Leading everyone into the Web3 world should be the historical mission of the Metaverse
The concept of Web3 has been very popular since last year, and PANews has made a lot of reports on it. I believe that everyone is no longer unfamiliar with this concept. As we in the blockchain industry, maybe we can hear the news of Web3 every day, but for outsiders, the concept is still vague, because Web3 is a paradigm shift of the Internet, not a specific product.
Technology does not equal product
The Internet era gives people the illusion that the world is driven by technology, because every change in recent years has a technological innovation behind it. But the technological advancements that we have not seen are as numerous as icebergs under the sea.
Web3 does not have a clear enough scene yet. The principles it shows people are abstract, but products must be concrete. Every new concept in history is similar when it appears. Users must first be trained in specific scenarios and establish behavioral habits in order to make changes happen step by step. Recently, VR equipment has begun to enter the market, and a lightsaber game has become the standard configuration of this equipment. In fact, it is also to let users feel the specific operation, so as to be familiar with the changes brought by a whole set of modes in the future.
Today we can do countless things on the computer, and we can also play a little Zelda like Genshin Impact on our mobile phones. The complexity of these products is very high, and there are many needs to be solved, but this is difficult for users to accept when the new technology is just starting.
The Metaverse, which will be responsible for transforming the abstract principles of Web3
As a game fan with 20 years of experience, I have very high expectations for the Metaverse, but the current Metaverse is still not specific enough, even if Nintendo said at the earnings conference earlier this year that although it is interested in the Metaverse, But don't know how to use it to create happiness. You must know that although Nintendo is technically conservative, its products are not conservative at all. I even played 3DS augmented reality games in high school (around 2009), and the experience can be said to be not much different from the current AR products.
A metaverse social game (Party Island) that ByteDance made some time ago, the slogan that came out was "Dongsen-style metaverse social experience", Dongsen (Animal Forest Friends Club) is a boutique game developed by Nintendo, players can Build your own island in the game. The style of the island, buildings, furniture, and terrain are all freely created by the player during the game. What you get is a unique "avatar", not a face-pinching game. , the so-called metaverse character or a small piece of paper.
Emphasizing precise "Ren's knife technique"
Nintendo's game development has always revolved around its own consoles. Every few years, it releases a new generation of home consoles whose performance is not at the same level as Sony and Microsoft, or even a generation behind. But there are always explosive models, which lies in its precise grasp of user needs.
As a product, a game, or the metaverse, is originally a systematic project. Just like the expansion of Ethereum, single-point optimization does not mean global optimization. So I roughly imagined what the metaverse would look like from a game perspective:
Learn from common sense
Zelda is Nintendo's explosive style. In the game, you can melt ice with fire, and blow the sails to make yourself sail. There are no prompts for these operations, but every subconscious reaction of yours can be responded to in the game. The characteristic of the open world is that when you stand on the cliff overlooking, you will realize that you can reach every corner, every mountain, every forest, and even every tree you can stand on. Can such a map be designed, what is its area? How are the scenes distributed? This is a problem that the predecessors have not solved or even considered. Nintendo draws on the size of Kyoto, Japan in reality, the distribution of the temple and other copy scenes draws on the distribution of convenience stores in Kyoto, and the size of the temple draws on Sensoji Temple. The location of every mountain and every plain in the game is carefully designed so that it will not make you feel far out of reach, but also allow you to suddenly open up after turning out of the valley.
The Metaverse draws on common sense. On the one hand, it can lower the threshold, and on the other hand, it can solve many problems that seem to be very new, but in fact have already been answered in reality. Zelda has many functions in the later stage, some of which cannot be found in reality, but these did not appear at the beginning of the game. The designers of the Metaverse should understand the concept of "coarse tuning and fine tuning". When users first enter the Metaverse, they need to use common sense to coarsely tune themselves to adapt to the new world, and then the details will be developed.
multiplication effect
Readers with investment experience should have heard of the concept of macroeconomic multiplication, such as a country invests a sum of money in infrastructure, it is given to material suppliers, and it is also given to workers. So this money is not only spent by infrastructure, but also by the supply chain and by workers. An investment drives the economic activities of the whole society, just like the adjustment of a parameter, it is multiplied many times by the system engineering of the society. This scenario is slightly different in the game, but it is similar to the point of "one resource, multiple reuse" (resource reuse, we also mentioned in the public chain modularization).
