The reductive ‘Fortnite is for kids’ dismissal reminds me of the angry reaction by a particular cohort to the first cel-shaded Zelda game on the Gamecube. They dreamed of ‘realistic’ graphics targeted toward serious gamers and even claimed they were betrayed by WIP footage that teased their dream.
Fortnite is a game with an incredibly high skill ceiling around its building mechanic. I watched Jonathan ‘Fatal1ty’ Wendell (who is currently a 40-year-old and one of the earliest professional gamers) struggle in deep concentration on trying to incrementally improve his building speed and technique. I know many adults who play and enjoy the game, and they seem to enjoy the branded tie-ins. They are mature enough for their ego to be unaffected by the game’s cartoon art style, chosen instead of a gritty Call of Duty realism. It has solid mechanics and the content has been highly polished, even when not tied in to branded content.
Even so, I’m still not clear how that connects to Ready Player One being a dull and cynical exploitation of nostalgia shoutouts/callbacks.
I personally found Fortnite to be a huge slog to play - with tons of downtime compared even to games like CS: GO, let alone old-school arena shooters like Q3. The only thing that kept me coming back is the season pass reward tracks and daily missions.
I think that applies to the entire battle royale genre. Unless you're good, it's 20+ minutes of downtime (between waiting for the map to set, load, and for you to complete your jump and start finding opponents) for at minimum a few seconds of gameplay with an opponent.
It really pains me how so few people play arena shooters any more. They are brilliant, and you can get into (and stay in!) the thick of the action for the entire time you are logged on, save for the match ending and a new map loading.
Sometimes we drop hot and fight as soon as possible. This is vastly less successful but makes for shorter, faster, more intense games.
It helps that matchmaking and loading is generally quick so there isn't much "fluff" downtime.
It starts you off the bus with a random but complete load out in a small circle with up to 60 (instead of 100) players.
Titanfall 2 is a somewhat recent example of a way to balance around this, with the more fun to use guns (Kraber, Cold War, Mozambique) but less effective than a hitscan bullet hose like the CAR. This video is a good example of what I mean, giving good players something to do other than racking up kills with meta weapons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5szruNvGT5c
Double Action: Boogaloo, an action movie themed source mod, takes this a step further with score being earned based largely on the weapon being used, which makes running around punching people more effective than say sitting in a corner with a powerful weapon.
I remember there was an interesting twist on this when, IIRC, Fortnite changed its matching algorithm to more likely place better players together with each other.
A bunch of those players were frustrate-to-outraged over the change. The reason that at least some gave? They were losing too much, and sometimes they don't want all the high adrenaline & stress of competitive matches and just want to relax and have it easy. (Yes, I know there have been more issues and complaints about the details of SBMM in Fortnite, this is just one of them)
It struck me as a uniquely selfish view, as though the entire ecosystem should be structured to their own enjoyment rather than that of typical players. Like if Gary Kasporov wanted to play in the local High School chess leagues and threw a fit when he was told he couldn't.
There's a whole problem around "people want to beat other actual humans", but in 1:1 competitive games, the average winrate is tautologically always 50%. In Battle Royale, the average winrate is more like 5% - But it's unevenly distributed, so some players are getting 20-30% winrates while others are getting 1%. The game is fun enough to play that people are willing to take 1% winrates, but at some level you want to win - That's where the real fun is. If you never win, the game is not fun. If you win occasionally, against skilled opponents, it feels like a great victory. If you win often, it's relaxing.
(There exist some exceptions to "average winrate" - Asymetric games can have a per-player average winrate above 1, though can just as easily drop below - Dead By Daylight, for example, lists 1.5B "escapes" to 1.8B "sacrifices"[1] - Did the survivor "win" when they escaped? or did the killer "win" when they killed a player? It might make more sense to view it as a set of 1:1s, since each survivor might escape individually, at which case we're back to square 1)
Ultimately, games live or die on being fun.
[1]https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/dead-by-daylight-5th-anni...
Gamers often abuse the matchmaking systems to get this result themselves. They make "smurf" accounts in the competitive games they like, underrated for their skill level either from being new accounts or by intentional losing, because it let's them bully less skilled players and avoid being bullied themselves.
Overall I think the best solution is probably the old fashioned dedicated server, where people can find a group with a roughly similar playstyle and skill level, but still enough variety to not be overly same-ey per game. I have fond memories of going up against and cursing better server regulars, and then having it flipped around when on their team.
I definitely believe that there's a high dropout rate for areas shooters. My experience was dying a lot until I got better - kind of like Dark Souls for multiplayer. But I'm still surprised that they're not popular anymore given how well single player Dark Souls sells.
But that does mirror my experience with newer games... the matchmaker usually isn't very good and I'm always put into games with players greatly better than me until I git gud.
Keeping track of MMR/ELO and trying to match players against others of similar skill is online matchmaking 100 (not even 101). What reason could a game possibly have to not implement it, except for possibly "lack of resources" (e.g. someone's indie project)?
