“What’s the meaning of life?”
“42”
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a super-dimensional species with an advanced civilization constructs a supercomputer, Deep Thought, in order to find simple answers to ultimate questions. This supercomputer is constantly running, simulating and calculating in order to find the answer to the question: what is the ultimate answer to life, the universe and anything else.
After 7.5 million years of calculations, Deep Thought finally calculated a result: the number 42. but for this result, no civilization can understand, even the super computer can only get the answer in the mathematical sense, and there is no way to give further explanation. Therefore, the explanation for this answer must be another higher intelligence computer to calculate, and this higher intelligence computer is the Earth.
Yet absurdly, the Earth kept calculating, and just five minutes before the answer was about to be calculated, the Earth was instantly cleared for blocking the alien project, and all answers to this ultimate question disappeared.
This is an ironic but serious science fiction story in which we can see that intelligent civilizations are always in the process of searching for meaning and unknowingly destroying it. In fact, the answer to the ultimate question of meaning itself is hidden in life, and any search that departs from this path is absurd.
Since the inception of the term Metaverse, the discussion around this topic has never stopped, both in terms of its conceptualization and the realization of its path, with pioneers of each era trying to explore it as they understood it.
From MUD, to Habitat, to Active Worlds, to Second Life, Roblox, Blue Mars, Solipsis, and now Minecraft, Oasis, CryptoVoxels, etc., everyone is understanding, perceiving and feeling this concept from different dimensions. And constantly in the process to find the meaning of it. Whether the attitude towards the final result is positive or negative, the process of searching itself is meaningful.
Just as we roam the galaxy in search of the meaning of the universe and life, we have put together this Metaverse roaming guide to find the meaning and direction of the Metaverse from our perspective, grounded in the evolution of history and its development.
Departure: Virtual World Development
The essence of development is the creation of something new and the extinction of something old, but the existence of the old itself cannot be ignored. Before the word Metaverse appeared in the 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, the vision of a similar concept and the products of the times that feed that vision emerged, only the description of that vision was recorded in the development of history in different technological forms or unobstructed concepts.
In the description, the big development direction and the word that is mentioned most frequently in stages is Virtual World. It is a concept that seems to be understood by everyone, but its own development is full of many overlooked details. In 2013, JDN Dionisio published a paper: 3D Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse: Current Status and Future Possibilities, which delves into and summarizes the stages of development of virtual worlds.
Here it is necessary to clarify the definition of a virtual world: A virtual world is a continuously online computer-generated environment in which users located in different physical locations can interact in real time for work or play purposes.
In his paper, he divided the development of virtual worlds into five stages, which were enriched and refined on the basis of:
- Phase I: late 1970s, virtual worlds built on computer text
- Phase 2: 1980s, virtual worlds with 2D graphical interfaces and social elements
- Phase 3: mid-1990s, virtual worlds with User-Created Content, 3D graphics, and open social networking
- Phase 4: 2000s, virtual worlds with better economic systems, UGC tools, and high image quality and fidelity
- Phase 5: 2010s, a virtual world with decentralized governance
Phase I: Virtual world enlightenment, based on computer text interaction
This phase started in the late 1970s with the construction of virtual worlds based mainly on computer text. Further, there are two main types: MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) and MUSHs (Multi-User Shared Hallucinations).
MUDs primarily consist of players’ creations of fantasy reality, in a narrow sense, MUDs refer to the 1978 MUD1, an online game that players can play directly using a terminal emulation program, presented primarily using text-based narrative. Players typically interact with other players or NPCs in the virtual world by typing commands that resemble natural language.
MUSHs, on the other hand, refer to more social implementations of MUDs that allow multiple people to interact in an artificial environment. Here, players work together more in a collaborative manner to solve problems, rather than just going about completing tasks and fighting monsters.
At this stage, the user sees the environment created based on computer text, and the player is only able to interact with the environment by entering text commands. The exploration of the unknown of this virtual world, the battle with monsters and the execution of tasks, etc., are achieved by the endless imagination of the player.
And it just so happens that based on the way they interact with computer text, players can build virtual worlds that meet their expectations. As Richard Bartle, the creator of the MUD game, says, “My interest is in creating worlds, not in living in worlds created by others.”
Phase II: The emergence of Avatar, 2D graphical interface and multiplayer social
This phase occurred in the 1980s, when Lucasfilm was partially inspired by William Gibson’s 1984 Neuromancer publication, and introduced Habitat for the Commodore 64 in 1986, and for the Fujitsu Platform in 1989.
