Diverse Opinions – 3
Herman Narula in GamesIndustry.biz: “It is my belief that we underplay how invested people are in the life of the mind. In one sense, we are already living in mental virtual worlds. Gaming has been quietly fulfilling humanity’s needs for decades in this mental life. Far from being ‘just’ entertainment, gaming structures, play and goal-oriented models all help deliver the essentials for psychological health and well-being of an individual. In gaming, people are actively growing, striving to overcome challenges and creating new experiences which ultimately fulfills as a whole. The needs being fulfilled are universal and innate and include the need for competence, autonomy and relatedness. And that is the promise of the metaverse, that these human needs will find greater fulfillment.”
New York Times (in an article about Horizon Workrooms): “In Mr. Zuckerberg’s telling, the metaverse is a world in which people can communicate via VR or video calling, smartphone or tablet, or through other devices like smart glasses or gadgets that haven’t been invented yet. There, people will maintain some sense of continuity between all the different digital worlds they inhabit. Someone might buy a digital avatar of a shirt in a virtual reality store, for instance, and then log off but continue wearing that shirt to a Zoom meeting. For now, that vision remains distant.”
Nick Fajt of Rec Room quoted in The Information: “Since Xerox PARC in the 1970s, all software has lived in a tile. As you start seeing these use cases migrate into a 3D world, software will look a lot less like a tile. It’s going to look like a room, an object or a person. I think what we’re trending toward is a Wikipedia-esque world, where rooms and objects and people can all be authored by different authors from all around the world.”
Wall Street Journal on Roblox: “Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki said…that the company sees its 15-year-old platform as a hub for virtual and immersive experiences where thousands of people can simultaneously attend concerts, school or staff meetings. He said the company has been investing heavily in technology and growing its workforce to support these experiences, but also in areas such as content moderation. Roblox’s business model is largely centered on users’ purchases of virtual currency that allows them to acquire in-game perks or items for their avatars. In May, the company hosted an immersive experience to celebrate the designer brand Gucci’s 100th anniversary and users could buy limited-edition items for their avatars. Roblox finance chief Michael Guthrie said the types of content on the company’s platform have broadened over time and, in some cases, developers are still figuring out how to generate revenue from their content.”
Jared Ficklin in VentureBeat: “The metaverse won’t be realized in a closed-garden VR space. Instead it will emerge as our digital lifestyles begin to join us in the physical world…The popular metaverse thinking often portrays a common interface, assuming we will all enter as Player One ready to play the same game by the same rules. But what we will see is a myriad of different business models, content types, and classes of experiences. Individuals will orchestrate the interfaces for these into workflows that bring productivity, entertainment, or socialization in the manner they want. The common thread is that all of these applications will amplify the capabilities of the individual users. If you were to watch the data flow in the modern internet, you would see some of it flowing into a pool like Facebook. But you would see far more flowing in many different directions, creating unique patterns of activity that begin to approximate us as individuals. This kind of hyper-personalization is extending into all parts of our digital lifestyles. The tools are becoming us. In the data is a meta me that is becoming every bit as real as us.”