Overwatch for example doesn't seem to try and fill in say 6 players of a range of 2500-2600 ELO, but will pull something like 2 higher ELO player and 4 low ELO players, partially due to there only being so many higher than average players to matchmake.[3] "Good" players get "bad" players to bring down their winrate and "bad" players get "good" players to bring theirs up. This miss-match might contribute to why some people become so toxic, especially when having fun relies on your teammates so heavily and everyone wants to be the DPS.
Also personally I enjoy playing against better players (within reason) in order to improve my own gameplay via imitation.
[1]https://www.halowaypoint.com/en-us/forums/84ad72a8b518479785...
[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/blackopscoldwar/comments/ifwuy4/sbm...
[3]https://win.gg/news/jeff-kaplan-on-overwatch-players-matchma...
Engaging with others early is recommended for top-tier Fortnite players for building your combat skills.
> recommended [...] for building your combat skills.
Or log onto a 32-man running CTF-Face][
To me, they are completely different games. I love the slowness in BR and tension that builds up between the action.
Another point is that Creative mode in Fortnite is thought to soon allow full Unreal Engine Blueprints and open modding.
The "mode selection" screen recently was turned into Netflix or Hulu like "tiles" with the majority of the tiles being Creative maps made by the community.
Fortnite is making a pretty strong "metaverse" play with Creative and the recently released by Epic Games "Imposters" mode shows that you will soon be able to play nearly any game "in Fortnite".
When I think of the slogan "Fortnite is for kids" it rings true precisely for this reason. In my "old age" I simply can't keep up with the input rate/reaction time of high-level players.
A) Social injustices and systematic oppression of marginalized groups.
B) The cultural and media emphasis on these injustices in attempt to dismantle systematic oppression.
I think others are confused whether you are decrying social justice (aka the issues and methods pursued by SJWs and modern progressives) or social injustice (abuses and inequalities in society).
Society today has self feeding feedback loop that is going to continue to grow where in government regulations are used to phase out small companies in favor of larger companies, as those companies become corrupt or at best at odds with the population, the population demands they be more heavily regulated which then leads to more power and more corruption in both government and corporations.
The only real solution to this is less powerful more distributed government, but people largely fail recognize this reality instead focusing on "electing the right" people or party.
Power Corrupts, the only way to end corruption is to deny it power.
I absolutely disagree with this. Under what metric and what government are you referring to.
US Federal Government has continually and unabatedly has increased and centralized its power since at least the Great Depression, Taking power from local and State governments transferring it to the Federal Government.
Under no metric can one say government in the US is less powerful today.
>The fight should be against the source of power, not against their powerless representatives.
The Source of government power is it monopoly on the initiation of violence, last I check it was only government with the legal power to steal, plunder, arrest, jail, and even kill people that disobey.
I think it is fine the fight against both
Government is more weak now because people have become very distrustful of it (reasonable given Vietnam and the events since). Because of that, the government has a lot less teeth nowadays to implement policies.
I know people talk about things like abortion and vaccine mandates and these issues are extremely important, but IMO they are extremely small scale topics that are more related to current cultural norms than long term policies.
We’re not dealing with the cultural issues of the 1960s these days. What we deal with are the 100 year old bridges, infrastructure projects, processes and programs that previous generations built. To me, these issues are much more important than anything else because they require investment now and yet their returns don’t realize until much later.
Yet our corporate tax rate is the lowest in a very long time and corporate tax evasion is huge, yet the government hasn’t had the support they need to do much about it. At the same time, people are (understandably) hugely distrustful of politicians, but all that does long term is hamper the policy making that we need now to set the stage for our grandchildren.
I think people vehemently taking pride and fighting over a lot of the current issues now is so short sighted.
I look at from what the government is or can do to me, what freedoms they take from me, you mention vaccine mandates and call it a "small issue". However from my perspective it is a HUGE issue, mandates to me are a complete intrusion into my body autonomy, if I loose that I cease being a free individual.
I look at things like the War on Drugs, War on Gun Rights, War on Terror, and 1000's laws that attempt end runs around the constitution and individual rights as an extreme expansion of government power
Where you look at crumbling bridges, a service I do not believe should be in the purview of the federal government at all in the first place, as seen a weakened government.
Roads at best should be a Local and State government issue not Federal Government. The fact that the federal government as taken over that function is an example of Expansion of government power.
But that still means the issue is insufficient government strength, though right? Simply at the local and state level rather than the federal level. Perhaps you can reframe it then as a power misallocation, but it still means some government is not powerful enough to get things done.
The federal government massively under funds the federal highway system.
That said, Road maintenance is not a government power issue. Road Construction might be if they need to seize land.
The calling out of roads is a red herring, Road account for a infinitesimal part of the budget, even the so called "build back better" plan has very very very little money in it for roads and bridges (about 3% of the spending)
To focus on that as an example of government being weak is ridiculous and completely miss understands the role and scope of government in the lives of everyday people.
If the government privatized all the roads would people that support this argument then claim we are in an stateless society because the government no longer builds the roads...
We can agree that the government is terrible at maintaining roads, however I do not view that as an example of government weakening, it is an example of government incompetence. Incompetence is universal and all encompassing for all government programs
And as someone already said, local government is still government. Both are government. Both are weaker than before. And I’m still paying both.
