Silicon valley has a history of producing things that initially don't have a lot of restrictions that get a lot of traction that then turn all corporate and sterile as soon as big money gets involved.
Lack of fun is one reason. User generated content is risky. It needs moderation. Somebody might express themselves in ways that are inappropriate for the widest possible meaning of that word. And that might lead to legal consequences. Which adds cost. Fun and edgy things are typically bordering on inappropriate; or flat out inappropriate if you have no sense of humor. The difference is not relevant. If somebody might get offended, it's risky. Which makes the lawyers nervous.
Another reason is the obsession with building walled gardens and claiming full ownership of everything inside those walls. It leads to locked down experiences where creativity is basically not welcome unless sanctioned from the top down. Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc. used to have APIs and an ecosystem of people building stuff on top of that. As they grew, all of that went away.
Facebook is a good example as something that started out to enable some wildly inappropriate and immature behavior. Mark Zuckerberg actually started out building a platform for rating girls called facemash. Controversial, even at the time and it got him in trouble. Facebook is what he did next.
The first point isn’t an argument for fun but for individualism, almost to an extremist extent. If you want to publish your thoughts for others to see you’re going to have to accept the fact that some people are just going to take it differently because it human experiences are diverse, and you must be mature enough to be accountable for what you say. It’s people’s problem that they see conflict with others as an inherent negative when the disagreement with others is what itself brews creativity, because it challenges your point of view.
People criticize the media for being “biased” but then crave echo chambers of their own.
The medium is the message. We are no longer in the literary age. The power is in the hands of the mob. You can make some carefully thought out post and try to be accountable for what you say. I can show up in your comment forum, shit all over everything and leave.
In the old days you would've had to publish a book to get your message out, and if I saw it a bookstore it wouldn't register, I wouldn't pay money for it, and I wouldn't bother writing an angry letter to send to in the mail because it would have zero capacity to take you down a notch in a public forum.
You're talking about old ideas from a more civilized age. Tribalism is back and in charge. The internet isn't here so that we can all get along and better understand one another's point of view. It's here so that we can take turns bashing one another.
On Twitter it's not merely that you get a "different" interpretation, you have to deal with the most hostile interpretation possible of both your words and what you "didn't say". A little bit of disagreement is interesting; constant spurious repetitive negativity is exhausting and un-fun. Which is why people are leaving Twitter.
The issue here, as it always is when censors argue that their methods are simply the will of the masses, is that individuals aren't being given the freedom to decide for themselves if they like content or not. It's always the censor that determines what content others are allowed to see. The censor makes the decision on behalf of everyone else and claims their views represent everyone's views and their tastes represent everyone's tastes.
> you must be mature enough to be accountable for what you say
OP isn't talking about personal accountability but about platforms being afraid to lose advertising dollars or being sued and thus restricting the platforms.
Damn, that's a memory unlocked there. I forgot it existed completely. It was huge during my university days, and led to some very entertaining posts about things happening around the campus.
In hindsight though, a huge amount of the posts on there were misogynistic. I keenly remember "slut-spotting" being a trend, with people commenting on girls walking home still dressed up from the night before, telling people to look out for them. Led to a lot of jeering out of windows and the like. Plenty of racist threads also. Targeted cyberbullying too; calling out various people by name and publicly insulting them under anonymity. I distinctly remember having to console a friend who was in hysterics because someone posted a thread about something relatively harmless that she had done, and she was publicly shamed.
It was an entertaining way to spend a few minutes at it's best, but at it's worst was a social weapon for a lot of people who shouldn't have had that level of reach nor anonymity.
So was Facebook Live. I had so much fun just perusing around the globe, seeing events play out in real time. But too many crimes were committed live, including a mass shooting in New Zealand. I get why it couldn't continue, but it was one of the only genuinely cool things Facebook has ever built.
I work in higher education. You cannot genuinely imagine the heartburn that app gave college administrators across the country. It was amazing. Like a wave of anxiety washed across the country as Deans and Vp's all saw the statistics for bullying and suicide wash across their consciousness.
It’s not that the nazis are some outside group “invading” the platform—they are the existing, initial audience.
Whenever someone decides they are tired of getting censored on Platform X and creates their own “Free speech alternative to Platform X”, who is the audience? Cast-offs from Platform X. In other words, everyone who got kicked off for being racist, sexist, homophonic nazis. These free speech alternatives will never have a wholesome membership list.
