
Fortnite and the Metaverse - Reedx
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/04/17/fortnite-metaverse-new-internet/
======
hn_throwaway_99
Ugh, this all seems like so much Silicon Valley nonsense.

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.

~~~
jariel
I feel your cynicism. Some of us have seen this a few times.

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!

------
cl42
Personally, I feel like WeChat or other superapps are closer to a metaverse
than Fortnight. You can build mini-apps, you can spend money, it's independent
from the underlying hardware -- i.e., you can run them anywhere and they
provide a deep social network. Throw in AR glasses and you can enter that
metaverse whenever you want, as a sensory experience or simply to browse/use
apps via the more traditional phone interface.

~~~
Mirioron
The issue is that there's no spatial component to WeChat. For whatever reason,
it feels different when you have an avatar in a world with some freedom to
move around. Another thing is that WeChat doesn't provide you much of an
activity itself, unlike the ones attached to games.

~~~
sdrothrock
> The issue is that there's no spatial component to WeChat. For whatever
> reason, it feels different when you have an avatar in a world with some
> freedom to move around.

I completely agree. My experience in Online Town was vastly different from my
experience in Zoom.

~~~
cl42
WOAH! Online Town... Never heard of it, but that's so cool. Thanks for
mentioning it. I'm going to reach out to the founders because I love this...
THANKS AGAIN!!

~~~
sdrothrock
Sure thing! I had a blast when it hit the HN front page and it still sticks
with me.

------
gambiting
I'm pretty sure I read this exact same article around the height of popularity
of Second Life - even more so than with Fortnite, since people actually ran
their businesses inside Second Life, sold property, held concerts and
performances.....and yet we didn't all shift into "cyberspace". I think as
successful as Fortnite is, it will eventually fade away like everything else.

~~~
Gormisdomai
Maybe we'll keep seeing this article over and over again, but one year the
technology will have reached a critical threshold where "cyberspace" is
appealing enough to be a real thing?

------
settsu
My favorite part of the article was this:

> “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

~~~
jfoutz
Snide, half thought out response. I don't think there's any malice here, if
there is, it's not intended.

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.

~~~
skizm
In snow crash Hiro specifically says there is not a 1:1 mapping and sword play
in the metaverse is nothing like sword play in real life.

------
seanalexander
Can you open up a command prompt in-game and run arbitrary code to control
your character? No? Then it's not the Metaverse. The Palace had that in the
90s (and used a version of Forth). If anything, the Metaverse is a
continuously regressing "could-have-been", where content creation has been
replaced with buying skins and premade, pre-approved aesthetics.

~~~
Animats
You can do that in Second Life, and do. I wrote a whole non-player character
system for Second Life. There's a 64K memory limit on how complex a program
you can write, because server resources are limited, but you can have multiple
programs and pass messages between them. You can make HTTP requests of
external servers, and it's common to call out to servers that keep databases
for game state and such.

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.)

~~~
HenryBemis
"Ready Player One" came to my mind. I have never been in/played "Second Life"
or "Sims". I bought a PS4 in the hope that "No Man's Sky" would become
something like that. It had a disappointing start, and I just ran out of
patience (and then time) to see what it has become nowadays.

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:)

~~~
kaetemi
Stories like Ready Player One fall into a Yu-gi-oh kind of trap. They're just
playing a game in a world where their game is somehow the center of attention.

It's more like a filter bubble, where the whole world looks like it conforms
to your dreams, and is paying attention to you.

------
furi
I'm very skeptical of this. I feel like I've been hearing this sort of idea
for my entire life and it's never come to fruition. In this case specifically
a closed, centralized, anti-cheat protected ecosystem like Fortnite seems like
the least likely place for it to crop up. Minecraft would have been more
likely, the operation of Minecraft servers is very decentralized and it has a
lot of modding.

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.

------
andreyk
On this topic, I have recently been quite enjoying and impressed by the game
Rec Room ([https://youtu.be/6kl9gqv9t_I](https://youtu.be/6kl9gqv9t_I)). It's
already well on its way to being an actual metaverse (it can be played both in
VR and on a computer, for free, and has a far more flexible system for player
creation). I kind of hope it ultimately prevails over the likes of Facebook or
Tencent.

------
allenleein
Really great related read:
[https://m3-org.github.io/research/sweeney.html](https://m3-org.github.io/research/sweeney.html)

\--- Originally shared by alanfalcon(HNer)
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22050891](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22050891))

------
sxp
This is just a wrapper around "an essay by venture capitalist and former
Amazon executive Matthew Ball":
[https://www.matthewball.vc/all/themetaverse](https://www.matthewball.vc/all/themetaverse)

~~~
Animats
Right. I read that months ago.

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](https://youtu.be/H3Z49MOG_xU)

[1]
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-09/softbank-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-09/softbank-
backed-effort-to-revolutionize-gaming-industry-is-struggling)

~~~
Fr0styMatt88
That’s an awesome summary, thanks for writing it.

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.

~~~
Animats
Second Life has serious performance problems. VR requires 90FPS or better, and
SL has trouble holding 30. Or 20. Arbitrarily complex mesh content, a terrible
level of detail generator, and single-threaded servers and viewers combine to
hold performance down. The basic architecture is 15 years old, from back when
servers had one CPU. Performance is totally unacceptable to the Fortnite
generation.

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.

~~~
HenryBemis
> 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.

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.

------
knolax
The entire concept of a Metaverse seems closer to existential horror than
SciFi to me. An entire subset of your reality taken up by consumerist
regurgitation of pop culture. Living your life as the Homonculus inside some
Anime avatar. I hope a solar flare wipes out all electronics before we even
come close to it.

------
kaetemi
I thought VRChat was the metaverse already? :)

