8 ms·

I'd say a sizable majority play Gran Turismo because it's a fun test of skill -- learning the controls of an intricate machine, the layout of the game's tracks,

I'd say a sizable majority play Gran Turismo because it's a fun test of skill -- learning the controls of an intricate machine, the layout of the game's tracks, and achieving some form of mastery over it. And I'm also sure some people play it for the fantasy of doing car racing in a safe environment, which is a very dangerous, expensive, and inaccessible sport for a lot of people. So, perhaps I misread Tim Sweeney's point of view, but it seems like it starts and ends with "put cool car in metaverse, drive it down Main St., everyone stops and stares, like that one scene from Snow Crash. Or Ready Player One." If it's more specific than that, "put cool car in video game, in metaverse" product placement, well we already have that today. Mercedes Benz already did a whole Mario Kart thing [0], and countless other racing games like the Forza series have sponsorships from real car companies. So that's not really anything novel for the metaverse, it's just the same product placement marketing strategy that's already existed. Tim Sweeney is basically saying "hey, look, this is the future, you can put your car in a video game" to Mercedes, who has already been doing this for years. > By this logic it's pointless to make a website to promote your car because you can't test the car by visiting the website. Pretty much all of these websites have a call-to-action for "Schedule a test drive at your local dealership". Hell, I remember an entire campaign from a major car corporation that was to the tune of "anybody can watch a TV commercial, but driving it is believing" [0] https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/29/5760538/drive-a-mercedes-in-mario-kart-8 https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/29/5760538/drive-a-mercedes-...