At the end of the day they all have a profit motive and the most profitable thing they have found is ads. The type of advertisers allowed to advertise on social media, aka to lots of children, don't want to be next to anything controversial.
But they have all done a terrible job of this, banning algorithmically people who have done nothing wrong (or in the case of X saying something that makes Elon mad) while allowing widespread truly harmful misinformation
I've worked at both and between both the games industry and SV. Given the presence of Roblox, EA and the Playstation unit in SV it is a bit odd to consider them such outsiders, but in a real sense they are.
Broadly though, the problem is SV in a business culture sense conflates fun with role playing, expressing yourself, generating and consuming UGC, and feeding the beast. Play in the sense of discovery without any external side effects confuses it. If you are in games you see more and more of this tendency infesting western games production too, and it's largely down to those versions of fun being far easier to monetize.
The blind spot of this article is a huge amount of the "productivity" users are larping as PMs and using Notion etc. in a manner completely consistent with their sense of play, while acting seriously about it in order to maintain their ludic circle. To say they are not gamers is false; their entire lifestyle is the game.
The huge reason the games industry hasn't been completely overwhelmed by SV types is it contains a critical mass of idealists that genuinely care about the player and player experiences, even in the most cynical companies.
Before switching to big tech I worked 8y in video games - and agree.
Many practices of gamedevs - like designers literally just exploring stuff without any plan for years before commiting to any feature - would make SV directors and PMs (not to mention investors) scream. :)
This is a double edged sword. On the one hand, this aimless exploration is needed in pursuit of real fun (as opposed to compulsive loops of mobile games). On the other hand, this leads to crunch, games being buggy and always delayed, and how most fun games always had very troubled production and sometimes literally destroy the studios/teams.
More organized companies I worked at (Ubisoft) had less crunch but also less fun games (cookie cutter AC formula). The messy toxic crunch workplaces (CD Projekt Red) I was at produced amazingly fun cult games...
> Many practices of gamedevs - like designers literally just exploring stuff without any plan for years before commiting to any feature - would make SV directors and PMs (not to mention investors) scream. :) This is a double edged sword. On the one hand, this aimless exploration is needed in pursuit of real fun (as opposed to compulsive loops of mobile games).
IMHO, that exploratory attitude is needed to make any innovation at all. Without it, you get a bunch of cookie-cutter junk aping something else.
Which unsurprisingly, is a lot of what silicon valley does. Years ago it was social, last couple years it was crypto, now it's generative AI, etc. Almost all the talk about innovation is just hype and marketing.
If you need solid estimates, you'll never stray too far off the path others have already blazed.
I find this interesting. in all the jobs I've had, accountability has always been key. folks above my paygrade have always tried to find ways to produce metrics for our work. I've never been at a shop where free reign to explore was deeply embedded in corporate culture.
From the end user perspective, as someone who's been gaming since 8-bit NES days, the Ezio trilogy was still up there in terms of some of the best story and gameplay I've seen packaged together. Then again, I'm also a huge history nerd, so the "what if all the conspiracy theories were true" premise was fun.
I do agree the bean counters at Ubisoft seem obsessed with the idea of running the franchise until the wheels fall off anymore.
Why is everyone piling on CD Projekt, they just had a massive growth after W3 they didn't manage quite right, along with perhaps overcommitting to C2077. I'm allergic to it, is there any evidence of "messy toxic crunch" before or after the one bad (in large part because shitty consoles are a thing) launch? There are way more egregious US game companies but CD Projekt gets mentioned way too often. Cyberpunk is fixed and very good now BTW.
That's... a really interesting thought. These mid-brained people that indulge in the endless productivity treadmill (the most appropriate word for it - working hard to end up where you started) are... actually role playing someone productive.
It's very common in rat races. You can find recognizable forms of it in the ancient history of Imperial China or Rome. Job #1 is producing the appearance of usefulness, importance and status. Job #2 is doing enough actually useful things that the appearance and system is maintained.
"it contains a critical mass of idealists that genuinely care about the player and player experiences, even in the most cynical companies."
This is so true and why video games are so special, its full of slightly insane guy that will endlessly tweak variable so that the explosions feels just right and satisfying, set jump speed so that it goes up and down at just the "right rate" (which means jumping again and again in the engine for hours sometimes).
