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There’s a lot of breathless speculation about how transformative the metaverse could be. This morning we heard from two leaders who are good at explaining what it means and how disruptive it can be: Matthew Ball, CEO of Epyllion and author of The Metaverse; and James Gwertzman, partner at A16z.
They talked about what technologies are needed to unlock the potential of the metaverse, which many describe as the next version of the Internet.
As part of our GamesBeat Summit Next 2022 online preview, Gwertzman said he became interested in games more than 20 years ago because he saw it drive innovation at the intersection of art and technology. He made games for years and eventually started Playfab, to create backend infrastructure services for games as they became multiplayer services. He learned the ins and outs of servers and live experiences needed to make those games successful. Microsoft acquired the company in 2018 and Gwertzman gained insight into how games worked. He recently moved into investing and joined Andreessen Horowitz, which has raised $4.5 billion for its gaming fund.
“This whole thing has given me an interesting bird’s eye view of what we’re starting to call the metaverse,” he said. “If the metaverse is really a place where thousands or possibly millions of people can come together, it’s no different from a multiplayer game at all. And in fact, I happen to believe that it’s game developers and game makers who build the metaverse, because we’re the ones who actually have the knowledge, the experience of what it takes to bring all those players into a 3D virtual environment. with security and (anti-trolling) to make sure everyone has a good time.”
Ball asked how we can move from today’s multiplayer games to networks that are much higher so that we can have hundreds or thousands of players in the same room at once, even as technology like broadband, computing power, and hard drive space progress at a linear pace. .
Gwertzman agreed that one of the biggest limits around multiplayer games today is how many players can be together in a single environment. With Fortnite, that number is 100. So when Epic Games hosted the Travis Scott concert, which drew tens of millions, the concert was divided into groups of 100 people, all connected together on one server, with hundreds of thousands of servers to house all the people, he said. ball. How do you get real scale?
“That’s where you start to have really tricky scaling problems,” Gwertzman said. “It is not a linear growth in traffic. It’s actually exponential growth because every new player you add has to pass so many more sets of messages back and forth to keep everyone in the loop.”
One of the guiding principles is to go with simpler games first, Gwertzman said.
“One of the big architectural changes that we’re looking at is how much of that logic we’re moving from your local machine and completely to the cloud, where you can keep it all on a single server or in a cluster of servers,” said Gwertzman. . “You don’t have to update so often with messages back and forth. That’s one trick. Another trick is to design your experience. You just don’t have that many players in the same physical space at the same time.”
He noted that Hadean recently raised $30 million to build metaverse infrastructure from Epic Games and others, and Hadean is trying to solve this problem. Unlikely is another approach where they spatially split the world so that there aren’t that many players in one place. (Leaders from both companies also speak at GamesBeat Summit Next).
“I think one of the interesting innovations that we’re going to need to really create this metaverse is to think about new ways to distribute the passing traffic and create that sense of real space,” Gwertzman said.
Ball said that battle royale designs mitigate the problem of networking by shrinking a play area and eliminating players when that happens. By the time it becomes a small circle, maybe five players are left and the network load is less.
Gwertzman said he recalled a quote from John Lasseter, formerly of Pixar, where he said that art challenges technology and technology inspires art.
“You have to start coming up with hacks and tricks and workarounds to try and create the experience,” Gwertzman said. “Or you go back to your technologists and say I really want to do this, and the current technology doesn’t support it. Let’s be innovative.”
He added, “I think there’s going to be some really cool things we can do with the metaverse that’s going to be really inspiring. And it’s going to force us to face some of these really interesting technological issues.”
Ball said he loved that tech leaders like Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, have been talking about solving these problems for decades. So he asked why so many veterans are talking about the metaverse now?
“When you start seeing this cultural hub, you suddenly realize that the idea of being in a gaming space is no longer just games, and these technologies are used for so much more,” Gwertzman said. “We are now just getting more comfortable with what the space is. It’s not that technology suddenly crossed a threshold and we can now do things we couldn’t before. I think it’s just as well that we’re comfortable with these spaces now. And I also think it sounds really interesting, new, I think we are, we’re starting to realize some of the limitations of some of the online platforms that we have – Facebook is famously criticized for the way it picks and chooses which messages to if you show criticism or polarization and we don’t get the full bandwidth online.’
“One of the benefits of moving to a more 3D environment is that you have more of a sense of presence. And then I don’t want to wear VR glasses and go for the most immersive virtual reality. Just the idea that you are really in a place with other people. And it’s not just anonymous votes. It’s not just these text threads. These are just people.”
He said virtual spaces like World of Warcraft have the power to create lasting bonds between players and make them comfortable to participate in online economies.
Ball hopes the transition to the metaverse can alleviate some of the problems we face today. But the question is how to solve this. Twitter recently changed its policy on what it considers hostile behavior. While not specifically toxic, people can be harassed by what gamers have long known as “mourning.” This raises an ethical obligation on the creators of these worlds to manage such behavior, Ball said.
“Every time you bring people together, you start to run into these exact problems,” Gwertzman said.
He said he’s optimistic because over time game designers have learned to push and reward certain behaviors over others.
“Some of these massively multiplayer worlds are actually pretty friendly places that don’t really suffer from the kind of grief and trolling in other environments,” Gwertzman said. “A lot of it has to do with more of the social norms that have sprung up around these particular games. It could be as simple as a game designer influencing or rewarding players early on for helping other players when a player joins.”
Some of these tools will be automated to look for negative behavior, and others will be designed to reward people for good behavior. That’s important because online behavior — as we saw with COVID — can lead to a loss of empathy and people to develop harder edges. That doesn’t work in the real world.
“How do we actually encourage players or users to learn to be healthier for each other?” said Gwertzman. “A lot of research is being done into so-called third spaces, pubs or hair salons, which are neither work nor home. You get a mix of people with very different opinions and social status.”
What you don’t want is people splitting up in their own echo chambers, he said. Ball believes that all of these forces — technical prowess, socialization, cultural impact, investment, and economic impact — mean we’re going to have something akin to the metaverse, whether it’s five to 15 years from now.
Asked about what he thinks will unfold, Gwertzman said the blockchain has had a rough start with speculative behavior and crazy hype. But he is optimistic about the long-term innovation in space, as decentralization will be important as we strive to own our own identities online and control our data.
“If you look at games, each game is essentially a complete, separate, isolated, walled garden,” he said. “Who I am in Fortnite is a very different person than who I am in Red Dead Redemption. It is because these games are isolated from each other. And one of the things I’m excited about is (how) we can give our users more control over their own identities.”
Your reputation can travel from place to place, just like your friends list. Games will overlap more. And a world built for one game can be reused in other games. Those who like user-generated content and modding can repurpose those places for new experiences. The creative economy itself will come into games.
“That’s going to be a really huge driver of the metaverse and everyone is expected to create and contribute something, not just be a passive observer,” Gwertzman said.
Gwertzman noted that for years we’ve learned from communities like Roblox or Battle Royale games, and those who grew up learning those things will have their own take on how to build on those foundations that are more fun or social.
“Kids who have these experiences will eventually innovate and create,” he said. “They want authenticity, they don’t want to put together the perfectly styled Instagram experience. They want me to be real, who I really am. And create the kind of space that we really want to spend time in.”
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