
Why “the Metaverse” needs gameplay and gameplay mechanics - Kroeler
https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2019/06/philip-rosedale-metaverse-gameplay-mechanics.html
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amyjess
What I find interesting is that when Stephenson wrote _REAMDE_ , he said that
he had come to the realization that MMORPGs were how the Metaverse happened in
real life.

From [https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/09/19/neal-
step...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/09/19/neal-stephenson-
reamde-video-games/)

> 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.

------
empath75
There’s never going to be _A_ metaverse. I don’t see why there ever would be.
People came up with that concept when we still more or less had a consolidated
media landscape with a few tv networks, one major newspaper per city, etc.

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.

~~~
Animats
Well, one of the original visions was Second Life and its open source clone,
OpenSimulator. OpenSimulator is a sort of 3D Internet - anybody can have a
server, and you can move from world to world. (The world to world transfers
have problems - what do you get to bring with you? - but they exist.)

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.

~~~
buboard
> 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.

~~~
Animats
It's quite real. A Second Life user of that suburban area wrote: _" Not being
American, but having been so 'TV Sitcom and Movie Americanised' over my
lifetime, this is exactly what I want. When I visited the US the first time, I
was in Connecticut, and I was like a kid with my face pressed up on the car
window. When I got out of the car and went exploring I am not embarrassed to
say I actually teared up, because there were hoops over garages, there was a
bike strewn in the front yard and one front yard even had a catchers mitt and
some kind of goal net thing. There were flags beside the front doors, it was
everything to me."_[1]

[1] [https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/435890-oh-
the-...](https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/435890-oh-the-
banality/?tab=comments#comment-1886684)

~~~
buboard
This says nothing about their financial situation. US suburbia does not exist
in Europe, but not because people are poor.

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rayalez
Does it make sense to have an actual metaverse, a common 3D world with the
same mechanics for everybody?

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.

------
agar
I both agree and disagree.

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...](http://blog.leapmotion.com/designing-physical-interactions-
for-objects-that-dont-exist/)

------
b_tterc_p
Maybe this is captured in “Infinite Detail” but it seems to me that this list
is missing the one thing that is explicitly stated to be the key to making the
MetaVerse popular in the book: highly detailed and accurate facial
expressions.

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.

~~~
Animats
That's been demoed for VRchat already. Facial feature tracking has been around
for years.

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ihuman
Couldn't more advanced users use the "Programmable Atoms" and "Live editing"
to create their own games from within? I thought that was how the "VR-based
swordfighting" game was implemented: not by the creators of the metaverse as
part of the program's main code, but by players inside the world.

~~~
leppr
The early-access PS4 game "Dreams" [1] is a _great_ implementation of exactly
that concept.

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.

[1]:
[https://www.mediamolecule.com/games/dreams](https://www.mediamolecule.com/games/dreams)

------
korethr
I think the closest we got to the Metaverse so far was Second Life, though it
didn't get quite all the way there.

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.

------
buboard
Strongly disagree. Second life games are at best toys , but that's totally
beside the point, they just exist as an relatively unnecessary prop that
people use to socialize. People use these worlds the same way they use FB or
other media, except they are way different in that they live in expansive
fantasy. Gaming the metaverse is not going to bring more people over. I think
highfidelity was _paying_ users to attend their load tests (Talk about
gaming). Still, thjose users didnt stick.

------
topkai22
I find the Vernor Vinge's vision of ubiquitous AR blending with VR from
"Rainbow's End" a more compelling vision then the "Snow Crash" metaverse. Not
sure if we'll get to persistently worn contact lenses or glasses, but a system
that anchors the virtual into the physical has much more appeal than a purely
virtual one. I don't think I'd go to a virtual bar to meet people and have
virtual drinks, but if you give me a way to feel like my best friend from
across the country is sitting across my living room having a real beer with
me, that I'll pay money for.

------
bitwize
The Metaverse is going to _grow_ gameplay if it doesn't have it already. One
of the things about video gaming that few people understand is that it's
almost fundamental to computing itself because it's one of the obvious things
you can do with a computer. So if you build a computer, somebody somewhere
will build a game for it. As Alan Kay said: "Spacewar blossoms spontaneously
wherever a computer is attached to a bit-mapped display."

------
mawburn
There was an up and comer a few years back called Blue Mars, that was shaping
up to be something really cool. It allowed content creators a great deal of
control over their virtual landscapes.

But, for some reason they abruptly changed direction to some kind of weird
mobile avatar creator on mobile and shut down shortly after.

~~~
crooked-v
"Some reason" was probably lack of money.

~~~
mawburn
That could have been it, but when they pivoted they had a very complete beta
product. Probably more to do with investor pressure or something along those
lines.

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.

------
floren
I've poked at High Fidelity occasionally over the last 3 years or so, and I'll
say one thing: "the Metaverse" will be able to load decently over a 100Mbps
connection and won't bring an i7 w/ 16GB of memory to its knees. H.F. can get
back to me when they figure that part out.

~~~
gorbypark
I think something along the lines of Google Stadia will really open up some
possibilities regarding this.

~~~
ArtDev
Yes! A subscription model would solve the hardware problem.

