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The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

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Re: The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

#81
post #72
post #52

Minecraft is great but to my knowledge you can't make a portal in one Minecraft world to another world, you can't take an object from one Minecraft world to another world, and you can't transit from one simulation to another simulation (all Minecraft worlds run the same simulation: the Minecraft simulation). It's not really a metaverse in that it's not one connected uncoordinated space, it's many separate, instanced…

I feel like taking an object from one simulation to another and having different simulations are oposites. Either you have the same simulations and thus objects share behavior, or the simulations are different and the objects are just 3D things.

> taking an object from one simulation to another and having different simulations are oposites

not really, we just have to get into some semiotics here and consider the difference between the signifier and the signified (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signified_and_signifier). In semiotics, a signifier is a physical artifact; the manifestation of something. A physical stop sign, for example. The signified is the concept embodied by a signifier. All of the stop signs in the world correspond to (roughly) the same concept of stopping, but they are separate instances of that concept. Separate signifiers (instances of "stop sign"), all with the same thing signified (the idea that you should stop).

Now in games, we have the notion of the signifier and the signified, too. Let's take an example item from WoW. I'm using this as an example because it's a game I'm familiar with. An item like Staff of Westfall (https://classic.wowhead.com/item=2042/staff-of-westfall) expresses several things. The first thing that it expresses is that it's a weapon so it uses your weapon slot to equip it, and the stat bonus of +5 intellect that gives you additional mana and +11 spirit that gives you mana regeneration. Great, that's nice. Those things can be taken to be the content of the item: its in-simulation properties and effects. But what does the existence of this item signify? The Staff of Westfall can only be obtained by each player exactly once, cannot be traded between players, and can only be obtained by going to The Deadmines, a particular dungeon, and defeating the final boss. Equipping the Staff of Westfall has the effect that it gives you mana and mana regen, but it also communicates something non-mechanical: that the player carrying the Staff of Westfall has gone to the Deadmines and fought and beaten Edwin VanCleef.

Now, can the Staff of Westfall be transferred to another simulation? Yes and no. The signifier, the physical (virtual?) staff can be transferred to another game in some sense. The 3D model can be transferred, the physical appearance of the item can be transferred. But that was always on your computer all along; it's not particularly meaningful. The effects of the item may or may not be transferable; if a game is not the exact simulation that WoW is, what does +5 intellect and +11 spirit mean? The game operator may elect to translate that to some other concept in their game, or they may not. I think this notion of "transfer" is what you're eluding to: the transfer of the signifier. This concept is probably very useless. It's also the concept that people are generally talking about when they talk about the transfer of items between games. I think it has no merit at all.

But there's something else that can be transferred: the thing that ownership of the Staff of Westfall signifies: the concept that the person holding that item has slayed Edwin VanCleef (in WoW). Transferring the Staff of Westfall may not mean transferring the physical model or its attributes, but it may mean something more along the lines of transferring the meaning of what the player has accomplished. Admittedly, I'm not sure why this would be useful or what the applications of such a system would be; what I'm getting at instead is the idea that transferring an asset may mean many things, and that transferring an asset from one simulation to another is not necessarily the opposite.

Re: The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

#82

To be completely honest, I don't really know what people mean when they talk about a "metaverse". But if I had to define it one way or the other, I feel like I already have, and interact with, a sort of metaverse. I play various video games with various people, talking and interacting with friends for these games on Discord, interacting with the larger community of these games on Discord/Reddit, engaging with influen…

I think the idea is there is a hub where all of those things are connected and live to some extend. Like if your web browser was basically a mmo experience and when you went to do any of the things you mentioned some type of avatar that represents you would be present doing those things rather than just cookies and network traffic from your computer.

My understanding is its just a way to do all the things you do currently but in a more "connected" way.

Re: The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

#84
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that strife will be in the real world. The thing about “real” is that it always wins over “virtual”.

100%. The virtual world is actually a very fragile thing.

Just turn off the electricity and it's gone. Imagine what a solar flare could do.

Re: The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

#85
post #18

(Aware of the fact that I'm taking time out of my day to read HN) I really wonder how many adults > 25yrs and < 60yrs have the time to immerse themselves in any type of digital world / metaverse experience. If I was a teenager or in college, then yeah I can see it... but there are so many things to do in the 16hrs we have each day, and I already kick myself for not finishing that book, or getting an extra workout in,…

Agreed. There's way too many things to do in reality. I have about 30-60 minutes a day of Me Time, and the last thing I want to do is piss it away in front of a computer when I've already spent 70% of my time doing exactly that.

Go outside, people. Talk to your friends in reality if possible. Experience the place you live in; participate in something physical to improve it materially. There's no end of socialization and minigames in reality, the graphics are better, and it's free.

