Fortnite and the Metaverse
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
First of all, this exact article could have been written in the early 00s (indeed, many articles like this were written back then) about Second Life. I remember well all the Second Life hype, about how we would all be somehow living our lives in this game/non-game most of the time. The hype eventually died.
I'm not arguing against things like MMORPGs or FortNite or Minecraft in particular. These are great games that people get a lot of enjoyment from, and a lot of that enjoyment is from building stuff and showing it off to other people. I just bristle at this whole "metaverse" nonsense and the hyping it up beyond what it really is.
But you know what? I think some people, particularly younger people are really enthused and inspired by this framing. People are energized when they think they are creating something heady thing of 'matrix-like' proportions.
I view it as a false kind of Koolaid, that derives real value out of its very existence. The Koolaid has value if it works!
But we need to be realistic as well.
Since 'blockchain' is losing its luster, and 'AI' isn't quite as shiny, we need a fancy new word to get the animal spirits flowing!
So watch out for a host of new 'metaverse' startups!
I completely agree. My experience in Online Town was vastly different from my experience in Zoom.
> “Everybody is looking at the Metaverse as something to experiment with and be in, but they never talk about the creation,” said Descamps, the former general manager for Zynga, the company best known for its viral Facebook hit game, FarmVille. “Even in [the film] ‘Ready, Player, One,’ who actually made the Metaverse there? ...”
Unless I'm misunderstanding the quote, did Descamps miss the entire premise for the movie?? That would be so deliciously poetic in context of the film and the article that it deserves an emphatic chef's kiss.
I digress... more on topic to the point at hand, one of my children spends quite a bit of time playing Fortnite and I realized several months back that much of that was in the game's "Creative" mode (largely with school friends) participating in things that might best described as "schoolyard-like"? Say, akin to four square or (loosely-organized) soccer. There's a fair amount of good-natured ribbing (which has escalated to unhealthy levels on a couple occasions with actual friends, not unlike what may occur during those aforementioned IRL examples), camaraderie-building teamwork/competition, and most of the other social dynamics that are exercised among young adolescents. Of course this is all minus such aspects as actual exercise or body language.
And that was long before the whole coronavirus situation disconnected them physically. Now it's effectively the de facto substitute casual social gathering for his circle of friends, for better or worse (plenty of both, best I can assess at this stage.)
However, all that said, there's absolutely nothing that suggests to me that Fortnite is—or ever could become—the (a?) metaverse. My view for now is that it is, frankly, very much a fad.
That isn't to say it won't leave lasting cultural effects. Just look at AOL: their reign of dominance was deep, wide, and surprisingly (if ultimately anticlimactically) long-tailed. They were The Internet to a vast number of Americans. But now? And I only pose that with the slightest dash of cynicism on top of a heaping serving of bland "time will tell"...
edit(s): minor grammar/clarity
Fortnite, the battle royal game - most certainly not. But a certain "always on" Fortnite mode, where I can meet with with friends, talk, jump, dance, shoot, or maybe watch an episode of Friends while sitting in a car in Risky Reels sounds like, hmmm, fun (disclaimer - due to covid I've been staying mostly at home for over a month now).
No fortnight players picked up a piece of rebar to practice their sword fighting. Close analogs are fun. No hate there. I really want the 1:1 mapping from snow crash.
I suppose the metaverse means different things to different people. Me, I want the direct mapping.
It's not all pre-made skins, either; you can go into Blender or Maya and make whatever you want. (What Fortnite calls "creating skins", from a supply of pre-made parts, Second Life users call "getting dressed".)
The downside is that you have to be good enough at 3D artwork creation and the tools for it to make something good. Anybody can create in Minecraft or The Sims. There's a high bar to entry in the systems that allow full creation capability. This is a real problem when attracting new users.
Nobody else seems to have both "big, persistent shared world" and "fully general user based creation". Most systems limit one or the other. There's also a big problem with Second Life viewers choking on excessively complex geometry, which brings down the frame rate. Second Life badly needs better automated level of detail generation.
