As you may have seen on Friday before the incriminating video was removed, there’s some pretty dodgy people out there on PlayStation Home. The thing is, it goes down a lot deeper than the unfortunate incident that YouTube’s flagging ninjas got hold of last week. So much deeper, that I’ve even coined a term for it. And filed a patent.

Alright, maybe not the last one. I think the US Patent Office might just reject a “patent describing the psychological behavior of male individuals around females on PlayStation-based 3D chat environments”. But that’s the general idea, and I call it “The Homegirl Effect”. You know, like a homeboy except…a girl.

The thing is, it’s an extremely troubling sort of issue. Seriously, you’ll see what I mean after the break.

I was hoping – really hoping – that Home would be the anti-Second Life. With a bunch of sensible PS3 owners, I thought, everybody would be decent towards each other, united by the common cause of owning the same console and enjoying it. There wouldn’t be any sexualised nonsense or abuse of other users, with the threat of moderation and IP bans hanging over everyone’s head. With the original closed betas yielding good results, with the community of testers getting along fantastically, I was looking forward to the open beta’s release to see this repeated in greater numbers.

Oh boy. That was a serious misconception. You only have to look at some of the SG community Twitters (or, dare I say it, use Home yourself) to see that initial impressions have revolved around the fact that Home is mostly populated by sexist perverts, homophobes and general morons. And that doesn’t look to change any time soon.

Enter the Homegirl Effect. In Europe, the Effect can be seen once or twice when out in the main Home Square. In Europe, nearly everybody is involved in a conversation with a friend or two; either that, or they walk around aimlessly for a while and stare at the video screens. Once or twice you’ll get a bloke approaching a girl and simply talking, which is fine. Occasionally, you’ll get the bodypopping flashmobs of guys who’ll surround a girl in seconds. But it’s a very rare thing.

In America, the difference is terrifying. Not to be cruel or demeaning towards the Americans – since, after all, I am working for a website created by a handful of them – but there seems to be a lot of them on Home who are desperately lonely. Every girl that enters the Central Plaza is instantly ambushed by a crowd of men of all shapes and sizes. It can be a horrifying experience.

To put to the test the conversation skills of the average American Home user, I tried a little experiment. Having initially disguised myself as a typical male American, I stood in the middle of the Plaza and waited for someone to talk to me. It took about two and a half minutes for somebody to come and talk to me, and even then they ran off when I started to type a reply.

Then, I switched personas and things got interesting. Once again, I stood in the middle of the Central Plaza and started the timer. It took 25 seconds for 4 blokes (and a girl) to surround me. Second time round it took 7 seconds for 4 guys to surround me and begin their bodypopping. The flirting was outrageous, too.

Trying the same thing in Europe generates some attention, but not to as much of a degree as you would find across the Atlantic. What separates American Home users from European ones other than nationality? What makes them so prone to harass every female avatar they see? Furthermore, are there moderation tools in place to deal with this sort of thing? One hopes Home has officials constantly on watch to prevent this sort of thing, as it’s happening a lot to people I know too.

The one, overarching question that remains is this: are there really that many lonely PS3 owners out there? One PSN friend commented that with Home, the PlayStation Network had found its own Xbox LIVE community: one filled with racists, homophobes and sexists that were once hidden behind a facade of silence, now unleashed on the rest of the userbase through the magic of text chat. It almost makes you grateful that you don’t get a headset included with your PS3.

The attitudes of users isn’t the only difference between the American and the European editions of Home. Keep an eye on the front page for my next article on Home where I compare the two. As usual with my European comparison articles, you can guess who gets the sharp end of the stick.