13 ms·

Fortnite and the Metaverse

44 points by undefined1 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
seanalexander 7y ago
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.
- imode 7y ago
  What was The Palace?
  - seanalexander 6y ago
    The Palace was (and still has some servers) a 2D chat program. It was sold in retail stores and used a client-server paradigm similar to IRC. It allowed users to copy and paste their own images as avatars, and had a robust enough scripting language (based on Forth) that let you write a script for basically anything in the game. Even the channels were described in the scripting language.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Animats 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    "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 6y ago
      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.
    - seanalexander 6y ago
      Ever notice that the skins are for sale, but making your own is basically impossible?
  - greggman3 7y ago
    Surprised no one has mentioned Dreams (PS4). It seems to be easier to create because it's not based around editing polygons (tedious) but rather both shape addition and subtraction (CSG) and it's fast (unlike most CSG) A sample of things created in Dreams https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOJOQt6x6dc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOJOQt6x6dc
  - seanalexander 6y ago
    That is so cool! Do you still use SL? I got really it during the prim days (before mesh clothing).
sxp 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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-backed-effort-to-revolutionize-gaming-industry-is-struggling https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-09/softbank-...
cl42 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    > 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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        Sure thing! I had a blast when it hit the HN front page and it still sticks with me.
  - cl42 6y ago
    I think this is 100% buildable in WeChat, not to mention its existing location-based services. I'd argue it's easier to build that feature into WeChat than all the other features into Fortnite.
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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!
  - draw_down 7y ago
    I don’t think it’s cynical to see history repeating itself.
- lidHanteyk 6y ago
  Metaverse theory goes far beyond this SV nonsense. In general, whenever there is a narrative or ludic barrier, there is a metaverse witnessing the barrier. As a result, universes never exist in a vacuum, but always absorb ambient attributes from the metaverse which spawned them.
allenleein 7y ago
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)
settsu 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
andreyk 7y ago
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.
furi 7y ago
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.
gambiting 7y ago
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 6y ago
  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?
knolax 7y ago
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 6y ago
I thought VRChat was the metaverse already? :)

44 points by undefined1 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

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.

imode 7y ago
What was The Palace?
- seanalexander 6y ago
  The Palace was (and still has some servers) a 2D chat program. It was sold in retail stores and used a client-server paradigm similar to IRC. It allowed users to copy and paste their own images as avatars, and had a robust enough scripting language (based on Forth) that let you write a script for basically anything in the game. Even the channels were described in the scripting language.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Animats 7y ago
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 7y ago
  "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 6y ago
    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.
  - seanalexander 6y ago
    Ever notice that the skins are for sale, but making your own is basically impossible?
- greggman3 7y ago
  Surprised no one has mentioned Dreams (PS4). It seems to be easier to create because it's not based around editing polygons (tedious) but rather both shape addition and subtraction (CSG) and it's fast (unlike most CSG) A sample of things created in Dreams https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOJOQt6x6dc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOJOQt6x6dc
- seanalexander 6y ago
  That is so cool! Do you still use SL? I got really it during the prim days (before mesh clothing).

sxp 7y ago

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 7y ago
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-backed-effort-to-revolutionize-gaming-industry-is-struggling https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-09/softbank-...

cl42 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  > 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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      Sure thing! I had a blast when it hit the HN front page and it still sticks with me.
- cl42 6y ago
  I think this is 100% buildable in WeChat, not to mention its existing location-based services. I'd argue it's easier to build that feature into WeChat than all the other features into Fortnite.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

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 7y ago
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!
- draw_down 7y ago
  I don’t think it’s cynical to see history repeating itself.
lidHanteyk 6y ago
Metaverse theory goes far beyond this SV nonsense. In general, whenever there is a narrative or ludic barrier, there is a metaverse witnessing the barrier. As a result, universes never exist in a vacuum, but always absorb ambient attributes from the metaverse which spawned them.

allenleein 7y ago

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)

settsu 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.

andreyk 7y ago

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.

furi 7y ago

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.

gambiting 7y ago

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 6y ago
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?

knolax 7y ago

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 6y ago

I thought VRChat was the metaverse already? :)