Zelda first proposed several basic behaviors, materials and scenes, and then let the game character interact with the scene using different materials. For example, a hammer can smash ore, but a wooden stick cannot. A hammer can shake apples off a tree, but only a bladed weapon can cut down a tree. Every prop in the game can be used in different ways and bring different effects in different scenes because of the properties of its material. Just like the real world, in chemical or physical experiments, there are countless combinations of possibilities, and many inventions and creations are tried out. Even if it is the "object-oriented" of the computer, a class of methods is made into an object, and then parameters are added to the object to form properties.
As long as there are enough types of objects and the attributes are specific enough, we can arrange countless combinations and make various attempts, so Python can be used in various fields. This expression may be too abstract. You can also think about Notion. In this software, is every interface essentially a blog? Modifications to blog properties, such as tables, nesting, and associations, allow Notion to do a lot of things. If the Metaverse allows users to participate only in the way the designer specifies, then when the designer no longer provides updates, its charm will be exhausted.
Therefore, a good metaverse can "self-grow". The designer needs to set several basic objects, and then let these objects interact through arrangement and combination. Reward users for their curiosity, just like in reality. In this way, even if the content of the metaverse has been excavated, the designer can still achieve the multiplication effect through an update.
screen performance
The most popular game on PS recently is "Horizon 2 West Forbidden Zone". Many people are amazed at its picture quality, but should this be the direction that the Metaverse is pursuing? Should the Metaverse rely on image quality to give people a sense of immersion? The head of Unreal's graphics engine has answered this question. There is a "sniper problem" in the Metaverse. When players on two mountains use scopes to observe each other, the calculation amount of the graphics engine increases exponentially according to the action reaction, wind speed, and light of the two sides at this time. The more beautiful the picture, the more parameters are required, and each additional parameter is equivalent to multiplying the current image calculation amount by itself. Therefore, it is difficult for a high-definition metaverse to accommodate a group of players at the same time. Of course, this is a technical problem, time will solve it, but it is destined to be a follower of single-player game quality. Technological progress is fair, the metaverse can be used, and other scenarios can also be used. So what to do? Zelda's method is to use cartoon images to abstract the realistic picture, just like there are two kinds of Chinese painting, the fine brush painting restores the details of a sunset, and the freehand painting shows how you feel at sunset.
What the Metaverse needs is to extract these abstract elements of reality to give the user the right feeling, not to restore it.
"Residents"
While some games have designed automatic pathfinding and automatic combat, there are also designers who do the opposite. For example, "Death Stranding" made by the well-known game producer Hideo Kojima (you may have played "Metal Gear" made by him), its gameplay is jokingly called "delivery delivery", in the game players need to consider the physical properties of the delivery , if the left side is too heavy, the character will lean to the left when advancing. The chemical properties should also be considered, some express delivery cannot be soaked in water, and some have temperature requirements. Due to the harsh environment, players have to make great efforts for every step forward, but when you cross a mountain, every thought you spend will be presented in your mind, and the mountain looks completely different to outsiders. In the game, infrastructure such as roads and slings can be built and shared with other players. If this is the metaverse, the users in it will get a huge sense of accomplishment when they look back at this world.
This is an achievement of co-construction. Participants can understand the story behind every inch of land, and understand that this is the result of the community's joint decision through the basic rules of the metaverse. On the contrary, what can you gain from a game that automatically hangs up? Even if a knife strikes 999, this achievement has nothing to do with the player, and the world will not change because of the player.
Web3 and the Metaverse
The design process of the Metaverse is a reflection process on Web3. Among the multiple innovative concepts of Web3, what changes are brought about by technologies that are needed by this society, and which are not needed now but may be needed in the future? I believe the Metaverse can give us such an answer.
The changes brought about by Web3 should be changes in the relationship between people and people, and changes in the relationship between people and society. If these two things cannot be achieved, any Web3 application can only be regarded as a mere appearance. But to change these two points, we need a testing ground for virtual worlds, and I also hope that the Metaverse can take on such a mission.
Returning to the specific problem, the designer of the metaverse must not only have a clear description of the goal, but also be able to plan a reasonable path for the goal. This is the difference between technology and products. As a product, the Metaverse should be responsible for its final experience; as an experiment, it should carry the principles of Web3; as a trainer of the new world, it needs to have a sufficiently low threshold.