> Roads at best should be a Local and State government issue not Federal Government. The fact that the federal government as taken over that function is an example of Expansion of government power.
Why? Local government can just as much restrict your individual freedoms (and arguably do) as federal government. I for example very much prefer a federal government building bridges than a local government that tells me what color my house can be or when I can or can't put out christmas decoration.
I think both you and the OP are correct in some way. I would argue, the government has expanded their power (the primary example being surveillance capabilities), on the other hand I also agree with the previous poster, government seems to have much less power to act against large corporations.
I think both you and and the OP are correct on. I think we have seen governments expand
First and foremost just because government has not used its power of conscription does not mean it has relinquished said power, in fact it has also expanded that power recently where by Women will not be required to sign up for the daft, aka selective service. Failure to do so has many penalties attached to it.
So this also fails the test on if government is weaker today then since WWII.
Further still even if the selective service was abolished I am not sure that eliminates the idea of conscription given that most of the military is made up of men and women who "choose" that path in life based on economic conditions impart created by governments monetary manipulation beginning in the 1970's [1]
>>Local government can just as much restrict your individual freedoms (and arguably do) as federal government.
While this is true, it is much much much easier to escape oppressive or non-functional local governments than it is to escape federal governments. This is why unpopular laws are often attempted at the federal level because if done at a local or state level people and businesses will just move to a new state or city to escape them, we see this all the time.
So I completely acknowledge that a local government could become just as if not more authoritarian as the federal government but that would still be preferred over a totalitarian nation state. It is far easier to move from California to Texas than it is to move from the US to Europe, or Europe to the US.
On the other hand, most of the ensuing consequences are not a violation of rights, but rather a natural result of any choice that puts others at risk.
Those who are anti-vax for any preventable, deadly disease choose their individual freedom over their community's safety. Such is their right. In turn, it is the right of the community to protect itself against the risk these people introduce.
Anyone may drive their car without a seatbelt on your property, but if they wish to use public roads, they must sacrifice a little bit of individual freedom and wear one.
I can see some logic behind wanting roads to be Local and State responsibilities. It would increase the freedom of individual taxpayers. This might result in a net increase in freedom, despite all the inevitable tolls, unstandardized roadways, and stymied arguments between states over who must pay to restore that crumbling interstate bridge. The economic burden would lift off of the taxpayer's shoulders and fall back on the business or person who uses the roads the most, especially those businesses which have profited from being able to cross state lines efficiently –not something most local folks care to encourage through a federal subsidy anyways. Perhaps the framers of the constitution went too far when they suggested that Congress should be able to tax to, "provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States...to regulate commerce among the several states...to establish post offices and post roads." Most people don't need packages to go straight to their house anyways!
The same goes for public schools, better referred to as the only school a poor person can afford to attend. Communities should be allowed
But one thing is for sure. If public schools exist as the only option for most of their students, two things are true. First, they cannot stop attendees from being smokers or anti-vaxxers out in the world. Second, they absolutely must restrict these individuals from introducing deadly risks into the classroom.
This is best solved at the State and Local level, but in some cases.
These should never be penalties and restrictions against refusal, but instead protections for the community against the resultant risk. It is for the State and Local government to decide how much they accommodate risk-promoting individuals. For example, many schools are providing separate instruction for anti-vaxxers. Good for those emburdened taxpayers, deciding to help the selfish among them!
False. Vaccination protects you the individual from being infected, thus eliminating the risk the unvaccinated poses to you. Which in turn eliminates your ethical right to impose conditions upon them..
>>Anyone may drive their car without a seatbelt on your property, but if they wish to use public roads, they must sacrifice a little bit of individual freedom and wear one.
This is like wise a TERRIBLE argument, if you support individual liberty (which clearly you do not) then you would understand that my not wearing a seat belt poses no risk to your safety, as such you have no ethical right to impose such a mandate on me.
My insurance company may as part of a private contract I enter into them voluntary but not the government on behalf of "society"
Government is neither my parent nor my master.
In reality the Seat belt mandated was an example of regulatory capture by the insurance companies, it to protect insurance profits not public safety
>>The same goes for public schools, better referred to as the only school a poor person can afford to attend. Communities should be allowed
I take it then you are in favor of School Choice, where each parent is given a voucher for X dollars they can redeem at the school of their choice.
I bet your not..... (I am)
False. Vaccinations reduce your ability to catch specific diseases and reduce the probability of enduring symptoms at full strength.
The risks the unvaccinated impose are not eliminated, and the unvaccinated in larger numbers will continue to impose a threat against the people that can't get vaccinated for medical reasons or are immunocompromised.
That seems to be a very Authoritarian respone, and one that has lead to very dark places through out human history, that is not a power I willing to give to any government
The corner stone of modern medicine is "informed Consent" the keyword there is Consent. You just want to toss away Consent because of (IMO) irrational fear.
The vaccination provides me with adequate protection, I do not need to impose a medical treatment on someone against their will, it is sad that others feel they need to.