Re: The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

#86
post #18

(Aware of the fact that I'm taking time out of my day to read HN) I really wonder how many adults > 25yrs and < 60yrs have the time to immerse themselves in any type of digital world / metaverse experience. If I was a teenager or in college, then yeah I can see it... but there are so many things to do in the 16hrs we have each day, and I already kick myself for not finishing that book, or getting an extra workout in,…

I read a recent interview from mark zuck about the metaverse and someone asked him a similar question. He had an actually really insightful answer. 1) Most american adults watch several hours of TV per day. alternatively, many play a few hours of video games. (The actual per-person-per-day numbers are very high compared to the average 2hr/week i watch tv but whatever). Most of TV and Video Games are about ignoring re…

But the metaverse itself is not content. Instead it’s another medium to consume content.

Therefore the metaverse isn’t a replacement for a video games or TV. You would simply watch TV or play a video game while in the metaverse.

The metaverse in that regard isn’t a new concept, because VR spaces have existed for a long time now. I’ve watched movies in Minecraft more recently, for example. I’ve seen every idea in the metaverse attempted in some game or application already.

The reason these VR spaces have not taken off, however, is because the medium to access these VR spaces have been pretty disappointing.

It’s the reason why the Internet took a long time to take off: using the Internet on a desktop computer sucks. When smartphones took off, so did the Internet.

Facebook has not fixed the medium problem as I see it. I have never gotten motion sickness, but I do not want to put on a VR headset for more than a few hours. I don’t even want to put on a VR headset to be honest. I’ve owned one for two years and it just sits in a drawer. I can’t imagine that many people want to put on a VR headset either if they could just watch TV while sitting on the couch, grabbing real drinks on their real table, and texting their friends.

Re: The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

#87
No, it is not. Neither is Roblox or Fortnite, or VRchat. A single game or world is NOT the metaverse, what is so hard to understand about that for journalists and companies?

The metaverse is the immersive internet, as a successor to our current one that is more 2D oriented around photos/videos/text today. It's a paradigm shift in how we interact, but most importantly there will be many of these virtual worlds/spaces interconnected together to form an actual network that nobody outright owns. To get to this future, we need protocols/standards to allow virtual worlds to talk to one another and agree that users can hop back in forth between them seamlessly, across all platforms.

More specifically, the way we use the web today to navigate from webpage to another is how we we traverse the metaverse. The core problem that needs to get solved right now is interoperability, to enable the "web of 3D".

Look to WebGPU, WebAssembly, and WebXR as cornerstone technologies here. Our startup is building the "3D/VR web" in this way, and our current focus is getting proper HTML5 exporting from the native game engines, currently Unreal Engine. We're also building out a suite of tooling to empower developers and creators along with our hosting/discovery platform that includes advanced texture compression + asynchronous asset fetching to enable 3D/VR websites that load as quickly as a regular 2D page. If you're a developer and are interested in our work, you can join our Discord here:

https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8

Re: The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Minecraft go down for several days like Roblox does? Does Minecraft ban/cancel people like PewDiePie as Roblox did? Aren't monthly active users (MAU) around 100M for each? I think Roblox is eventually doomed to slowly fizzle like Second Life, etc. Internet history is littered with the corpses of dead closed systems. Remember Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL? Remember Myspace? Microsoft might eventually, say, install…

Mojang would have a problem trying to control Minecraft because it's written in Java, their developers commonly associate with the players who hack the game, and the only control over the gameservers that they have is their authentication servers- which you can disable the use of by editing one flag in your server config files, allowing anyone to play even if they didn't buy the game.

This describes the current state of Minecraft, but Microsoft can tie new releases to new restrictions. The unknowing masses will adopt the new version without understanding the loss of freedom. Look at the success MS, Adobe, etc., have had getting people to pay rent each month for software like Office and Photoshop that they used to buy once and run forever.

Re: The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

#89
post #67
post #52

Minecraft is great but to my knowledge you can't make a portal in one Minecraft world to another world, you can't take an object from one Minecraft world to another world, and you can't transit from one simulation to another simulation (all Minecraft worlds run the same simulation: the Minecraft simulation). It's not really a metaverse in that it's not one connected uncoordinated space, it's many separate, instanced…

The principle being demonstrated here is persistence , and it exists on a spectrum. In a single Minecraft server your inventory is persistent, but across Minecraft servers only your account identity is persistent. In Valheim or Terarria both your account and your inventory is persistent across servers. Right now the talking heads are trying to sell us a metaverse on the idea that one account could have a persistent i…

right I agree with all that, I'm not advocating for the idea of moving the content that an item represents from one simulation to another, but the idea that transferring what that thing symbolizes should be considered separate and isn't as easily dismissable. See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29086662

Re: The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

#90
post #79
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With software improvements, our perception of time will eventually be slowed down in the metaverse to such an extent that one hour in the material world will equate to several days of perceived elapsed time in meta-reality.

Do you have any context which would indicate this is possible?

Might be sarcasm?
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