The final impact of all of it is often hard to quantify and sometimes feels silly but to them its important and they will do it even if it means working overtime because it feels like the right thing to do.
The fish rots from the head, blame MBAs and Stanford GSB in particular. Google e.g. "Peter Thiel laughing" and click on Images to view a panoply of boundaries in executive humanity.
It's been a while and maybe things are different now, but I left the video games industry because it was easily the most awful and least fun segment of the software industry that I've been exposed to.
First, the metaverse - Meta's "vision" is a bleak, dystopian colored world without much fun except a few mini-games.
It's core idea was/is implemented in way better ways - Dreams was a great step, Fortnite & Roblox are currently trying to do the same thing, and hell, even old GTA San Andreas and Garry's mod were more of a metaverse than Horizon Worlds ever came to be.
On the concept of fun - of course it doesn't understand it. The tech scene has move from the fun, hacker ways into the dark pit of standardisation, processes, bureaucracy and average. Creativity gets sapped out of it to conform to a kafkaesque mind of your average stakeholder. Designer's and developer's opinions get overridden by glorified paper pushers.
You can see it happen in every startup, and the valley is the same - to conform to the largest possible market, as it grows, everything has to be averaged out and greyed out - making stuff colorful might exclude a market and we don't want that. Especially if the market is a trillion dollar enterprise-ridden bureaucratic hellhole, since those hellholes are where the easy money is.
Second Life is probably the most successful metaverse to date. Probably in large part because people could do things like create flocks of flying dicks.
I was on SL for a while. Apart from the weird code, where prims would download and appear around you in a more or less random order, it was a dystopian nightmare of consumerised homogeneity and boredom. Mile after virtual mile of people "living" in prims they couldn't afford in real life - boats, fast cars, big houses, perfect clothes and bodies.
Flying dicks or no, it was a soul-destroyingly tedious hellscape of people acting out shallow lifestyle compulsions and grifting for lindens.
No, Roblox is by far the most successful metaverse along pretty much any reasonable metric.
If it doesn't conform to your ideas about what a metaverse is, or something that Vannevar Bush or Neal Stephenson pictured, that's a reflection on how your own prejudices don't match reality.
I think the best thing Facebook has done for the world has been to not take over Second Life. It's a move that makes perfect business sense but it would destroy an interesting piece of culture.
Old-time TV used to have ads for alcohol, cigarettes. Late-night shows, sometimes risky in europe (i.e. tits) had ads, lots of them. Google + Facebook, like the puritanest of the puritan americans have made that a no-go. It's not clear who decided it first, but basically anything that the local church might frown upon has become unmonetizable and unadvertisable. Of course you won't have fun things when you do that.
The article is not correct about metaverse. There 's still games like second-life and others (thousands of users roam in open and distributed worlds in opensimulator - see https://opensimworld.com) . Facebook's leg-less (convenient alias for genital-less) avatars are of course not fun. When you kill all that's fun about virtual worlds (the ability to transcend this world and let imagination be truly free) then what do you expect people to do? simulate the misery of the office in 3d form? I seriously would like to hear what they expected to have
The issue with the "metaverse" is that it's kind of horrifying and no company wants to build it.
I say that as somebody building something of the sort!
Second Life was the big one, and it was as I understand an accident. So it formed organically and became this weird mess of weird subcultures and porn.
Now some companies saw a lot of people logging in and wanted to replicate that, but they missed the very point of it. A sterile imitation of SL is pointless. Grandma doesn't want to put a VR headset or to navigate a 3D space to share cat photos with her friends. It's a lot of effort and nothing to gain.
Metaverses seem to mostly cater to unusual, fringe audiences. The furry fandom is a popular one for instance, because if you want to look like an anthro cat, well, in real life that's kind of difficult, and that's something that gives a reason to put up with the challenges. The people who are into this kind of thing tend to be not quite average in one way or another.
But this absolutely doesn't mix with the SV model of "let's get the entire planet in here". The general area is in my opinion inherently a niche.
"Making Snow Crash into a reality feels like a sort of moral imperative to a lot of programmers, but the efforts that have been made so far leave a lot to be desired."[1] -John Carmack in 1999 (!!) and it looks like programmers are still trying to do it.
I don't think making virtual worlds is inherently a bad idea. It's just like a niche, like writing a chess engine. It's not reasonable to expect everyone to be interested, it's the kind of software that's very interesting to a small segment of the population, while everyone else fails to get the point.
