Thread
Thread/ The intersection of games and the metaverse is going to be fascinating. Composability and interoperability are coming to games.👇 future.com/metaverse-infrastructure-technology-games/
1/ I believe the metaverse going to be created by game developers, using game technology. Why? No other industry has as much experience building massive online worlds, in which hundreds of thousands of online participants engage with each other.
2/ The metaverse will change what it means to be a game. Games today are walled gardens. Polished experiences, lovingly crafted, self-contained. It's the movie-director model of game creation. "I create the game, you play it."
3/ The problem is that this creates a really high bar for game creation. Creators need to build everything: the world, narrative, game-play, UI, etc.
4/ Asset stores are one solution. UGC and Mods are another. Game creation platforms like Roblox and Core are a third. But I think we'll see games open up even more, creating greater level of composability.
5/ Consider the world of Red Dead Redemption. Massive, gorgeous world, purpose-built to host a single game. What if I could build my own game set in that world? Create my own stories and narratives?
6/ Consider a new Parkour game, set in the metaverse. Installing this "game" gives my avatar new moves; what if I could try out these new moves in the world of Grand Theft Auto? What if other players built custom content inside GTA just for parkour?
7/ And to push this point even further, what if while playing Parkour inside of GTA I see a Pokemon hiding under a mailbox? Which I can snag using a Pokeball I pull from my inventory?
8/ It's a bit like the creativity unleashed by early hip hop and sampling culture -- at least until lawsuits started flying. But I like to think the game industry is far more open to this sort of remixing, especially if we can work out the right incentive models.
9/ If we get this right, I think we'll see new areas of specialization in gaming: World Builders, Narrative Designers, Experience Creators, Platform Operators.
10/ World Builders: specialize in creating playable worlds, both believable and fantastic, populated with appropriate creatures and characters, with continued investment so they grow and evolve based on the needs of games set in these worlds.
11/ Narrative Designers: craft compelling interactive narratives set within these worlds, filled with story arcs, puzzles, and quests for players to discover and enjoy. These stories/dialog can plug right into existing NPCs -- or add custom NPCs as needed.
12/ Experience Creators: build world-spanning playable experiences focused on gameplay, reward mechanisms, and control schemes. Especially valuable will be creators who can bridge between the real world and the virtual world. My parkour example is an "experience" example.
13/ Platform Operators: provide the underlying technology infrastructure needed to make all this possible. Tools, engines, services, hosting, standards, protocols, etc. This is where I personally focus most of my time.
14/ To make this shift possible, we'll need to rethink how we handle identity, friends, and possessions across games.
15/ Players need a single identity they can carry between games and between platforms. No more tedious rebuilding profile and reputation in each new game.
16/ Players need a single friends list that can follow you from game to game, to make it easier to find friends to play with and to share competitive leaderboard information.
17/ Allowing item re-use between games is most contentious. Clearly bringing an assault rifle to a medieval game will wreck game balance. But with limits and restrictions, could open up new creativity and emergent play. And some epic items.
18/ In part 2 of this thread I'll summarize interesting technical problems that we as an industry need to solve in order to make all this possible.