(Automated level of detail generation is supposedly a solved problem. The trouble is, the usual algorithms don't work on clothing as separate items. Second Life mesh clothing is not part of the body. It's like real-world clothing, a 3D object with an inside and an outside. Sometimes designers omit the inside, if you can't see it, but usually it's present. Mesh reduction algorithms in common use have a terrible time with thin objects like cloth. If the original has a wrinkle or pleat that affects both sides, which are separate meshes, it's hard to flatten that out during mesh reduction while maintaining the thickness. Nice R&D problem for somebody.)
A sample of things created in Dreams
I would very much enjoy a "Ready Player One" universe with the entrance/lobby of "Wreck it Ralph" where you can jump around (imagine pacman with a fully equipped "Half Life" character ;)
The "buying objects" is the thing that will annoy me, people staying hungry to buy 0s and 1s still doesn't make sense. I understand buying Software, but software is a tool that we use to build something to add value. On a game I don't understand why we need to spend £€¥$100 to "buy" a weapon that does 100 damage instead of 1. (don't tell me demand --> offer, I know what:)
It's more like a filter bubble, where the whole world looks like it conforms to your dreams, and is paying attention to you.
But really it seems like this mostly boils down to adding a spatial component to things computers can already do. Watching a movie trailer premiere with your avatar standing in front of a big screen in Fortnite vs. with YouTube's premiere feature, browsing a virtual item store by walking through the shelves vs. searching listings with filters/keywords, etc. And I'm not sure how much that really adds. In the video premiere example you've made something that's many times harder to run both for the host and the viewers (as it now involves 3D rendering and physics) and it's a worse experience too. The screen is displayed in a subsection of your real screen, your character's head is in the way, games tend to command full control of your mouse so it's harder to multitask, etc. I don't think the flatness of the modern web is a limitation but a strength that enables more powerful interactions than 3D space (a good filter/category system beats spatial shelves for shopping any time) and preserves portability.
VR could perhaps change this but even VR hasn't really embraced it. I'm yet to play a VR game where the main menu isn't a series of flat panels hovering in front of you which you interact with by means of a laser pointer.
--- Originally shared by alanfalcon(HNer) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22050891)
I'd like to see the "metaverse" happen. So would many others. There's work going on in multiple directions. We're getting there technically. As a business, not so much.
There's Second Life, still plugging away. Content looks great, runs slow because the system is not parallel enough internally. Those guys need about a dozen really good C++ programmers and some people who know how to make distributed stuff that isn't web go fast. The original devs are long gone and the current ones are overwhelmed by the legacy code. Usage is up 5% or so since everybody had to shelter in place. About 55,000 concurrent users on a good day, comparable to GTA V Online. All in one persistent world built mostly by the users. Second Life is profitable but Linden Lab blew a lot of money on the CEO's pet project, Sansar, which flopped. A quick overview of SL by a user: [0]
There's a crowd of "blockchain" worlds - Decentraland, Sominum Space, Sandbox. They're about 80% land speculation and 20% virtual world. Mostly, I suspect, so that their internal currency is considered a "utility token" by the SEC, rather than an unregistered public offering.
Tim Sweeney, Epic's CEO, has been making "metaverse" noises since 2017. But, over the last three years, his vision has shrunk. Early plans read like Ready Player One. By this spring, it's only being able to teleport you and your friends from Minecraft to Fortnite as a group. He used to talk about an open metaverse where anyone could build. If someone did that, the margins would be like those of a hosting service.
The whole Improbable/Spatial OS thing seems to have gone bust. They built a back end for big virtual worlds with about $500M of VC money. (Softbank, who else? [1]) They were supposedly valued around $2BN at peak. It sort of works, but the terms are awful - you have to run on Google's cloud, under Google's thumb, at high pay per use rates. No major game company has taken that deal, and the three minor companies that did games for it went bust. 2019 revenue, $1.5M.