Which is why it's weird for somebody like Facebook to try to do it. I think chess is actually a pretty apt comparison. Imagine Facebook for some reason got this idea that everyone must play their chess game. I think obviously the end result would be bad, because they'd try to spice things up and water down the game to make it more palatable to a general audience. But the end result would be that the general audience quickly gets bored, and the actual purists don't find what they're looking for.
The metaverse part as a whole feels completely unneeded and misguided (spending so much time on declaring it dead, with 0 mention of VRChat or RecRooms is odd), but the dive on how much SV loves productivity apps was interesting.
This reminds me of Hello Internet (rest in hiatus) with the more US minded CGP Grey spending so much time on productivity tricks, to the point he's now part of a company making productivity goods.
And in contrast Brady getting bored to death by the productivity gurus, just delivering project after project without the weird and random systems, while enjoying resort beaches, also building legos, also going to parties etc. and just seemingly enjoying life so much more.
Productivity in that sense seems to be an outgrowth of "hustle" culture. It's something between a cargo cult and an MLM; people hope to make money by selling productivity apps to other people who want to be more productive in their productivity app startup.
At no point is anything of value produced, because the western US is already absurdly abundant in anything that can be "produced". What is left to produce? Only things that are "rival" (real estate), or public goods (addressing SF's crime and cleanliness problem would be great for its residents, but it's not possible to charge for it, so it's not going to be fixed).
People look at the app store and weep because there are no more worlds to conquer.
> The more someone wants to own it, to control it, surveil, the less people will buy in.
I remember when I first got into Android, the open handset alliance was such a big thing. The goal, at least what I thought was the goal, was to bring together all the manufacturers, software developers, telco operators, and users on a single platform so they could avoid duplicating effort. I think you’re right. The platform succeeded because google refused to suck up too much of the oxygen in the room in the project’s infancy.
Funny enough though as a user it was maddening to see basic apps that could get bug fixes and updates because they were part of aosp and couldn’t update from android market. I actually wanted those to be on an App Store because manufacturers didn’t have regular updates
As "metaverse" was not capitalized I assumed the generic term.
Otherwise I don't think Horizon getting sunset would mean Meta giving up, they've shown willingness to go down that road as far as they need to. That could include buying up any service that gets ahead in the Occulus ecosystem, though I'm definitely not thrilled by that perspective.
I don’t buy that the metaverse is a new invention. My brothers and I lived in one many years ago, it was called World of Warcraft around the Burning Crusade era and it was some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my life. This was before Blizzard enabled cross server play and destroyed the socialization aspect of the game. Then you lived on one server and were forced to socialize with the same players every day and make a whole world and society that existed on that one server. You had cities and factions and your guild doing raids and recruiting new players and it was another life. It was wonderful and I’m sure it will happen again someday from some other company and in some other format.
I’m always amazed to look at the servers and imagine all the lives and stories that came from that one piece of hardware.
The Metaverse concept has basically existed fully-formed, and even with that exact name, since at least Snow Crash (1992).
The wider idea was clearly floating around in the zeitgeist as the Red Dwarf episode where they get stuck in a game called Better Than Life aired in March that year, a few months before Snow Crash was published.
And don't forget Lawnmower Man in March 1992 [1] (Snow Crash was June 1992).
I think the "VR headsets" of the day were popular for a few years before both, driving said particular zeitgeist. As mentioned in a sibling, William Gibson { and probably Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem } presaged all this stuff decade(s) earlier.
I enjoyed Jumpgate back in the day - a space sim MMORPG.
There was quite a funny effect that at a certain level, you tended not to leave the space stations at all. The world was dangerous and losing your ship was a pain in the butt so seasoned players rarely launched and instead socialised and played each other in the training simulation that was inside the game.
I felt the hint of a general principle: if you create a realistic world with risks, chores, costs etc. it has no value. It's not what people seek. People will need to create games within the virtual world to find leisure. The virtual world becomes an irrelevant shell of indirection you need to escape just as you want to escape the real world.
Reminds me a lot of BBSs. It's hard to develop lasting and deep relationships with random people on the Internet. Just as old WoW, many BBSs had a small group of people who hung out virtually together and you got to know them. It's the closest you can get to lifelong high school and college friendships after leaving school.