Habitat is an MMORPG, the first attempt to commercialize virtual worlds on a large scale, and the first virtual world to include a graphical interface. Habitat is also the first game to use Avatars to describe its digital inhabitants in a virtual world, meaning that each user has a third-party perspective of themselves.
Each player uses his or her home computer as a front-end to communicate with a central back-end system via a Commercial Packet (data exchange network). The front-end primarily provides the user interface for the players, generates real-time animations to show what is happening, and converts player input into back-end requests. The back-end is responsible for maintaining the game world model, enforcing rules and keeping each player’s front-end informed of the changing world state. In addition, the backend enables players to interact not only with the game world, but also with each other.
The player controls a character that can move around, pick up, put down and manipulate objects, and can also talk to each other and make gestures. Control is mainly through the joystick, so that players can point to objects and issue commands. Talking is done by typing on the keyboard, the text that the player types will be displayed on the head of the controlled character.
Habitat is a very large and imaginative game even now. As described by Habitat’s project leaders, Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer, the vision is of a virtual world where users can communicate, play games, have adventures, fall in love, get married, get divorced, start a business, establish a religion, wage war, protest against religion, and attempt autonomy, among other things.
Such a vision arises primarily from the very idea of Habitat itself, which is open and diverse. Rather than providing a set of fixed goals for the digital inhabitants of the virtual world, the designers of this world offer a variety of possible activities that players can choose from, driven by their own internal inclinations.
Of course, at this stage, although Habitat mentions letting players drive the design themselves, the main path to implementation is still the same: game designers observe what players do in the game world, then help them in it, and keep adding new features and areas to the system that players are happy with.
Also, at the First International Conference on Cyberspace in 1990, Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer reviewed their thinking and lessons learned from the Habitat project and published a paper, The Lessons of LucasArts Habita, which mentions a treasure hunt designed by the project called “D’nalsi Island Adventure”.
The campaign took engineers a lot of time to plan and design, and in anticipation the designers thought players would spend days experiencing it. What they didn’t expect was that some players did get a great experience, but some were quickly done with it, and some didn’t even get to experience it, and then the digital content that took a lot of manpower and investment was consumed in an instant.
So it can be seen that the producers of the Habitat project realized that the digital content designed in the virtual world may not be able to get all the players’ satisfaction, so they are willing to let some of the design rights into the hands of the players, so as to improve the whole virtual world game experience. But at this stage there is no UGC development tool inside the game, mainly by the project’s game designers to continue to create.
In this stage, first of all, we can find in the presentation of the virtual world, the whole world construction from the computer text to the graphical interface, which means that from the need to rely on their own brains to imagine and create the process, down to just rely on the project side of the creation of the embodied model, that is, to simplify the brain for the process of information processing, so as to bring players a more intuitive feeling. For the public players, more simple and intuitive graphics will bring the most direct sensory stimulation, without much imagination, which is why the MUD will be lost in the dust of history.
Secondly, as Habitat thinks about cyberspace: it is defined more by the interaction between its internal participants than by the technology it implements. Therefore, at this stage, multi-person interaction and socialization are added to the important elements that make up a virtual world.
Finally, in terms of game experience, game designers have gradually realized the need to transfer part of the design rights to the hands of players, so there is a path to design the scenes and functions of the game based on the performance of players in the game, which also laid the foundation for the emergence of UGC development tools later.
Literary or narrative works that have inspired virtual worlds and technologies during this period:
Phase 3: 3D world building and user-created content
The third phase began in the mid-1990s, when computer processing power and graphics technology advanced, and technologies and applications such as User-Created Content, 3D graphics, and Open-Ended Socialization emerged in the development of virtual worlds.
In 1994, Ron Britvich created WebWorld, the first 2.5D world that allowed tens of thousands of people to chat, build and travel. Soon after, Britvich moved to Knowledge Adventure Worlds (later to become Worlds Inc.), where he worked with other designers on Alphaworld.
In 1995, AlphaWorld was rebranded as Active Worlds after its 3D web browser . Immediately thereafter, Active Worlds quickly became the foremost 3D social virtual world, attracting thousands of users and growing exponentially in size.
After logging into the Active Worlds world, users are able to explore 3D virtual worlds and environments created by other users. In addition, users can chat with each other or construct their own buildings. active Worlds allows users to have their own worlds or universes and allows them to develop their own 3D digital content.
