The PS3 Online

So I've been a fan of the Sony PS3 for some time now. I've had one for a while but whenever I've spent much time with it in the past I've been playing multi-player games with a friend in my living room. It's a truly amazing machine. I've set up a media server on an old PC with 80 GB of my music, all my photos and a bunch of movies on it and I love that I can play all of this effortlessly on my living room television/stereo via the PS3. There are some pretty incredible other features that I've played with as well, such as "PlayStation Home", an interactive 3D world and "Life with PlayStation" which allows you to manipulate a globe and see what news is happening and what the weather is like in many major metro areas.

But tonight I decided to sit down and spend some quality time with a game of mine that I hadn't spent much time with previously, "Little Big Planet". The basic synopsis of the game is that you're in a world of human dreams and you go around playing these interesting, somewhat surreal levels. It's physically challenging (requiring a certain amount of dexterity and reaction) but it's also really beautiful, creative and a little intellectually stimulating. Well, as I played it tonight I decided to try some of the levels "online". This was totally weird. Suddenly I'm playing levels with other people around the world, like me, in their living rooms. I can chat with them, choose levels with them and see their own creations within the game.

I've spent a lot of time on the internet. I started using IRC a decade ago and I'm no stranger to chat and, obviously, blogs, web sites, twitter, etc. What was so alien about this is that it was in my living room... on my television! For some strange reason I felt somewhat exposed and more "connected" to this experience than I've felt during my online computing experiences. I guess it goes to show that there is a lot more to be discovered and experienced in our relationship with these machines. It's so strange how images on a television can evoke a different emotional response based on what you think is driving them. In some ways, this may be the reason the Turing test is such a benchmark. If we believe that we're interacting with a person on the other side of that screen then there is a different response from us.