In the metric that matters: who bought the US government. Current US government is bought by corporate interests and does absolutely nothing that goes against big corporate power. This indicates that government is subjugated to the capitalist oligarchy, and the crimes it commits are allowed or supported by the same capitalist oligarchy.
When you concentrate so much power in one place, everyone who craves power will go after it, so its subjugation was inevitable. That's one of the reasons why centralization is bad - and this is completely orthogonal to capitalism and other economic modes. Strong centralized government without capitalism gets you authoritarian (if you're lucky) or totalitarian (if you're not) socialism.
Government created corporations, corporations are not a free market invention. With out government there can be no corporations as they are simply a fictitious legal entity created by government for the purposes of liability protections, and investment
You seem to have this impression that Corporations hate regulation, this is false, I mean hell Amazon, Facebook, even Google has BEGGED for regulations at various points because the know it kills competition in the market.
But yes, keep blaming capitalism for problems created by government, I am sure more government will solve those problems....
Well, if a "free" market cannot create corporations, then what can it really do? You're talking about a fantasy created by your head, not about a free market.
For example EPA, and other government agencies have all kinds of regulations that cap, or other shield companies from liabilities preventing ordinary citizens from seeking compensation from the corporations that harmed them.
There is also the endless amount of regulations the protect businesses from consumer backlash which is also a form of liability shield. This is why businesses wanted the government to step in an mandated masks, vaccinations, etc so they would not have make the hard choices for their own business they can stand back and say "it is not us, it is the government making us"
Of course these are just 2 examples there are many many many others
The main thesis that was/is being debated is one on corruption and the feedback loop between government and corporations. For which I contend that governments created corporations to shield these entities from liability.
you described one type of liability which excluded other types, I maintain that my original comment has a greater scope
The concept of limited liability for corporations, equitable trusts, and the like predates its official recognition in law. For a long time it was simply taken for granted that creditors could not pursue a business organization's debts against its individual members. The term "corporation" may have been a government invention—originally associated with de jure monopolies—but government did not create the idea of an organization with limited liability. It did extend the concept slightly to include protection against liability for certain kinds of torts, which I agree is not something that could exist in a free market. And of course the idea of a corporation in the original sense, as an organization granted a monopoly on a certain kind of trade, is incompatible with the free market. But the idea that large companies with limited liability (only for contracts, not torts) could not exist in a free market is nonsense. And when it comes to torts, liability ought to rest with the individual(s) whose action or negligence caused the harm, not the shareholders, which makes the lack of limited liability for torts for the owners of a large joint stock company less of a concern; they're not the ones responsible for the harm to begin with.
Of course they left most of that out of the pathetic film...
Given Facebook's history of prudishness I suspect their metaverse will be closer to "Fortnite -shooting +ads" rather than Ready Player One.
As always, advertising is the root of all the evils we face today in our technological society. When is this industry gonna be regulated out of existence?
Without being reductive, though: there's obviously a middle-ground here. For example, property/space is "owned" by entities in Second Life and those owners can kick/ban others who aren't behaving from their space. It seems entirely possible for a large, 3D space to have areas where brands (or other entities) can ensure they have a penis-free space without dictating what the rest of the "world" is like.
It's not just certain websites anymore. The internet is no longer decentralized like it used to be. Independent communities are pretty much dead. Now everything is on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, whatever. All of these are advertising companies and they regulate what you can and can't say there. Basically you can't say or do anything that offends these advertisers.
I'd rather have a free internet where I can witness the full spectrum of humanity, good and bad. Not what some company or even some government deems acceptable.
Sticking with the Epic example, a great deal of custom maps made it into regular rotations in the original Unreal Tournament community, and a great many mods were played for a very long time.
But people weren't doing it for money, or "brands" as you say. They were building stuff for their own enjoyment.
A community polices itself, ultimately. If "brands" try to police it, then yes you will get penises and Hitler, because "brands" have assumed liability for said policing and the community itself is rightfully reluctant to help them do their jobs. Penises and Hitler are more often than not a subconscious lashing-out at the "brands."
Oh do I hope it is.
Actually, they rarely do in Second Life. As I mentioned in a previous posting, in a big 3D world, being a jerk doesn't scale. You can only make trouble locally. Second Life is about the size of Greater London.
Most virtual land is leased to individuals, and the leaseholder can eject or ban annoying visitors. There's also peer pressure. People can and will tell jerks they are being a jerk. This works better in 3D than it does in text forums.
There are a few public places in Second Life that are jerk magnets. These are the "social islands", where new users enter the system after completing the tutorial. They're the bus terminals of Second Life. They're intended as transit points. Most users take one of the portals and leave for a new destination. Some new users, confused about what to do, stay there. Some losers go there to harass new users. They're the same kinds of losers found in real-life bus terminals.
People who write articles about Second Life sometimes don't get past the entry area, and they think that's typical of the whole virtual world. It's more like visiting only the Port Authority Bus Terminal in NYC and then publishing an article about your trip to New York.
> Second Life is about the size of Greater London.
Both these statements are directly contradicted by https://secondlife.com/land/ which says land is bought from LindenLabs and that SL is not fixed in size but they continuously add more "land" with new users, so anyone can buy land themselves. Premium users get 1000 square meters free.