noduerme 5y ago
I have two cars - a 1980 Datsun and a Fiat Spider. They're both a "test of skill". There's no reason it wouldn't be massively fun to play with lots of other cars on tracks or in all kinds of conditions in VR. "Fun test of skill" is the whole point. The original, like, Stephenson-ish "metaverse" was somewhere people fought with swords. This was getting directly at the idea that skill and challenge were more valuable than raw code. [edit: "entertainment"] Stephenson has a passage in that where he talks about Hiro Protagonist and his friends being coders who would race infinite-speed Tron style "cars" around an endless black plane, before the city of the Metaverse was built. And this was of course, pretty boring in the end. Because infinite speed isn't very interesting. What makes driving fast cars interesting is the limitations -- and knowing them. Then what makes a metaverse interesting is the same type of puzzle. People play "Flight Simulator" for a couple reasons, but a primary one is to figure out how to recover from a catastrophic engine failure. So... how would that not be a great way to sell a car?
- Jasper_ 5y ago
  You're just describing multiplayer video games. We've already had those for more than 20 years.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    Well, yeah. Honestly, a massively multiplayer GTA V or Red Dead 2 would basically be the whole Metaverse concept. The only differences would be: (1) You aren't there to complete missions; there's no storylines and it's totally open-ended. There are no writers, and (2) The spaces and content are created by anyone, not a central company, and (3) You can go from GTA world to Red Dead world to tons of other worlds without changing missions or skins or avatars or whatever; they're part of the same huge space you can traverse without leaving VR. (4) You can code your own physical spaces and code your own avatar's abilities. So, like, yes Stephenson's metaverse is similar to a lot of video games we have now, but it's critically different because his characters are "heroes" in that universe specifically because they coded their own avatars and their own environments. Which is another way of saying that it rewards thought, code, and creativity -- exactly the things that video games steal people away from.
    - Jasper_ 5y ago
      I don't know, that just sounds like pitching a TV show without writers. Even a reality TV show or a cooking show needs writers to keep things entertaining. Otherwise, you sort of just have nothing to look at. > You can code your own physical spaces and code your own avatar's abilities I ask again: why can't I code my avatar to be the most OP avatar that ever exists? I will create a weapon that kills people if they look at me. What's the incentive to purchase new things if everyone can just code the most OP version and undercut the person next door? I will have the best cars, the funniest T-shirts, and the strongest potions, and you cannot stop me. Because I write Lua scripts. There's some element of cooperation that is usually assumed when people talk about the metaverse but I don't see any incentive to maintain it that way. Garry's Mod and Roblox are platforms that do what you're talking about, today. The way they maintain this cooperation is that they prevent users from having strong autonomy in games that others make. In Roblox, your avatar is limited to a few cosmetic choices for customization, and in Garry's Mod, you don't really have any customization at all in most game modes.
benatkin 5y ago
I thought modeless was wrong and that you weren't discounting the experience of driving, but rather the experience of driving a mediocre car. However, with your followup comment, it seems you're discounting the experience of driving. Suffice it to say that plenty of people genuinely love driving, both in video games and in the real world. Flying won't make driving obsolete any more than mountain biking has made hiking and trail running obsolete in places that are accessible to mountain bikes.
- noduerme 5y ago
  Same with manual transmissions. But watching my gf obsess over yeast cultures, I would say same about baking bread. Some people love a challenge; other people don't get it.
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    Manual transmission is not a challenge. It quickly blurs into muscle memory and you don’t really notice it.
    - saiya-jin 5y ago
      Can second it, its properly effortless and becomes second nature. Gives much more control over the engine. That being said, switched my old BMW 3 series (E46) with manual to newer 5 series with automatic steptronic transmission, and especially for longer drives, the cognitive and 'manual' load is measurably less. But you don't realize it until you migrate. It moves to almost boring territory, luckily I am not a type of person who tends to fall asleep behind the wheel (unlike my wife).
    - corin_ 5y ago
      It becomes second nature, but most people find it a bit of a challenge to learn - obviously not a particularly huge or impossible one considering how common it is for people to get the hang of it in tens of hours, but still a challenge compared to just learning to drive in an automatic.
- 5y ago
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>Tim Sweeney is basically saying "hey, look, this is the future, you can put your car in a video game" to Mercedes, who has already been doing this for years. I think the idea is that the Metaverse will give you as close to the real experience of being in that specific car as possible, a video game won't do that because any car placed in a video game must be subservient to the goals and mechanics of the game. The reason that giving you the real experience of being in a specific car is bullshit for marketing purposes is that you can see hardly anyone markets cars based on what it will actually be like to use them and of course because except for a few outliers using any specific car is the same as using pretty much every other car built in a similar time frame. on edit: meaning every other car serving the same market segment of course.
- freshhawk 5y ago
  I guess my main question here is: why will it be so close to the real experience? Why wouldn't everyone make it the most engaging virtual car driving experience they can find, what incentive is there to make it "real" in this useful way? I mean, I get that it's necessary for this to happen for the whole pitch to make sense, but it's just nonsense. Why these weird religious beliefs about 3D stuff, including product placement, which seem to magically behave differently than the 2D versions we've been living with for decades now. I am just incredibly confused by this. Is it like NFTs where we aren't supposed to believe the cover story and the wink-wink acknowledgement of the grift is a in-joke/cultural thing?
- roenxi 5y ago
  > I think the idea is that the Metaverse will give you as close to the real experience of being in that specific car as possible... The experience of driving a real car is heavily influenced by the real world. Take those little flap things cars sometimes have to shield your eyes from the sun - the metaverse will first have to simulate an annoyance (possibly with harmful eye-melting ultraviolet light?) then let you mitigate it with the flap. It isn't obvious why people will want that or pay money for it. If they don't simulate glare, then what is the flap for? Cars aren't independent of reality, they exist as well designed tools that allow us to do and experience things that we otherwise couldn't. When that gets translated to some sort of virtual space all the design decisions start to fall apart. The only thing that really carries over is to get the branding in front of a person to make them think of the name - which rather undermines the original "isn't going to run ads" thesis.

noduerme 5y ago

I have two cars - a 1980 Datsun and a Fiat Spider. They're both a "test of skill". There's no reason it wouldn't be massively fun to play with lots of other cars on tracks or in all kinds of conditions in VR. "Fun test of skill" is the whole point. The original, like, Stephenson-ish "metaverse" was somewhere people fought with swords. This was getting directly at the idea that skill and challenge were more valuable than raw code. [edit: "entertainment"] Stephenson has a passage in that where he talks about Hiro Protagonist and his friends being coders who would race infinite-speed Tron style "cars" around an endless black plane, before the city of the Metaverse was built. And this was of course, pretty boring in the end. Because infinite speed isn't very interesting. What makes driving fast cars interesting is the limitations -- and knowing them. Then what makes a metaverse interesting is the same type of puzzle. People play "Flight Simulator" for a couple reasons, but a primary one is to figure out how to recover from a catastrophic engine failure. So... how would that not be a great way to sell a car?

