Sony's Peter Edward

The Second Life thing comes up quite a lot but I think it's a very different platform to ours. It's easy to make those comaprisons because they're both 3D, avatar-based virtual worlds. But Second Life is very much a PC experience, a solo experience.

There's much more of a wild west approach in terms of what's allowed to happen there - which is great, if that's what you're into. PlayStation Home gives you a more secure environment where it's impossible for someone to create their own animations and objects.

Haha! Well, who knows what might happen in the future... But we're very conscious of what people expect from Sony as a company and the sort of implicit trust people put in a brand like that. Second Life is more of an experimental platform really, where anything goes. That's one of its selling points. Home is more family-oriented, it's less of a solitary thing.

I'm not going to say yes to that, because then it'll be all 'Home developer discusses nudist colony'.

We have an age-rating system within Home, but at the moment if someone says they're over 18 that's because those are the details they've inputted. We have no way of knowing whether those details are true or not. Before we can be a hundred per cent certain of a person's age, things that are truly adult in content would be very difficult to approve.

You can, but it is a big, complex job. It's not just a case of translating a text file and shoving it in. It also depends on where development started, because if it started in Europe development will tend to have localisation planned from day one. If it started elsewhere in the world it might get done later in the development cycle, which slows things down.

There are something like 29 PlayStation territories within PAL and 23 languages. There are different legal bodies governing those countries, individual legal requirements, ratings and boards... Anything that deals with moderation and copyright becomes massively complicated.

The issue with the picture frame stuff is yes, I can put my holiday snaps on there, lovely. But what if I put some copyrighted material up or worse? How do different countries require us to deal with that? That's were it gets complicated and slows down. It's being worked on and it's something the European guys do want to put out there.

Clearly it's something we want to narrow. It's not a desirable situation for users or for us. It's something everybody wants to fix. As for how long that's going to take... The games industry generally has suffered from this issue for 20 years, so I don't think we're going to make instant progress. But everybody is working to make a difference.