Second Life Main Grid size as of 17 Oct 2021 is 1786.64 square kilometers.[1] The area of Greater London is 1,572 square kilometers.[2] The number of regions changes slightly from day to day, but not by much.
Wasn't this the promise of the internet? A place where any and all information could be free? Now we have ongoing war over who controls the information and who can see what information when. We have companies that skirt users privacy, manipulate user data and manipulate users so they can monetize them to the fullest.
I don't see how the "metaverse" will be any different than what the internet has become.
Is it not? I do not think the promise was that any and all information on someone else’s computers would be free.
Now does I believe Facebook has any chance of succeeding in that sphere? Not at all, but it won't be because of virtual penis everywhere. To be frank I don't even believe Facebook will still be relevant in 10 years (and maybe they agree with it and it's why they are trying to push that hard toward something else).
As a Second Life user and creator, and client developer, I agree. I think Second Life could be bigger if the technology was improved, and can see ways to do that. But the concept will not scale to Facebook levels. Besides, we have no way to do full dive technology in a home environment. (Location-based, maybe. The Star Wars Experience and omnidirectional treadmills indicate it's not impossible with enough space and machinery.)
What will scale, and I suspect this is Facebook's vision, is AR goggles. Facebook, in your face, all the time. The dystopian vision of this is the "Hyperreality" video.[1] That's all too achievable, and very much in line with Facebook's business model.
It is a brilliant distillation of the commercialization of AR, and a "must watch" for all fanboys of the m-word.
Many of us saw the potential of the Internet, the WWW, and have lived long enough to see its trajectory from pure promise and world-changing potential, into mostly commercial milking medium.
I see no reason to assume that Zuck's vision will be any different.
Business opportunity: "METADWEEB.COM" is unregistered.
Eh. My mother learned English in Second Life by paying an actual company that provided classes in Second Life. Instead of a boring chapter with some canned dialogue about, say, an airport scenario, they would take the class to a virtual airport, and roleplay there.
Having a setting where everyone could interact led to organic conversations and seemed much more effective than the textbook approaches.
Not sure I would call it a novelty.
Tangentially: If I remember Snow Crash correctly, the Metaverse/Internet in that novel belonged to only one person – who was the villain of the piece. He wanted to use the metaverse to distribute a “mind virus” which would enslave the world population to him.
Somehow I do think Facebooks PR flunkies have not read the same novel as I.
> The dimensions of the Street are fixed by a protocol, hammered out by the computer-graphics ninja overlords of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Global Multimedia Protocol Group.
> In order to place these things on the Street, they have had to get approval from the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, have had to buy frontage on the Street, get zoning approval, obtain permits, bribe inspectors, the whole bit. The money these corporations pay to build things on the Street all goes into a trust fund owned and operated by the GMPG, which pays for developing and expanding the machinery that enables the Street to exist.
… but in another way this:
> „I deal in information,” he says to the smarmy, toadying pseudojournalist who “interviews” him. He’s sitting in his office in Houston, looking slicker than normal. “All television going out to consumers throughout the world goes through me. Most of the information transmitted to and from the CIC database passes through my networks. The Metaverse—the entire Street—exists by virtue of a network that I own and control.“
So somewhat the moneychanger-in-Klondike approach.
(“He” = Bob Rife, the villain; CIC = privatised CIA)
I'm sure you can share some interesting stories and/or arcs of what-was-envisioned vs. what-ended-up-happening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stigmata_of_Palmer_E...
Christ, Mark, Wood and Wei,
Led us to this perfect day.
Mark, Wood, Wei and Christ,
All but Mark were sacrificed.
Wood, Wei, Christ and Mark,
Gave us lovely schools and parks.
Wei, Christ, Mark and Wood,
Made us humble, made us good.
At this point, they can't win the war on changing people's minds on these issues. So, instead, they need a new narrative to build around. They're ditching the Facebook name and branding, and focusing on a new vision around the Metaverse.
It doesn't matter if this is real or not, or if VR/AR doesn't become the next computing paradigm. The narrative itself is a new, interesting thread to build their brand around.
I doubt they are ditching it, and instead just abstracting the ownership chain one degree with a holding company and installing a straw man to blame. Watch him copy Larry and Sergei's moves, he may one day realize he held on too long and became something hard to un-become: infamous.
I still think they should just take a leap of faith and become radically transparent.
In a way it does; because if it is widely perceived as phony and yet another distracting ploy, then it much less chance of actually changing the narrative around the reputation of "the company formerly known as FaceBook". In fact, further "sleight of hand" manoeuvres would fortify the dodgy reputation.
Tesla's self-driving product is a great example of this. They got consumers to buy into the vision of self-driving cars way before it was actually ready. This allowed them to sell a lot more cars and pre-orders as well as have a narrative for investors to pump their stock. If they get FSD to work, it will be great. But, even if it never is a successful product, they've benefitted tremendously from the narrative itself and have been able to turn it into sales and cheap capital to invest in the business.
