In Part III of our voluminous four-part interview with Sony Computer Entertainment worldwide studios president Phil Harrison, he detailed the success of SingStar, defended his nonstop evangelism of MotorStorm (in stores March 6th), and acknowledged that his company could have done a better job keeping journalists and gamers informed ahead of the Playstation 3's November 2006 launch in North America and Japan. In today's final installment, Harrison shares his thoughts on which aspects of SCE's culture need to adapt and evolve, the prospects of sanctioned homebrew development for PlayStation Portable, and the company's plans for what it has dubbed the "entertainment tool."

So given the issues that I've outlined regarding the flow of information out of SCE, what do you think needs to change?

There is a cultural thing about our approach in Japan that has to change. Our approach in Japan is, "Once it's perfect, we'll share it with everybody else." Whereas I think in order to engender trust in our users, we have to share some things that might be not quite perfect, but are ready to give you an indication of what's coming. So we could say, "You know, we're not sure when it's coming, but we're going to have DVD upscaling on Playstation 3." There you go. There's a scoop for you. In my view, we should have a slide on a Web site, or a blog. We should have [Playstation head of platform development Izumi] Kawanishi blog his road map for the Xross Media Bar for Playstation 3. I think he would probably have the biggest blog after yours in the world.

[Laughs.] One of the greatest and in some ways most insidious accomplishments of the Internet, is that everyone accepts perpetual beta.

Right. No, perpetual beta implies--

No, I don't mean--go ahead.

--that implies that we're calling it beta because we're not prepared to stand by its features and functionality.

I wasn't implying that. Look at Google. I've been using Gmail for years, and I don't know that they've ever officially launched Gmail.

Well, it still says beta on the logo.

That's what I mean.

I'm a user of it as well, and I love it.

At the same time, I'm assuming that beyond the cultural challenge, because of the space that you're in, there's a product challenge as well. People accept beta software, but would people accept, say, a beta Bravia television? And consoles are increasingly positioned somewhere in between hardware and software.

It's an incredible tension between those two things. Obviously the hardware is now done, so that's fixed. It will cost reduce, and it will change in function in some ways, but the hardware is now off and running. But the software has to grow and change over time, and we have to become more comfortable in sharing our road map. We have to get more liberal in the ways we experiment with some things. Because some things that we think are important may not be important to our consumer. Conversely, something which is lower down on our road map may be the most important thing to a consumer, unexpectedly so. And we need to be a little more open in that regard.

Yesterday, you were asked a question about homebrew development on the PS3, then I steered you onto the PSP. And you said that because the nature of the PSP platform is that it is more closed, and that you didn't feel that it was as appropriate. Your answer made me wonder, is that driven more by corporate goals and the piracy situation? Because when I look at the homebrew community and what they're doing, it's not massive, but there is a sizable number of people that are passionate about experimenting on the PSP.

Yes. It's always difficult, because officially, we could never condone it. Unofficially, I am always very admiring of those people, because they do some really interesting things under very technically complex circumstances. If there was a way to legitimize that--we wouldn't get all of the community, because for some people, the whole dark under the radar element is the appeal. I respect that. I don't like it, but I respect it.

Hence the name dark_alex, right?

Right, yeah. I don't know why that's the name. When you have a fundamentally retail-distributed SKU of software on a disc, you have a value chain of stakeholders that you have to maintain. Developers, publishers, distributors, retailers, etc. It's important that we maintain that. However, when you start to move towards network-distributed software on PSP, you can take a different approach to that value chain and you can be more adventurous in the way you distribute software. You can open it up to other developers and non-traditional game types. And I think to Alex Rigopoulos' point earlier about Frequency and Amplitude. If he was making those games now, he'd make them for Playstation Network, and I think they would have greater resonance, greater critical mass. Maybe Resonance should be the third one in the series, because Rez was Mizuguchi's game. I don't know who owns the IP to Frequency and Amplitude--it might be us, it might be Harmonix. I'll have to check.

I was a big fan of both games. In fact, after I got my hands on the preview code for Amplitude, I wrote Alex a long note saying how amazed I was by the game, and that he needed to move it onto mobile phones and portables--this was before PSP was even announced--because I felt that it needed to be mobile and connected. I was blown away by its potential.

That is a perfect example, and it's going to sound like a forced segue, but this GDC speech that I'm doing about Game 3.0--I was wondering whether you going to ask me about this yesterday, and you didn't--why I call it Game 3.0 is that I think there are three ages of games. The first age was the disconnected island nation console, with games entirely on disc or entirely on cartridge as the whole experience. The second age was the connected console, but where the content was still locked entirely on the disc or the cartridge. And the third age, which we're moving into, is where you have upload and download, this bidirectional relationship with the user. And something like Amplitude, or Frequency, or even Dance Dance Revolution--you've seen the YouTube clips of the DDR freaks, who are just incredible--what if DDR had the ability like SingStar for you to upload your performance for other people to check out, and you could get that whole community element going?

Keeping the community inside the game experience rather than breaking it out of the game experience is what Game 3.0 is about, or it's one of the characterizations of what Game 3.0 is about. It's about commerce, it's about community and it's about communication, but it's about collaboration as well. It's this network effect of users creating content and sharing it with each other, and that the game system or the game technology is a provider of that platform as much as it is a piece of gameplay. So I think we can revisit some of these games in the next era, or the era that we're now in, much more successfully with that kind of backbone. So as you said, sharing is a very powerful thing; "Check out my mix in Amplitude," that user-to-user, one-to-many, many-to-many communication is really interesting.

