said, I’m now a Home addict. But if there was a special “Adults Only” public area created with access permitted via a PSN card, I still might not use it. I’m not convinced that all the pervs and trolls who bother us with icky PMs are all children. I have a feeling that an Adults-Only area would actually INCREASE the potential of being harassed by a creepy stranger. It would be a magnet for those seeking “virtual sex”… yecch! I don’t play Second Life, but from what people are saying here, it sounds terrible! I mean, I love my friends on Home, but I don’t LOVE them. I’m married in rl, and I’m not looking for romance elsewhere, so I’m somewhat of a “special case”. But even if I were single and searching, the idea of creating an avatar which will then be able to hold hands with, kiss, cuddle and even engage in sex acts with another avatar? EW. Maybe it’s just me, but I was even creeped out by a cut-scene of avatars having sex in the game MassEffect.
I don’t know… maybe I’m TOO old, but it doesn’t seem even the least bit sexy to see avatars “getting busy”… it seems comically ridiculous. If there was a public space on Home where that stuff could happen (presumably because the shackles are off), I would probably avoid it like the plaque.