Maybe. But on the other hand, Tesla was starting out with a _lot_ more user goodwill than FaceBook.
Tesla isn't perfect, they have (IMHO) a good basic product, but with some build quality issues, labour issues, over-promising self-driving issues etc, and yet ... these issues have not shifted the narrative from basically favourable. Part of me still wants one, even though I know it's not going to drive itself. Maybe narratives are sticky?
So, FaceBook is going into this with a massively negative narrative. Shifting it will be hard. We're all really cynical about FaceBook already.
who are these users you are writing of?
Sadly, I think this may be the future where we don’t solve climate change so more and more people just check out from reality.
In Snow Crash, I don’t think people liked the meta verse so much as their life in a shipping container sucked being in the meta verse was better.
Besides, Buterin and the other whales "own" Ethereum.
Does someone with no money own any stake in Ethereum? No. They don't.
Ethereum isn't a socialist paradise.
Are they able to control people's transactions? No
They do influence the development of ethereum, however what's great about blockchain is that the community can "fire" the developers and choose new ones if they want. This almost happened after the DAO rollback drama in-fact.
Does someone with no money own any stake in Ethereum? I don't understand your point.
Why would you think Ethereum is supposed to be a socialist's paradise?
The FOMO is insane here.
BUT if it only costs then a few dozen billion to take a stab at it, they may as well. We can see what a disaster the mobile platforms locking down Facebook’s spying has been for their ad business
Yes, but the Oculus Quest 2 is pretty good for the price, and fact that its probably 5 years earlier than anything anyone else is putting out. They're really actually trying it seems, which is pretty welcome.
I honestly think the coolest aspects of it are the simple AR-ish things they're doing (hand tracking, keyboard tracking, the camera based zone for where you can walk, etc).
Not that I am saying FB will necessarily be the ones, but I think the only honest position is that "the jury's still out" on who owns this one.
The rate of gains in mobile computing (M1x), mobile vision (pixel 6 pro) and mobile sensors will make the technical and monetary barriers to VR dissapear within the next 5 years.
Whatsapp was a small.iterative change to chat apps and it cost them $20 billion. Spending a few billions to get ahead on the next paradigm in interactive experience simply prudent spending.
AR/VR does run the high risk of creating a super dystopian and fragmented real world. It’s definitely something to watch out for
VR lends itself more to MMORPG-like experiences, which are quite social. Similarly, Ready Player One didn't lack social interaction or real friendship.
For time spent in nature or making physical things it's probably the other way around. AR could make these things much more accessible (even if "less pure"), while VR doesn't exactly promote them.
Until we can perfectly simulate physical reality, virtual interactions will never be as real as real world interactions.
I'm not quite sure what makes an interaction more or less "real". The people on both ends of the interaction are real, so surely if they interact that is a real interaction?
So far all virtual interactions lack some aspect of communication, but with full-body tracking and eye-tracking VR already offers the closest analog to face-to-face communication we have. Mapping all the tiny facial expressions will remain a challenge, but isn't really that far fetched.
The difference is the evocation of that embarrassment was intended by the authors of the latter two.
Also it seemed clear to me that some chapters only existed to provide notes to a future movie production, and didn't need to be infodumped. (One chapter in particular the only thing that actually happened was he was sitting in class and letting his mind wander, IIRC, and did nothing to drive the plot forward, just infodump).
In retrospect rereading/listening to something like Cryptonomicon or Hyperion Cantos for the umpteenth time would have been much more enjoyable.
https://www.youtube.com/c/syrmor/videos
VRChat as a platform has (enormous) problems of its own, but right now it's the best way to meet and chat with interesting people in VR.
> Even crazier, most of them approvingly point to the execrable "Ready Player One" as an example of a vision to deliver on. No, I'm sorry, a horny 15 year old shaving his body hair so he can be more aerodynamic in VR while engaging in extended self-congratulatory monologues about what a Nice Guy he is for not being repulsed by his "Rubenesque" girlfriend while he recites lines from Ghostbusters in a series of completely incoherent "memba this???" vignettes, is not a vision for the future.
Is pretty much as far from what actually happens in the book as you can get and completely misses the point on why it's used as a reference point to this metaverse stuff.
[1]https://medium.com/@jsemrau/hackers-vs-ready-player-one-b6ad...
> … Hackers (1995), which after more than 20 years, holds still up amazingly well.
I’m not sure you’re demonstrating any appreciable sense of objectivity here.
Hackers was an absolute joke of a movie; an exaggerated snapshot of ridiculous, misinformed 1990s pop culture thinking on technology.
Ready Player One is pop culture fan service, played out amidst a dystopian corporate future. It’s not even really trying to discuss technology at all.
Ready Player One tells us about technology about as much as Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2 does.
Hackers is a hilarious and fun over the top movie but I don't think it changed the way anyone thinks about technology.
I believe that Metaverse tech, which is currently at the same stage is isolationistic and enjoyed by a fringe of users. Same as the Internet was seen in the early '90s.
>Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder, predicted that in future cities would be designed around the device, while Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, also backed the project publicly and financially.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/dec/04/engineering.hi...
