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It’s now widely acknowledged that games are the gateway to the 3D interconnected internet – aka metaverse – but leading figures in the gaming community are less enamoured of the vision proposed by big tech.
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“The metaverse vision, as it was presented over the past
year by Meta, is a very not creative vision that was basically lifted directly
from Matrix, Ready Player One,” says Phil Libin, founder of mmHmm and
former Evernote CEO. “When Microsoft and Activision merged, this talk of the
metaverse was, again, just more marketing bullshit.
“They try to make a deal look more interesting to investors
in the month that had happened. Had it happened six months before, they
wouldn't have said the metaverse, they would have said something else.”
Libin was speaking as part of a roundtable of industry
technologists talking to the FT about the future of the internet (in this video
https://youtu.be/-tsZVzq_5l0) from a
gaming point of view.
Gaming is already a $201bn industry, twice the size of the
film business, and attracts hundreds of millions of players. Given it's such a
lucrative business, it's no surprise that some of the world's most valuable
companies are now taking video gaming much, much more seriously.
Amazon made a big move into games a few years ago when it
bought Twitch for a billion dollars. We've since seen the pace of consolidation
in the gaming industry pick up, especially at the beginning of 2022 with some
really monster deals, like Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard, Sony buying
Bungie, the maker of Destiny and Halo, and Take-Two buying Zynga, the social
and mobile gaming company.
“Tech companies are basing their future on games, in part
because of the games themselves, and the IP that come with that,” says the FT’s
technology commentator Tim Bradshaw. “People will go out and buy the next Grand
Theft Auto or Call of Duty when it comes out. But they're also betting that
we'll spend more time in these virtual worlds.”
Sébastien Borget, the Co-founder and COO of
The Sandbox thinks games will unlock all the possibilities of the
metaverse and create new forms of entertainment.
“The way games work is like life. And so using gaming
mechanics at the core of building the metaverse will make it more accessible to
everyone.”
Manuel Bronstein, Chief product officer at Roblox says,
“Most of the activities that we do online are going from things that you did by
yourself to things that you do with other people. So gaming is a good example,
because if you think about gaming [then] 3D, immersive and multiplayer has been
possible for a long while.”
One of the chief reasons we should be paying attention to what
games developers think is that the audience for shared online games is huge and
growing and will essentially inherit the Web.
“That's a mindset shift for a lot of people,” observes Cathy
Hackl, futurist, author and consultant. “When they see something happening in
gaming spaces or in virtual spaces, they say, oh, that's not real, just because
it's not physical. [but] I think the big change that's happening is that for
younger generations the Gen-Z and the Gen-Alpha, what happens in these virtual
spaces is real. They own these virtual assets. They build these worlds. And
it’s very, very real to them.”
However, the metaverse being plugged by the likes of Meta –
which is built on the sci-fi novel Ready, Player One whose
premise is of the metaverse as a giant virtual arcade - is necessarily one that
gamers seem to like.
“The metaverse shouldn't be a replacement for the real
world,” says Borget. “It should help you augment the real world. It should
allow you to do things that maybe were not possible to do.”
“Ready Player One is a pretty dystopic vision of the
future of the metaverse,” says Hackl. “The people that are accessing that
vision of the metaverse are escaping the physical world because the physical
world is not very fun. That's not the future that I want to see, right?”
Yet the idea that we can form an avatar, engage in multiple
virtual worlds, and do all sorts of activities, much beyond gaming or working,
like socialising, dancing, interacting, learning, attending all sorts of shows,
art galleries, museums – is drawing closer.
“The thing that we are not necessarily close to is this
MetaHuman representation, where we need to be as realistic as possible on the
graphic side to be immersed in the metaverse,” says Borget.
Part of the problem is the thorny one of having to access
the metaverse via a VR headset. Says Christina Hella, founder, Metastage, “The
challenge when you put it on a headset is having enough graphical power in that
headset, because it's portable, so it has less power. It also gets hot, so hot
it burns the person's face. If you're in VR for a long time, you take off the
glasses and sometimes the real world feels alien.”
Games developer Rami Ismail agrees: “Wearing a thing on your
face, and not being able to see where you really are or actually talk to
people, and being this kind of isolated, is not fun [for any length of time].
He continues, “This idea that there's an immersive world
that we primarily experience through VR, through virtual reality, as sort of an
alternative, a substitute to the real world that has a connected economics,
that encompasses gaming, and living, and working, and we're all kind of
spending our time in this like skeuomorphic 3D VR world, I think it's
dystopian. I think it's unpleasant. It's stupid and it has pretty bad
repercussions for the world.”
Another issue is the corporate roadblocks to creating an
interoperable open next-gen internet capable of having unique avatars hopping
from verse to verse.
This would require keen competitors in the gaming space like
Electronic Arts and Activision, to cooperate on an unprecedented level.
Equally, it seems kind of difficult to imagine that Apple,
which is working on its own augmented reality headset would some way
interoperate with Meta’s Oculus.
“Those companies do not like each other,” says Bradshaw.
“And it seems like the vision of a metaverse, where anyone can go anywhere and
take all of their digital assets with them wherever they go is going to hit up
against some pretty hard business rivalries and reality.”
Hackl thinks gaming could be the solution to this. Right
now, there's only one internet albeit with millions of domains or websites
within it. Likewise, there will be many metaverse platforms.
“You almost have to envision it as when someone says the
Metaverse, it's like the metaverse capital M, and then there's maybe metaverses
lowercase m, or metaverse platforms,” she says. “So what does it take to be a
metaverse platform? There needs to be an element of social. A lot of these
early metaverse platforms have to do with gaming, so gaming is on-ramp or is
kind of the parent to that greater Metaverse capital M.”
Bradshaw observes that we hear a lot about the metaverse
from the big tech companies but far less from players themselves. The metaverse
seems like a vision that suits the business objectives of Meta, Apple,
Microsoft, and Epic rather than something that players themselves genuinely
want.
“Part of the urgency for all of these tech companies rushing
into the metaverse is that we've reached a bit of a plateau in the current
generation of smartphone and PC technology,” he says. “Smartphone penetration
is very well established in Europe and the US. So, the upside of getting more
people to download your app is that much smaller. Tech companies are having to
try and find a new frontier to colonise. And they've seized on the metaverse as
that concept.”
Ismail is just as cynical, “I think the way it's being sold right now is very much in line with old science fiction books, getting beamed into a computer. If everything in the computer just kind of is what you do in real life, but now you're a virtual puppet, I don't really see the benefit.”
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