There were the "game level loaders" - you log in, you pick a game map, you play in a prebuilt virtual world. High Fidelity (went bust), Sansar (sold to somebody in Marin who buys distressed companies), and SineSpace (limping along, user count in 2 digits). All could be very pretty, but were not that compelling. You can't do much in there.
Headset VR, as John Carmack says, isn't going anywhere until the headgear gets down to swim goggle size. Even then, a sizable fraction of the population can't stand an immersive VR world where your sense of motion and the motion you're seeing are very different. There's a reason that the most successful VR game is Beat Saber, where the real and virtual worlds stay locked together while you slash at approaching objects. This is a big problem with getting to a Metaverse.
Facebook did Facebook Spaces, which flopped. Its replacement, Facebook Horizons, was supposed to have launched by now, but hasn't been mentioned in months.
Ball, the VC, claims Disney should be the power player in this, with games as extensions of the movie franchises. You can read his article series as to why. Movie franchise games have been successful, but they're usually tied closely to a canned story line, which is not the Metaverse.
So right now we don't quite have the technology and don't have a killer app, but what's out there is interesting and useful.
[0] https://youtu.be/H3Z49MOG_xU
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-09/softbank-...
The metaverse will not be AAA budget quality, anything of that caliber, such as Fortnite, can easily be scrapped off potentials. A metaverse is by definition community created content, most of it will be utter garbage.
VRChat exists. It doesn't look pretty, but it works.
Putting a bridge between Minecraft and Fortnite doesn't make a metaverse, it's just a bigger walled garden with a bridge.
There are currently three forks of High-Fidelity which I'll be keeping my eye on. I believe two of them have former/current High-Fidelity staff working on them. An interesting blog post about Vircadia, a FOSS-focused fork. [1] The blog also covers the other two forks. [2][3]
[1] https://ryanschultz.com/2020/04/03/the-project-athena-fork-o...
[2] https://ryanschultz.com/2019/11/17/tivoli-cloud-vr-a-brief-i...
[3] https://ryanschultz.com/2019/05/27/opensim-virtual-world-pro...
This is how Vader Immortal[0] felt to me. It’s an interactive experience rather than a game, and while the graphics are good it still seems like early days for the tech, but it’s so much more immersive than a 2D non-interactive film. The immersion is difficult to describe, but you get to do things like wander around your personal ship, talk to your droid assistant, and of course wield a lightsaber.
There’s three episodes, and I’ve only done the first so far but plan to complete the other two soon. I have no idea how long I spent in the first one, probably a little over an hour. They’re $10 each, which might seem on the steep side for something shorter than a movie, but there’s a little replayability (there’s lightsaber trainer to practice) and I’ll gladly replay the mission a couple times even though I expect the same story.
Second Life is funny - I commented to a friend the other day that the place seemed to get overrun by genitals (not my exact wording.... ROFL) and casinos. I actually worked for a company that got a bit into Second Life back in the day (we made an official port of Tringo to a TV set-top-box games service).
I got the sense that Second Life couldn’t outgrow prims. They were great when bandwidth was low, but game graphics just overtook Second Life and kept going. Content creation was really fun though, especially the collaborative aspect.
I haven’t checked it out in a few years actually. Impressive to hear it’s still going, though it’s a shame they couldn’t really jump into VR when the Oculus Rift came out. I vaguely remember something about a VR client, but can’t even recall if it was officially supported. I always remember wondering where they were and why they didn’t seem more prominent. It seemed like VR was what something like Second Life was waiting for, yet they never came to the party. I got Linden’s other experimental thing on Steam (Patterns) and then it disappeared before I got around to really trying it.
I’d add AltspaceVR, Bigscreen, VRChat and Rec Room to your list of what’s currently happening in ‘metaverse-like’ things. As a user I find AltspaceVR frustrating as I’m never quite sure when events are on in my local time-zone. Stuff ends up being on at odd hours and I never seem to catch it. Or something seems promising but then you realise most of the people there are kids and it’s off-putting. As for Bigscreen, it’s great for hanging out with friends occasionally. Never really got into VRChat much, but it seems very much ‘Second Life’ in a lot of ways. I haven’t tried ‘Rec Room’ myself but have heard complaints that it’s been overrun by kids.