>John Doerr speculated that it would be more important than the Internet[...] Steve Jobs was quoted as saying that it was "as big a deal as the PC"[...]
It is not a useful analogy in any case, for a variety of reasons. The question you need to be asking is if video games will be able to break into reality once a certain level of capability and UX is met. You may be too old: AR may be a young person’s reality.
My point is that the Segway does seem like a silly device in retrospect, but it was actually profoundly impactful.
AR isn't going to get big unless Facebook recruits other firms to make investments in content.
Those investments are going to happen until a decent AR dev kit exists, but for now very expensive $2500 headsets are not good enough in terms of
* image quality
* brightness
* size
* drop a pair on anybody right now for a demo
points out the problems are difficult; industry badly wants full color, but a green-only design helps on all of those fronts.
AR for the military is a real thing. The U.S. spends over $1 million to train an infantry soldier, it can afford to equip one with a $2500 headset.
Consumers will be sick and tired of metaverse promises long before Facebook can deliver.
I feel pretty strongly we'll see a good Passthrough AR device from Apple in 2022.
AR will be a niche product constrained primarily to industrial applications.
There, we've both made our blind predictions, now we get to see who's right!
I'm sure there was pockets of people who thought 3D TV was the greatest thing ever, and look how far that technology has come. Alexa and Siri were once upon a time going to be the greatest things ever, until everyone realized how very meh the experience was in practice. Smart watches were similarly going to change the world and have since largely pivoted to being niche products for health nuts.
BTW, I'm not saying you're absolutely wrong! I just don't think there's any reason to believe you're right, either, and a lot of reasons you might not be, including sky-high costs, practical technology limitations, the lack of killer applications, social barriers to adoption (see: Google Glass), etc.
Man, that family must be doing very well for themselves to afford at least two full VR rigs.
Look, if VR kit becomes reasonably priced for average consumers (which also means GPU prices have to come down), maybe I could buy into your touching vision, here.
But we've got a long way to go before this kind of gear is remotely affordable enough to result in the kind of mass adoption required to realize these purported benefits.
As for Zuck, if he sees opportunity here, all the more reason for me to hope it never succeeds...
This already exists and works very well, in the form of the SteamVR and Oculus VR play area guardian systems:
https://support.oculus.com/guardian/
>If I am walking down the sidewalk with a friend, we may be experiencing a quiet forest path, with other strangers we pass in the real world appearing as elves or animals to cue us of their presence
How will the system cue used hypodermic needles?
For many, not being seen via an avatar will be akin to feeling unclothed. It will be strange and unlikely to be fully accepted by people who are above a certain age.
the implicit premise is that the category (AR/VR/XR) remains the same but the technology improves until its better for pretty much all usecases we currently use 2d screens.
3d interaction clicks with people, i'm not suprised they are doubling/tripling down while leading the market
It might be a nice entertainment gadget or working tool but that's all, anyone believing in the VR revolution is a fool. The TV or internet could have been amazing things, but we all see how it turned out: ad infected, mega corps ruled, consumerism oriented, echo chambers of the dominant ideology
I work on a social VR product for learning foreign language. Yes, VR language immersions are never going to replace real life, in-country immersions. But moving halfway around the world to study a language is just not a realistic prospect for the vast majority of people. For one, it's expensive and extremely disruptive to the rest of your life. Our students aren't college students who can take a semester abroad, they're professionals already in their careers, with kids and mortgages. For another, most of our students are studying languages where they wouldn't be allowed to move to the target country--either by the target country itself or the students' employers.
And our students do "need" foreign language training. This isn't something they're doing for funsies; their employers are paying for them to take the classes. These aren't executives looking to wine-and-dine business partners in China, these are diplomats, foreign aid workers, and intelligence analysts.
And these other methods aren't working to meet the demand for fluent speakers. You're not going to learn how to tell an old, former-Soviet base commander, "show me the nuclear storage facility access control logs now or expect some UN sanctions" from YouTube.
There is an international ranking schedule for foreign language acquisition, ILR Level, that roughly quantifies a person's fluency. Untrained, you start at 0. Most people get to level 1 by the time they finish college. Level 2 is basically competent enough to survive without a translator in-country. Level 3 is considered the minimum to be "competent enough to do work". There are a few higher levels, but everyone's goal is to get to 3.
With current training methods, almost anyone can be trained to level 2, 2.5, but there is still a big gap between what those people are capable of doing and where they need to be to do their jobs. We need more 3s and just doing "video chat" isn't working. Think, "the US military just sunk a cool million into your education to be able to translate intelligence on the fly, you better start showing results."
But there is some evidence that VR not only improves learning in general, but that it's particularly suited for language acquisition. UMD for example has a body of research they've been developing over the last 20+ years that shows there are real, psychological changes to people who perform language training in VR versus traditional and even flat screen simulations.
If NFTs become the standard then you could theoretically take your assets off Facebook into another Metaverse without losing your items. NFTs help avoid lock-in and put pressure on Facebook to play nicely with others.