Funny enough, BBSs were the way many of the players on WoW servers pre-cross realm would communicate/flame each other outside the actual game.
When I started online gaming with an old multiplayer tank game called Tanarus, we used Usenet. With EverQuest we used EZBoard, then with WoW it was many times the server’s board on the official WoW forums.
While I’m sure there’s a bit of nostalgia shading the memories, I made a lot of friends and great memories!
It absolutely isn't a new invention. The only thing new that everybody completely latched onto was that Facebook changed its name to Meta. People thought that meant the beginning of something new, and Meta themselves certainly didn't want to disprove that notion.
I know multiple people who have long-lasting IRL relationships because of Asheron's Call, preceding WoW by a few years. Same stuff... Get-togethers, group quests, level-up ceremonies, taking care of each other's characters and stuff (until houses came along)
I mean, you are essentially playing small village in those games.
I believe there is something fundamentally perverse about neighbourhood "attrition" for the human mind. Like, you want to know people and have some sameness in your neighborhood. Nowadays people move so much. Especially in big cities.
The difference between say, VRChat (but also non-VR equivalents like second life, MUDs and certain MMOs) and whatever the Silicon Valley metaverse thing was very much visible in how they envisioned it. Silicon Valleys approach was literally "put a bunch of 3D models that are meant to look like you + things you know from the real world and then transport as many real world bureaucracies and ideas as possible into it" (and throw making money on top because that's clearly what people want to do more than anything else[0]). It was doomed from the outset because it fundamentally restricted user creativity and expression as much as possible to try and mimic the real world.
VRChat from what I can tell instead stapled a basic interface together for making a "metaverse" (map, player objects and basic scripting) and then set players loose on the field with all the creation tools to customize it (iirc the only hardcap in VRChat is the polygon count on any individual model). The result is that VRChat is a. incomprehensible to outsiders and b. undeniably creative.
Most other examples don't offer the freedom VRChat does (closest to VRC is probably something like Garrys Mod? Second Life still tries to go for a realistic aesthetic, although it allows user creations), but if you place VRChat as one extreme and Facebooks anemic "metaverse" at the other, you'll find that most succesful metaverses lean closer to the VRChat degree of freedom than they do to Facebooks version of where creativity doesn't exist beyond what Facebook pre-approved of (and what a users wallet could afford, nothing for free, of course).
Or if you just want the crass answer: VRChat let weirdos be weird and express themselves however weird they wanted to be. Silicon Valley saw that weirdness as a problem to be solved away and tried to make everyone fit an "acceptable", pre-approved mold. The reality is that most people do not like being made to fit in existing molds, even if what they do fit into isn't too different from those molds in the first place.
I think you really hit the nail on the head. How large of a role self-expression plays in the "fun" determines how important it is. VRChat, Minecraft, and GTA Online have been successful because the entire point is to let people be creative with very few guardrails.
The old days of Counter-strike were filled with people using shock photos as sprays. Yet when Valve nixed the ability to use custom sprays it didn't impact the popularity of the game at all because that isn't the point of the game.
Let's not call people weirdos. If normies entered vrchat they d become weirdos too, because they can. They are in a world with absolutely no judgement where everything is possible and life starts anew. Nobody wants to be normal in a virtual world because, that s what the real world is supposed to do.
The term isn't intended to be derogatory or anything. If anything, it's a positive to me. Celebrate weirdness where you can find it because it, more than anything else imo is what unfiltered humanity looks like. Weirdos are just those who are openly willing to do so in greater quantities than the rest of us.
I'm just saying that VRC allows that weirdness to exist, while the SV tech demos didn't and weren't ever planned to without being attached to some harebrained moneymaking scheme that would benefit only the SV middlemen (and would be washed down and sanitized to the point of being boring).
Everyone is a weirdo, as near as I can tell. I think that if I ever met someone who was actually "normal" (hasn't happened yet), I'd consider them weird.
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Lack of fun is one reason. User generated content is risky. It needs moderation. Somebody might express themselves in ways that are inappropriate for the widest possible meaning of that word. And that might lead to legal consequences. Which adds cost. Fun and edgy things are typically bordering on inappropriate; or flat out inappropriate if you have no sense of humor. The difference is not relevant. If somebody might get offended, it's risky. Which makes the lawyers nervous.
