At first, I thought it was just me. Cruising around PlayStation Home in first a male then female avatar, I noticed as the latter that guys would gather around me no matter where I stopped, five or six at a time, to strike up conversations.

Then they would start dancing, for absolutely no reason.

Usually, the conversation wasn’t appealing. Example: The very first words from the very first guy to address my female avatar demanded a sexual act that’s illegal in several states — and impossible to perform just yet, thankfully, in PlayStation Home.

It’s not that I cut a particularly appealing figure in Home (or in person, for that matter). This kind of interaction apparently is fairly typical around the virtual environment created by Sony and introduced for PlayStation 3 users last Thursday. It even spawned a kind of retaliatory strike against the worst offenders.

For those of you who don’t know yet, Home is a virtual three-dimensional social networking environment where fake people gather to have real conversations via online chat. Each person logged into Home appears as an avatar that can be customized right down to bone structure.

These “people” interact in a virtual mall, virtual movie theater, virtual bowling alley and arcade where visitors can play real games, and a virtual commons area that connects them all. Apart from these is a beachfront apartment — each avatar gets one — where friends can meet and mingle or just buy new furniture using micropayments.

Thanks to the level of customization, avatars can be made beautiful, and so the entire Home environment looks like it’s populated by reality TV castoffs. Nevertheless, visitors seem to forget this and, as demonstrated by the lewd guys, act as if the virtual beauty queens are extensions of the real thing.

What does Sony have to say about this weird glomming around girls? Nothing yet. The company stressed early on that Home remains in beta — a late testing stage for software — and always will be a work in progress. There will be more clothes, more games, more virtual meeting places …

And, hopefully, better behavior. It would be a shame if virtual sexual harrassment lawsuits began appearing at Home, too.