From my perspective it seems inevitable that somebody will create a killer VR app/world. If FB is really dedicating a large amount of resources to this, I'm sure they will be successful at some point. Their budget can be orders of magnitude higher than even the most expensive game ever developed, if they wanted to. I just hope they take cues from game designers and focus on making it "fun".
I mean, a VR office could conceivably be a new normal setting to perform work in. The technology is not far enough along at this point though... imagine trying to code on a virtual screen in low res, hah. And many prefer the privacy of the new remote work normal, and probably wouldn't want to be "physically" present, even if in virtual form.
Haven't really followed what their intention is with metaverse, but I imagine they are trying to build an actual endless/seamless virtual world where you'd spent a large amount of time in, and possibly even work in.
But again, gonna be kinda hard to make it that engaging with current tech. And the amount of assets that would need to be created is enormous.
Maybe they start with just VR meetings/office.
Facebook, under Zuck's leadership in particular, is driven by greed and control. They repeatedly demonstrate a willingness to make user hostile decisions for short term gain: they build to commodify their audience, not to satisfy them.
Times Square Wal-Mart is Mark's idea of a virtual wonderland, and that's why it won't win.
The successful metaverse will be led by someone with the spirit of Willy Wonka - it must be whimsical and empowering and sincere. Facebook simply lacks that spirit and heart, and I see no path to them changing company culture that drastically.
I'm not blaming him personally, he might just have happened to have surrounded himself with a few too many people who lost touch with reality, but the metaverse and these plans to "govern people" seems to have gotten to his head. He sounds more and more like a lunatic.
Not enough people are interested in virtual reality and even less people are going to be interested in one based on Facebook's arbitrary and vague rules (aka "governing people") and their algorithmic discrimination. Not to forget about actual governments who will also have a few things to say about some aspects of the planned metaverse such as its economy and payment systems.
I suspect it's less about a new incarnation of second life, and more about what happens when we've all got access to an AR layer while traversing the real world.
AR is an obvious candidate for the next platform and superior UX (if the hardware is possible) when it's ready.
"Metaverse" branding doesn't matter, UI in line of site and ability to manipulate things in the real world just by looking at them and gesturing has obvious massive potential and appeal.
I don't care about Ready Player One and the fiction stuff is irrelevant.
The ability to have interactive virtual overlays in the real world is big, the potential for new things given that platform is enormous. If you think that hardware is impossible that's one thing, but to not even see it is just short sighted and a classic knee-jerk HN dismissal that can end up a joke ten years later.
https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2017/poems-about-poetry
The concept of a "metaverse" comes from Snow Crash, which was a more realistic and cooler depiction of large-scale networked VR environments -- cooler because it reflected the early 90s internet, full of freaks and weirdos.
If we're going to have a real metaverse, can it be the one from Croquet? I've always liked saying Alan Kay was building the metaverse, but only as a stepping stone to his true goal of building the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age...
I agree that a VR helmet is not going to significantly change anything, but one day we will absolutely plug ourselves into the matrix and never leave.
I'm pretty sure it was though. Fortnite is one of the most popular games in history and is single handedly responsible for Epic's financial success over the last 5 years.
What other criteria do you have for improvement?
There are more dimensions than popular appeal.
In the context of a consumer product, not really. Everything is always a tradeoff to optimize for multiple factors. Mcdonalds may not be the highest quality, but they've sold billions of hamburgers for a reason. Their product is what the market wants, with enough acceptable tradeoffs to operate at a scale that fulfills demand.
tl;dr: The customer is always right.
Longer answer: Read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Huzzah!
Sorry this is tangential, but anyone remember Active Worlds from Circle of Fire circa 1995?
I looked it up so you don’t have it
I looked it up so don’t have to
That being said, I do think FB will succeed on the hardware front but flounder on the software front unless they somehow completely reinvent themselves and stop being so "Disney".
On the upside, even a boring “stand around and talk to people” game will be more immersive and fun in VR than most action-packed run-and-gun games without it
Modern VR standards are even better than what it was with my older PC setup (GTX 970 + vive). Way larger FoV and better PPI screens are making a big difference
If you try to just power through the sim sickness, you can reprogram your body to get sick when you so much as look at a headset
The VR enthusiast community is laughably tiny compared to the gaming/computing/mobile user world at large, and it's self-selected down to people who were either immune to sim sickness or willing to put in the effort to get past it
The closest I could come to any scientific data is third/fourth hand, so it's not really going to settle any arguments, but here you go: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/4woycf/what_are_the...
Even crazier, most of them approvingly point to the execrable "Ready Player One" as an example of a vision to deliver on. No, I'm sorry, a horny 15 year old shaving his body hair so he can be more aerodynamic in VR while engaging in extended self-congratulatory monologues about what a Nice Guy he is for not being repulsed by his "Rubenesque" girlfriend while he recites lines from Ghostbusters in a series of completely incoherent "memba this???" vignettes, is not a vision for the future.
It's a bummer because I think there probably are legitimate uses of VR/AR telepresence as the next frontier of video calling, which would seem to be right in line with Facebook's stated mission of connecting the world.
But no, we'll get an exceedingly shitty videogame instead. Can't wait for them to power it all by NFTs.