Another reason is the obsession with building walled gardens and claiming full ownership of everything inside those walls. It leads to locked down experiences where creativity is basically not welcome unless sanctioned from the top down. Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc. used to have APIs and an ecosystem of people building stuff on top of that. As they grew, all of that went away.
Facebook is a good example as something that started out to enable some wildly inappropriate and immature behavior. Mark Zuckerberg actually started out building a platform for rating girls called facemash. Controversial, even at the time and it got him in trouble. Facebook is what he did next.
People criticize the media for being “biased” but then crave echo chambers of their own.
In the old days you would've had to publish a book to get your message out, and if I saw it a bookstore it wouldn't register, I wouldn't pay money for it, and I wouldn't bother writing an angry letter to send to in the mail because it would have zero capacity to take you down a notch in a public forum.
You're talking about old ideas from a more civilized age. Tribalism is back and in charge. The internet isn't here so that we can all get along and better understand one another's point of view. It's here so that we can take turns bashing one another.
OP isn't talking about personal accountability but about platforms being afraid to lose advertising dollars or being sued and thus restricting the platforms.
In hindsight though, a huge amount of the posts on there were misogynistic. I keenly remember "slut-spotting" being a trend, with people commenting on girls walking home still dressed up from the night before, telling people to look out for them. Led to a lot of jeering out of windows and the like. Plenty of racist threads also. Targeted cyberbullying too; calling out various people by name and publicly insulting them under anonymity. I distinctly remember having to console a friend who was in hysterics because someone posted a thread about something relatively harmless that she had done, and she was publicly shamed.
It was an entertaining way to spend a few minutes at it's best, but at it's worst was a social weapon for a lot of people who shouldn't have had that level of reach nor anonymity.
But the reboot was just sad! Who in their right mind thought they would be able to revive that cultural moment and moderate the shit out of it?
I work in higher education. You cannot genuinely imagine the heartburn that app gave college administrators across the country. It was amazing. Like a wave of anxiety washed across the country as Deans and Vp's all saw the statistics for bullying and suicide wash across their consciousness.
Every time there is a platform that touts its love of freedom and hatred of censorship it is flooded with neo-nazis and pedophiles.
Whenever someone decides they are tired of getting censored on Platform X and creates their own “Free speech alternative to Platform X”, who is the audience? Cast-offs from Platform X. In other words, everyone who got kicked off for being racist, sexist, homophonic nazis. These free speech alternatives will never have a wholesome membership list.
But they have all done a terrible job of this, banning algorithmically people who have done nothing wrong (or in the case of X saying something that makes Elon mad) while allowing widespread truly harmful misinformation
Broadly though, the problem is SV in a business culture sense conflates fun with role playing, expressing yourself, generating and consuming UGC, and feeding the beast. Play in the sense of discovery without any external side effects confuses it. If you are in games you see more and more of this tendency infesting western games production too, and it's largely down to those versions of fun being far easier to monetize.
The blind spot of this article is a huge amount of the "productivity" users are larping as PMs and using Notion etc. in a manner completely consistent with their sense of play, while acting seriously about it in order to maintain their ludic circle. To say they are not gamers is false; their entire lifestyle is the game.
The huge reason the games industry hasn't been completely overwhelmed by SV types is it contains a critical mass of idealists that genuinely care about the player and player experiences, even in the most cynical companies.
Many practices of gamedevs - like designers literally just exploring stuff without any plan for years before commiting to any feature - would make SV directors and PMs (not to mention investors) scream. :) This is a double edged sword. On the one hand, this aimless exploration is needed in pursuit of real fun (as opposed to compulsive loops of mobile games). On the other hand, this leads to crunch, games being buggy and always delayed, and how most fun games always had very troubled production and sometimes literally destroy the studios/teams.
More organized companies I worked at (Ubisoft) had less crunch but also less fun games (cookie cutter AC formula). The messy toxic crunch workplaces (CD Projekt Red) I was at produced amazingly fun cult games...
IMHO, that exploratory attitude is needed to make any innovation at all. Without it, you get a bunch of cookie-cutter junk aping something else.
Which unsurprisingly, is a lot of what silicon valley does. Years ago it was social, last couple years it was crypto, now it's generative AI, etc. Almost all the talk about innovation is just hype and marketing.
If you need solid estimates, you'll never stray too far off the path others have already blazed.
I do agree the bean counters at Ubisoft seem obsessed with the idea of running the franchise until the wheels fall off anymore.
