My Player One and Only

Home Alone

lol wuz up john tesh

I'd brought this upon myself. Tired and lonely, I decided to break from my marathon session of Everyday Shooter and install PlayStation Home. The decision didn't come easy: I'm a misanthropic introvert, drawn to solitary, alien experiences like Flower, Knytt and Rez. Plus, my perception of Home was that it was like Second Life minus the user-created content, furries and sex dungeons, plus microtransactions - not exactly most people's idea of a good time.

As I said, I was lonely. And I really just wanted to play that echochrome arcade game they'd put in the bowling alley - at least, that was my excuse.

After spending what seemed like at least four minutes creating my character, I spent another five trying to cast him off his swank downtown apartment's balcony and into the harbor below. Thwarted by his pitiful vertical and some well placed invisible walls, I went back inside and took stock of my situation. No bathroom? Where did I sleep? Why am I so ugly? No matter. After conceding that it was impossible to destroy my Frankensteinian doppelganger, I decided I would "fix" him later. For now, I would face the world. I loaded the Central Plaza.

The Central Plaza is PlayStation Home's hub. It connects all of the first-party "spaces" - the Bowling Alley, Mall, Theatre and Gamer's Lounge, a place I didn't know existed until researching for this piece. It's sleek and decidedly West Coast, not too dissimilar to one of those Southern California high schools filled with 27-year-old actors you always see on MTV, except instead of curiously hot, over-tanned wax people, it's overflowing with animatronic American Apparel models, almost all incapable of anything but a few monosyllabic grunts and groans. That was definitely the case with the first guy who approached me as soon as I had loaded into this new environment.

>hey brah u look jus like john tesh

That's because I am John Tesh.

>u mute?

No, I don't know how to respond to you, blunt_killa7329. Here, have some bird seed.

>whats matter, you got dick in yo mouth?

Totally. In fact, I have an entire bag of dicks in there.

That's how the conversation would have gone if I had known how to type back. Instead, I sat there, a malformed mute, and took my verbal flogging. Anyway, he was right. I did look like John Tesh. How he was familiar enough with the TV-personality-turned-musician's appearance to make that judgment was anyone's guess. In the meantime, all I could do was glare at blunt_killa7329 in silence and move on.