So if the possibility of games like Amplitude interests you, what's your road map for first-party EDI games in terms of level of ambition?

We have a penalty box--if anybody says the word "EDI," I charge them ten bucks. It's "Games for the Playstation Network."

Right. Now from a third-party perspective, Tekken is going to be made available--it's a sizable download with plenty of gameplay. But that consisted of taking something that was an arcade game, then a PSP game. But I'd like to know about what's going to be native and created from the ground up. There's a saying that goes "crawl, walk, run." How ambitious are your plans for the kinds of experiences that you want to create for download, and what's your timetable for those more ambitious games? Not to cast any aspersions on Blast Factor or flOw--I love both of those games--but something like Amplitude with the remixes and sharing, that's more akin to a game on the scale of SingStar PS3. How are you pacing yourself for proving out what you think is the potential of games built solely for digital distribution?

Because of the risk profile being comparatively lower, we are taking a more deliberately scatter gun approach. We're being much more experimental, taking ideas we know would never, ever work at retail and revisiting them and trying to establish them. Some of them, I think we can establish on the network and then move to retail. I think that's a perfectly valid approach. Between us and third parties, we can be releasing hundreds of games a year for the network. Thousands even. Non-traditional game content as well.

What we did with PSP in Europe with travel guides was a great experiment and a great idea for that format. But it didn't really work as a retail SKU so well because of the distribution. Do you want to go into a game store to buy one of these? We did actually get distribution in bookstores in the travel section, and people were like, "What the hell is that?" But if you have a PSP, you have a network opportunity to download it and you're going to Prague for the weekend, that's the kind of thing that you would consume and enjoy. So it's coming.

When we met in the fall in California, you and I discussed the category that Ken [Kutaragi, chairman of Playstation] and others have dubbed "entertainment tools," like Richard Marks' EyeToy photo manipulation demo. Is any of that kind of stuff in the works? What I said to you at the time is that there have been the province of PCs, like video-editing, photo-editing, photo management. The mouse and keyboard is very efficient for those kinds of applications. But when you look at services like YouTube and Flickr , the line between productivity and entertainment begins to blur. The demo that I saw of EyeToy PSP, with the photo effects, combined with the power of the PS3 to do things with photos and videos--is that something you're actively pursuing? Or would that be more of a corporate initiative, to perhaps approach a company like Adobe and say, "Hey, there could be an opportunity to bring some of your products to our machine in an interesting way."

I can't answer that question specifically because it would perhaps overstep the mark that I've already overstepped many times. How do I answer that?

Well, take a step back. Ken had thrown that idea of the entertainment tool a while back, but publicly I haven't seen any movement. Can you at least verify that that wasn't just a flash in the pan, that there are things that are being done?

So the photo viewer on PS3 has a really powerful bit of software that nobody knows about. But there's a really powerful bit of analytical software running on your photographs that knows where the faces are.

Someone mentioned that to me. Not that they knew that software was running, but they did notice that in one of the full screen viewing modes, it would focus on the faces.

And that's a piece of technology that was invented by Sony Research Labs, which we implemented on PS3 in real-time. So that transfer of research into interesting entertainment tool opportunities is already starting. It's already happening. And Howard Stringer keeps banging the table and saying, "Why aren't we doing more of it?" And rightly so. He should be, because the Playstation 3 is actually the best technological outlet for much of this research. Part of the challenge of a research-led company like Sony is inventing stuff that you don't actually have a market for. You have no way of selling it. So what's the point of investing all this money in R&D if you have no way of productizing it? But the Playstation 3 delivers a channel for a lot of these application/service hybrids which will come in the future.

Right. And then lastly--

Was that ambiguous enough for you?

Well, I respect the fact that some of these questions tread on sensitive ground. It's just that I was very taken by the concept of the entertainment tool, and I was just hoping--I just like to see cool stuff.

Yeah.

So the last question is a two-parter on PSP and homebrew. Could the PS3 potentially become the homebrew development environment--at the appropriate time, when it makes sense with the value chain that you talked about? An official homebrew development environment.

For the PSP?

Yeah.

That's a very interesting question. Technically, no reason why it couldn't at all. It would only be a business policy issue. In a development environment, the PSP as a standalone hardware is not sufficient to write games on it. You can't plug a keyboard and just get on with it. But as a host environment, the PS3 would be perfect.

The other part of the question is this. You've spoken a lot about the importance of user-created content. Looking at Will Wright and what he's doing with Spore, it seems the one of the keys to user-created content work is the tools. Will has spoken about the amount of time they've spent on the various editors in the game. So when you look at user-created content in the near future, what's your investment in making powerful, simple, entertaining tools to provide to consumers within these games?

I loved Will's speech for a couple of reasons. One, because I thought it was fantastic to see the progress that he's making with Spore. but it was also interesting to see that they have solved problems in exactly the same way that we have solved them. Admittedly coming at it from very different thematic angles, but they've solved the same problems. You're right, UI on the tools is a lot easier on the PC, because you've got a mouse, you've got a keyboard, you've got some established user interface metaphors that people can figure out. Drag, drop, click--these are things that people understand. Harder to do on a controller, but not impossible, and we're doing some of those things in a couple of games that are built around the whole premise of user-created content.

I've mentioned this to you before. It just made me smile--Spore is this huge, epic, fantastic, scary, amazing project--and if Spore was a whole screen of pixels, what we've done is just one of those pixels. And we've done it really well, but it's only one of the little elements of their bigger ambition. So I'm interested to see more of that game. I can't wait to play it.

Great. Thanks very much for your time, Phil.

My pleasure. I always enjoy this.