Like maybe being flexible on deadlines but strict on overall process, to-dos, and separation of work?
I love this idea.
It's very common in rat races. You can find recognizable forms of it in the ancient history of Imperial China or Rome. Job #1 is producing the appearance of usefulness, importance and status. Job #2 is doing enough actually useful things that the appearance and system is maintained.
This is so true and why video games are so special, its full of slightly insane guy that will endlessly tweak variable so that the explosions feels just right and satisfying, set jump speed so that it goes up and down at just the "right rate" (which means jumping again and again in the engine for hours sometimes).
The final impact of all of it is often hard to quantify and sometimes feels silly but to them its important and they will do it even if it means working overtime because it feels like the right thing to do.
Anyone else's brain kind of error out trying to parse this phrase?
It's core idea was/is implemented in way better ways - Dreams was a great step, Fortnite & Roblox are currently trying to do the same thing, and hell, even old GTA San Andreas and Garry's mod were more of a metaverse than Horizon Worlds ever came to be.
On the concept of fun - of course it doesn't understand it. The tech scene has move from the fun, hacker ways into the dark pit of standardisation, processes, bureaucracy and average. Creativity gets sapped out of it to conform to a kafkaesque mind of your average stakeholder. Designer's and developer's opinions get overridden by glorified paper pushers.
You can see it happen in every startup, and the valley is the same - to conform to the largest possible market, as it grows, everything has to be averaged out and greyed out - making stuff colorful might exclude a market and we don't want that. Especially if the market is a trillion dollar enterprise-ridden bureaucratic hellhole, since those hellholes are where the easy money is.
Flying dicks or no, it was a soul-destroyingly tedious hellscape of people acting out shallow lifestyle compulsions and grifting for lindens.
Fun was very much not part of the deal.
If it doesn't conform to your ideas about what a metaverse is, or something that Vannevar Bush or Neal Stephenson pictured, that's a reflection on how your own prejudices don't match reality.
Which always reminds me of the jobs where they use a foosball table or whatever as a selling point.
The article is not correct about metaverse. There 's still games like second-life and others (thousands of users roam in open and distributed worlds in opensimulator - see https://opensimworld.com) . Facebook's leg-less (convenient alias for genital-less) avatars are of course not fun. When you kill all that's fun about virtual worlds (the ability to transcend this world and let imagination be truly free) then what do you expect people to do? simulate the misery of the office in 3d form? I seriously would like to hear what they expected to have
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I say that as somebody building something of the sort!
Second Life was the big one, and it was as I understand an accident. So it formed organically and became this weird mess of weird subcultures and porn.
Now some companies saw a lot of people logging in and wanted to replicate that, but they missed the very point of it. A sterile imitation of SL is pointless. Grandma doesn't want to put a VR headset or to navigate a 3D space to share cat photos with her friends. It's a lot of effort and nothing to gain.
Metaverses seem to mostly cater to unusual, fringe audiences. The furry fandom is a popular one for instance, because if you want to look like an anthro cat, well, in real life that's kind of difficult, and that's something that gives a reason to put up with the challenges. The people who are into this kind of thing tend to be not quite average in one way or another.
But this absolutely doesn't mix with the SV model of "let's get the entire planet in here". The general area is in my opinion inherently a niche.
1: https://games.slashdot.org/story/99/10/15/1012230/john-carma...
I don't think making virtual worlds is inherently a bad idea. It's just like a niche, like writing a chess engine. It's not reasonable to expect everyone to be interested, it's the kind of software that's very interesting to a small segment of the population, while everyone else fails to get the point.
Which is why it's weird for somebody like Facebook to try to do it. I think chess is actually a pretty apt comparison. Imagine Facebook for some reason got this idea that everyone must play their chess game. I think obviously the end result would be bad, because they'd try to spice things up and water down the game to make it more palatable to a general audience. But the end result would be that the general audience quickly gets bored, and the actual purists don't find what they're looking for.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus"
https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538
This reminds me of Hello Internet (rest in hiatus) with the more US minded CGP Grey spending so much time on productivity tricks, to the point he's now part of a company making productivity goods.
And in contrast Brady getting bored to death by the productivity gurus, just delivering project after project without the weird and random systems, while enjoying resort beaches, also building legos, also going to parties etc. and just seemingly enjoying life so much more.