The hardest thing though is finding friends that have VR headsets and that are willing to install any of these apps and go to the trouble of setting up accounts. In this sense I think Facebook Horizon will have an advantage over the others when it does finally become available (it’s not the only one that lets you use an existing account; I remember being able to use my Oculus account for one of the others but can’t remember which one off the top of my head).
I also still find that I feel an inertia to entering VR, despite owning an Oculus Quest and being really enthusiastic about it. It’s just easier to pick up my phone and play something on a whim. VR still requires more effort and I think it’s just the isolation from everything that makes it feel like that. Especially when you’re in a place with other people. It feels weird isolating yourself around everyone else, at least for me.
The system can't handle crowds. Second Life is divided into regions 256 meters on a side, and starts to slow down when more than about 40 users are in one region. Regions are usually capped somewhere below 60 users to keep performance acceptable. This is a big, big problem. Anything really good that draws a crowd slows down to an unusable level. On top of that, there's a huge transient when a new user enters a region, and all their asset info is copied into that region's server. For historical reasons, the region servers do a lot of bookkeeping that ought to be handled by per-user server processes, and so, as users move around, they carry with them excess baggage which must be pulled out of the state of one region, sent across the network in the data center, and inserted into the state of the new region.
Sometimes transfers from region to region fail, and, as a result, traveling around in a vehicle results in a region crossing failure that disconnects the user. Typical failure rate is about 1-2 times per hour for a traveler. Much worse with multiple users in one vehicle, which kills travel as a social activity. There's a serious architecture problem in this area - region crossings need to be an atomic operation to work right, yet you can't lock up both regions involved for the time required. It's a difficult distributed transaction problem. So there are race conditions and failures. This alone gets the system laughed at in gamer reviews.
All this is quite fixable, but needs more staff resources than are currently available.
As for "the place seemed to get overrun by genitals", that's not really a problem in practice. That sort of nonsense mostly appears in a few social hubs operated by Linden Lab. Those are default destinations. If you don't have a home location set, you go to one of those on login. Only new users and the jerks who harass them go there. About the only time an experienced user goes there is if the region they're in goes down, which results in being teleported to a random social hub. Everybody else is on private property, their own, their friends, or that of some business, and the owner can eject and ban users from their property. Property rights make Second Life go, in a very real sense.
There's not much need for "moderators". Second Life does have a "governance" group. And what comes up as governance issues? Property problems. Users putting up giant billboards. Users with stuff sticking off their parcels onto public roads. (If it intrudes on a neighbors' parcel the neighbor can remove it, but that's not automatic. Having a tree branch or other landscaping hang over is usually OK. Like real life.) Obstacles to boats and aircraft. Pirated copies of in-world goods resulting in DMCA issues. User harassment sometimes comes up, but not that often, because the property rights system lets you prevent someone from entering your property, communicating with you, or even being seen by you.
If you want to do consensual sex on private property, it's not an issue for Linden Lab. Nor is it much of an issue for users. There's not much controversy in the user community over it.
The perception that Second Life is all about sex is a business problem. Google is anti-sex; you could not host SL on Google Cloud. Twitch.tv, which is owned by Facebook, does not allow video from Second Life. That's a big marketing issue.
SL's somewhat casual attitude on sex is alien to the current state of the web. The system has been running for sixteen years. Today we have a division between the sex-free world and the porno world, and that division has hardened considerably in the last few years. SL doesn't have that division, and that bothers some people. This may reflect SL being run out of San Francisco.
Can't remember which one episode it was, but "Rick and Morty" have definitely played out this scenario when Rick was kidnapped by aliens and they tried to trick him into disclosing some recipe for instant travel/teleportation fuel. It was a mixture of "Inception" and what you wrote.