Why “the Metaverse” needs gameplay and gameplay mechanics
nwn.blogs.com
nwn.blogs.com
From https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/09/19/neal-step...
> That was the thing I totally missed in Snow Crash. When I was thinking up the Metaverse, I was trying to figure out the market mechanism that would make all of this stuff affordable. Snow Crash was written when 3D imaging graphics hardware was outrageously expensive, only for a few research labs. I figured that if it were ever going to become as cheap as TV, then there would have to be a market for 3D graphics as big as the market for TV. So the Metaverse in Snow Crash is kind of like TV.
> What I didn't anticipate, what actually came along to drive down the cost of 3D graphics hardware, was games. And so the virtual reality that we all talked about and that we all imagined 20 years ago didn't happen in the way that we predicted. It happened instead in the form of video games. And so what we have now is Warcraft guilds, instead of people going to bars on the street in Snow Crash.
Nobody wants to live in a single shared virtual universe, hell most people don’t even seem to want to live in shared reality and have segmented themselves off into echo chambers on social media.
Second Life was supposed to be "Internet 3.0". All businesses would effectively have to have a presence in-world. Many large ones did. They're all gone now. The vision of doing things in a 3D world wasn't the right one.
SL still has about 2/3 of the users it had at peak, and is going along fine. About 35,000 to 50,000 users at any time, about even with GTA V Online. Sluggish by modern game standards, though, which is a big problem for new users.
Rosedale went off to do High Fidelity, which was supposed to be a better Second Life. It works, but it flopped. That company has recently "pivoted to enterprise", having failed with their consumer product.
Whether the Metaverse needs gameplay mechanics is an interesting question. It definitely needs game aesthetics. In High Fidelity, when you started up a new region, the world came up as a big piece of graph paper on which you could build. Rosedale thought "build it and they will come". They didn't. SineSpace had the same problem. Sansar (a Linden Labs project separate from Second Life) paid people to build good looking areas. They had a Star Wars prop museum, a Ready Player One prop museum... People came, looked once, and left.
Second Life starts new regions with terrain that has hills, streams, rivers, roads, and trees. Sometimes a full city road grid with street lights. Management behaves a lot like a municipal government.
Recently, Second Life opened some new areas of "Linden Homes". It's a nice suburbia, and it filled up so rapidly that additional areas are being added. It's developing a suburban lifestyle. There's no plot, but there are picnic and boats and pets and pubs. People hang out with their neighbors, drive around, set up community associations, and have barbecues. This appeals to people for whom middle class suburbia is an unreachable aspiration in real life, a growing demographic.
Considering the extremely high cost of SL land, i doubt this is true.
[1] https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/435890-oh-the-...
Plus the client feels like a something that grew organically out of a research project from the early 2000s and is about as new user friendly as Blender.
It's not impossible that a "metaverse" would benefit from the same network effects. You would want to inhabit the same (virtual) reality as your friends, probably, and they would like to inhabit the same as their friends, and so on. (Which doesn't mean we would like this outcome!)
Most social media tend to be extremely sticky, and not segregated by echo chambers. It's not like the socialists went to twitter, rightwings went to instagram etc.
I would imagine that different parts of the metaverse would have different rules and mechanics, because they're used for different purposes - various games, workplaces, software, etc.
And if so - don't we already have that with the internet, reddit, social networks, steam, and MMORPGS?
I would imagine that metaverse as described by scifi authors would have to have some kind of central location with various portals leading to various parts of the world. But I think there's a good chance that what we have now - internet, steam allowing you to download games, and multiplayer games themselves providing various subspaces - might be simpler, more convenient, and more flexible than one unified 3D world.
Hundreds of games already provide their own game unique mechanics, and social networks and reddit already provide unified game mechanics for reputation scores and such.
If we really want the whole thing to exist in VR - maybe there could be a VR "browser" creating a 3D interface for searching and navigating various parts of the metaverse. But the parts themselves would be built by different teams/companies using their own game engines and rules. That version seems more flexible and realistic to me.
A metaverse doesn't need to include games per se, though portals to standalone games will be important - the metaverse simply acts as a lobby.
However, the critical component is the unified physics and interaction model. Games in the real world emerge because people can rely on consistent actions around which rules can be based.
Let people throw and catch, and people will play basketball with trash cans. Provide good collision models and people will play baseball or hide-and-seek. Basic occlusion and grabbing mechanics enable card games. Yes, provide great hit boxes and collision detection and people will become swordsmen.
Right now, creating great (predictable and realistic) physics in VR is CPU expensive and with lots of finicky edge cases. Leap Motion and others have done good work here[1], but anyone that has spent time in VR knows the challenges of simply stacking boxes without everything randomly flying away when the corner of one box is accidentally placed "inside" another box.
A successful metaverse requires physics to be predictable, consistent, and fun. Games will emerge. But expecting a single universe to somehow also extend to the requirements of games like Fortnite, Minecraft, or GTA5 - each of which have their own physics, graphics, and gameplay optimizations - is a difficult, if not impossible, goal.
[1] http://blog.leapmotion.com/designing-physical-interactions-f...
The facial scanner in the movie adaptation of Ready Player One was a good touch for this. I think we could accomplish the same with temporary (or permanent!) non visible tattoos for facial tracking via cameras.
Players can create scenes with in-game editors for 3d modeling, sound editing and visual programming. They can then share the scene and play other players' creations within the game.
The scenes load fast, the editor is accessible, easy to use, and powerful. In my opinion it's close to the best we can do with the medium, and the step up from Dreams will only be possible with more precise input/output and more powerful hardware.
If it's easier or more rewarding for them to create these games or other content outside the metaverse platform, then the metaverse gets less useful, less used, and doesn't happen.
I actually played Second Life before reading Snow Crash. So imagine the chills I got when I started to read, and found this past vision of the future predicting Second Life with such uncanny accuracy. I found out later that the guys who made Second Life had drawn inspiration from Snow Crash. Human nature bridged most of the gap between the implementation detail of Second Life and Stephenson's vision.
But, for some reason they abruptly changed direction to some kind of weird mobile avatar creator on mobile and shut down shortly after.
I think Blue Mars was started when there was a huge surge of them after Second Life took off. Even Google and others were developing something in the space.