At no point is anything of value produced, because the western US is already absurdly abundant in anything that can be "produced". What is left to produce? Only things that are "rival" (real estate), or public goods (addressing SF's crime and cleanliness problem would be great for its residents, but it's not possible to charge for it, so it's not going to be fixed).
People look at the app store and weep because there are no more worlds to conquer.
The more someone wants to own it, to control it, surveil, the less people will buy in.
I remember when I first got into Android, the open handset alliance was such a big thing. The goal, at least what I thought was the goal, was to bring together all the manufacturers, software developers, telco operators, and users on a single platform so they could avoid duplicating effort. I think you’re right. The platform succeeded because google refused to suck up too much of the oxygen in the room in the project’s infancy.
Funny enough though as a user it was maddening to see basic apps that could get bug fixes and updates because they were part of aosp and couldn’t update from android market. I actually wanted those to be on an App Store because manufacturers didn’t have regular updates
Otherwise I don't think Horizon getting sunset would mean Meta giving up, they've shown willingness to go down that road as far as they need to. That could include buying up any service that gets ahead in the Occulus ecosystem, though I'm definitely not thrilled by that perspective.
I’m always amazed to look at the servers and imagine all the lives and stories that came from that one piece of hardware.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/97tudn/one_of_world...
The wider idea was clearly floating around in the zeitgeist as the Red Dwarf episode where they get stuck in a game called Better Than Life aired in March that year, a few months before Snow Crash was published.
I think the "VR headsets" of the day were popular for a few years before both, driving said particular zeitgeist. As mentioned in a sibling, William Gibson { and probably Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem } presaged all this stuff decade(s) earlier.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lawnmower_Man_(film)
There was quite a funny effect that at a certain level, you tended not to leave the space stations at all. The world was dangerous and losing your ship was a pain in the butt so seasoned players rarely launched and instead socialised and played each other in the training simulation that was inside the game.
I felt the hint of a general principle: if you create a realistic world with risks, chores, costs etc. it has no value. It's not what people seek. People will need to create games within the virtual world to find leisure. The virtual world becomes an irrelevant shell of indirection you need to escape just as you want to escape the real world.
When I started online gaming with an old multiplayer tank game called Tanarus, we used Usenet. With EverQuest we used EZBoard, then with WoW it was many times the server’s board on the official WoW forums.
While I’m sure there’s a bit of nostalgia shading the memories, I made a lot of friends and great memories!
I believe there is something fundamentally perverse about neighbourhood "attrition" for the human mind. Like, you want to know people and have some sameness in your neighborhood. Nowadays people move so much. Especially in big cities.
VRChat from what I can tell instead stapled a basic interface together for making a "metaverse" (map, player objects and basic scripting) and then set players loose on the field with all the creation tools to customize it (iirc the only hardcap in VRChat is the polygon count on any individual model). The result is that VRChat is a. incomprehensible to outsiders and b. undeniably creative.
Most other examples don't offer the freedom VRChat does (closest to VRC is probably something like Garrys Mod? Second Life still tries to go for a realistic aesthetic, although it allows user creations), but if you place VRChat as one extreme and Facebooks anemic "metaverse" at the other, you'll find that most succesful metaverses lean closer to the VRChat degree of freedom than they do to Facebooks version of where creativity doesn't exist beyond what Facebook pre-approved of (and what a users wallet could afford, nothing for free, of course).
Or if you just want the crass answer: VRChat let weirdos be weird and express themselves however weird they wanted to be. Silicon Valley saw that weirdness as a problem to be solved away and tried to make everyone fit an "acceptable", pre-approved mold. The reality is that most people do not like being made to fit in existing molds, even if what they do fit into isn't too different from those molds in the first place.
[0]: I hope the sarcasm is obvious.
The old days of Counter-strike were filled with people using shock photos as sprays. Yet when Valve nixed the ability to use custom sprays it didn't impact the popularity of the game at all because that isn't the point of the game.
The term isn't intended to be derogatory or anything. If anything, it's a positive to me. Celebrate weirdness where you can find it because it, more than anything else imo is what unfiltered humanity looks like. Weirdos are just those who are openly willing to do so in greater quantities than the rest of us.
I'm just saying that VRC allows that weirdness to exist, while the SV tech demos didn't and weren't ever planned to without being attached to some harebrained moneymaking scheme that would benefit only the SV middlemen (and would be washed down and sanitized to the point of being boring).