Jasper_ 5y ago
You're just describing multiplayer video games. We've already had those for more than 20 years.
- noduerme 5y ago
  Well, yeah. Honestly, a massively multiplayer GTA V or Red Dead 2 would basically be the whole Metaverse concept. The only differences would be: (1) You aren't there to complete missions; there's no storylines and it's totally open-ended. There are no writers, and (2) The spaces and content are created by anyone, not a central company, and (3) You can go from GTA world to Red Dead world to tons of other worlds without changing missions or skins or avatars or whatever; they're part of the same huge space you can traverse without leaving VR. (4) You can code your own physical spaces and code your own avatar's abilities. So, like, yes Stephenson's metaverse is similar to a lot of video games we have now, but it's critically different because his characters are "heroes" in that universe specifically because they coded their own avatars and their own environments. Which is another way of saying that it rewards thought, code, and creativity -- exactly the things that video games steal people away from.
  - Jasper_ 5y ago
    I don't know, that just sounds like pitching a TV show without writers. Even a reality TV show or a cooking show needs writers to keep things entertaining. Otherwise, you sort of just have nothing to look at. > You can code your own physical spaces and code your own avatar's abilities I ask again: why can't I code my avatar to be the most OP avatar that ever exists? I will create a weapon that kills people if they look at me. What's the incentive to purchase new things if everyone can just code the most OP version and undercut the person next door? I will have the best cars, the funniest T-shirts, and the strongest potions, and you cannot stop me. Because I write Lua scripts. There's some element of cooperation that is usually assumed when people talk about the metaverse but I don't see any incentive to maintain it that way. Garry's Mod and Roblox are platforms that do what you're talking about, today. The way they maintain this cooperation is that they prevent users from having strong autonomy in games that others make. In Roblox, your avatar is limited to a few cosmetic choices for customization, and in Garry's Mod, you don't really have any customization at all in most game modes.

benatkin 5y ago

I thought modeless was wrong and that you weren't discounting the experience of driving, but rather the experience of driving a mediocre car. However, with your followup comment, it seems you're discounting the experience of driving. Suffice it to say that plenty of people genuinely love driving, both in video games and in the real world. Flying won't make driving obsolete any more than mountain biking has made hiking and trail running obsolete in places that are accessible to mountain bikes.

noduerme 5y ago
Same with manual transmissions. But watching my gf obsess over yeast cultures, I would say same about baking bread. Some people love a challenge; other people don't get it.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  Manual transmission is not a challenge. It quickly blurs into muscle memory and you don’t really notice it.
  - saiya-jin 5y ago
    Can second it, its properly effortless and becomes second nature. Gives much more control over the engine. That being said, switched my old BMW 3 series (E46) with manual to newer 5 series with automatic steptronic transmission, and especially for longer drives, the cognitive and 'manual' load is measurably less. But you don't realize it until you migrate. It moves to almost boring territory, luckily I am not a type of person who tends to fall asleep behind the wheel (unlike my wife).
  - corin_ 5y ago
    It becomes second nature, but most people find it a bit of a challenge to learn - obviously not a particularly huge or impossible one considering how common it is for people to get the hang of it in tens of hours, but still a challenge compared to just learning to drive in an automatic.
5y ago

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

>Tim Sweeney is basically saying "hey, look, this is the future, you can put your car in a video game" to Mercedes, who has already been doing this for years. I think the idea is that the Metaverse will give you as close to the real experience of being in that specific car as possible, a video game won't do that because any car placed in a video game must be subservient to the goals and mechanics of the game. The reason that giving you the real experience of being in a specific car is bullshit for marketing purposes is that you can see hardly anyone markets cars based on what it will actually be like to use them and of course because except for a few outliers using any specific car is the same as using pretty much every other car built in a similar time frame. on edit: meaning every other car serving the same market segment of course.

freshhawk 5y ago
I guess my main question here is: why will it be so close to the real experience? Why wouldn't everyone make it the most engaging virtual car driving experience they can find, what incentive is there to make it "real" in this useful way? I mean, I get that it's necessary for this to happen for the whole pitch to make sense, but it's just nonsense. Why these weird religious beliefs about 3D stuff, including product placement, which seem to magically behave differently than the 2D versions we've been living with for decades now. I am just incredibly confused by this. Is it like NFTs where we aren't supposed to believe the cover story and the wink-wink acknowledgement of the grift is a in-joke/cultural thing?
roenxi 5y ago
> I think the idea is that the Metaverse will give you as close to the real experience of being in that specific car as possible... The experience of driving a real car is heavily influenced by the real world. Take those little flap things cars sometimes have to shield your eyes from the sun - the metaverse will first have to simulate an annoyance (possibly with harmful eye-melting ultraviolet light?) then let you mitigate it with the flap. It isn't obvious why people will want that or pay money for it. If they don't simulate glare, then what is the flap for? Cars aren't independent of reality, they exist as well designed tools that allow us to do and experience things that we otherwise couldn't. When that gets translated to some sort of virtual space all the design decisions start to fall apart. The only thing that really carries over is to get the branding in front of a person to make them think of the name - which rather undermines the original "isn't going to run ads" thesis.