Joystiq [PlayStation]

If there's one thing we love about Sony's Philliam Harrison (what, you mean Phil isn't short for Philliam?), it's that he's always available to answer questions for whatever reason. These are interesting questions, so we'll go ahead and summarize the Q's and the A's below. Enjoy!

If you could go back in time, what would you tell your past self?

Phil said: "the professional advice I'd give myself is to "think bigger"...I would have encouraged him to be more ambitious, bigger scale, more aggressive in changing the way games were made and also to have invested more heavily in creating online experiences - however experimental, however unsuccessful."

Where do you see gaming, socially and culturally, in 20 years?

Phil responds thus: "I hope that videogames and electronic forms of interactive entertainment continue to expand to new audiences, all the time. Linked to that, I want to see videogames given more credibility as a mainstream form of entertainment through appropriate cultural commentary and criticism." We all do, Philliam, we all do.

So... encouraging or discouraging "homebrew" games?

Phil? "Let me first say that Homebrew is sometimes a misused term and so for the purposes of this answer I will exclude pirates and hackers with illegal intentions from the definition." He goes on, "I fully support the notion of game development at home using powerful tools available to anyone. We were one of the first companies to recognize this in 1996 with Net Yaroze on PS1...we will do our industry a service by providing opportunities for the next generation of creative and technical talent." But remember, guys, piracy isn't allowed and Sony will do what they can to prevent that.

Does SCE grow concerned over the loss of multiplatform titles?

"We have the widest selection of meaningful exclusives on PlayStation 3 - by virtue of our own investments in our development studios and strategic support of independent developers and publishers...Within SCE Worldwide Studios we have the largest platform-dedicated development resource in the industry - with more people, and more teams, dedicated to making games exclusively for PlayStation 3."

What're you going to do about all the negative Sony press?

Phil replies: "We absolutely have a lot of work to do but I'm convinced we have the right strategy - and recent announcements like Home and Little Big Planet have resonated very positively with our audiences around the world, including some commentators who had been previously critical of us." He also goes on to discuss the mistakes Sony has made and apologizes for them. He also mentions that positive word-of-mouth is far more impressive than any PR firm can do. So as people enjoy the system, they'll grow comfortable in talking about it and recommending it.

So... price drop?

We're not even going to quote. Because the answer is no. What'd you expect? Feel free to drop some comments on what you think of all this -- we feel he's a pretty competent guy and answered all these reader-submitted questions with the greatest of Sony style. Take that as you will.