With the development of Active Worlds, the following features have gradually emerged:
- Building：Users are allowed to create their own environments, but no one is allowed to infringe on another user’s declared territory. If users wish to build collaboratively, they can share privileged passwords with each other, and entering another user’s privileged password will grant that user the right to modify their build
- Chat：Traditionally, communication in Active Worlds requires a distance of up to 200 meters from others in the area in order to chat. Alternatively, virtual world residents can communicate via Telegram, which allows contact with other users from any location
- Worlds：Active Worlds are divided into worlds (about 800 worlds in 2008) that either belong to Active Worlds itself or to individual users and that users can purchase from Active Worlds’ website. In addition, these worlds are sized (i.e. there are physical boundaries) and the owners of these worlds need to maintain a list of permissions and assign certain permissions to users within the worlds
- Universes：Like worlds, players can purchase and own their own universe, which can contain a separate world or, like Active Worlds itself, have multiple worlds. As the Active Worlds platform evolves, universe owners must purchase universe server upgrades directly from Active Worlds
- Bots and software development kit：First, some of these applications can help users automate simple tasks such as weather, chat, providing tours and information, complex asset management, etc. Second, some games can also be developed that interact with databases and other technologies to provide a scalable gaming platform. Finally, there are many other potential applications that can be developed using the SDK, such as programs that can automatically explore the world and create maps, chat programs that implement artificial intelligence, and more.
Further, as the virtual worlds of Active Worlds develop, a series of social behaviors, such as affiliation, identity determination, group differentiation, etc., will be extended as in the real world. In the paper Activeworlds: geography and social interaction in virtual reality, the characteristics of social activities in Active Worlds are presented:
- Citizenship：Those who enter Active Worlds are either tourists or paying citizens (citizenship costs $19.95 per year). Tourists have access to all public spaces like citizens, but they do not have the same range of options as citizens, they can only build houses in certain areas, and these buildings can be destroyed.
- Property Rights：There are two types of space or property in Active Worlds, public space, which is space that allows anyone to build on unoccupied space, and private space, which is space that can only be built by a specific owner because they have paid for the “ownership”
- Roles and Group Differentiation：In virtual worlds, there are roles that serve specific functions, or NPCs, to assist novice users in performing certain actions; in addition, different worlds attract different groups of users, such as worlds with religions, or worlds of other faiths, etc., which further divide into various groups.
From the above characteristics of the development of Active Worlds we can roughly summarize the characteristics of the development of virtual worlds at this stage:
- On the image level, it has increased from 2D to 3D, further increasing the immersion of players in the virtual world.
- On the social level, with the improvement of communication technology, users can communicate with more other users in real time, and the social attributes of the virtual world are further enhanced.
- At the level of user creation, it increases the tools for users to create digital content, and greatly enriches the digital content in the virtual world while satisfying the users to create the virtual world.
- At the level of ownership of digital assets, the attribution of ownership of digital assets gradually emerges when users are given greater rights in the virtual world (creation) (e.g. inviolability of land in private space)
- At the level of community autonomy, users of different faiths are allowed to exist in virtual worlds, and users of different faiths are willing to contribute to the community spontaneously for the sake of the same faith, gradually forming autonomous organizations.
- In the economic system, there is no virtual economy in Active Worlds
Phase 4: Development of virtual economic system and improvement of image technology
This phase developed in the early 20th century and was characterized by the dramatic expansion of the user base of commercial virtual worlds (e.g. Second Life), the enhancement of virtual world content creation tools, the development of the virtual economy and the gradual increase in graphic fidelity.
Like Active Worlds, Second life also allows users to create items or buildings in the virtual world, but the difference is that these created virtual items can be bought and sold through a virtual currency in the internal world: the Linden Dollar.
Linden Dollar can be converted to U.S. dollars based on fluctuating exchange rates, so users can use their credit cards to convert between the two currencies. In addition, users can sell their creations in the virtual world, from land to virtual clothing and accessories, to some of the games inside.
In 2004, a user (Nathan Keir) created a virtual world game called Tringo, the first game developed using Second Life development tools to exist in its own internal world.
The game was a huge seller in Second life, and Keir earned $4,000 in the real world by selling copies of the game to other Second life citizens so they could run it in their own virtual homes. In addition, the game attracted the attention of Donnerwood Media, which offered Kier a five-figure license for Tringo, which appears on several platforms including Nintendo’s Game Boy Advanced.
In addition, another user, who goes by the name Anshe Chung, has created his own business empire in Second life, earning millions of dollars by buying virtual real estate in the virtual world and subdividing it into different themes for rent or resale, and Anshe Chung was featured on the cover of the May 2006 edition of Business Week.
In Second life, Anshe Chung’s wealth is mainly in virtual real estate (equivalent to 36 square kilometers of land, supported by 550 servers), and in addition to virtual real estate, she owns millions of Linden Dollars, several virtual shopping centers, virtual chain stores, and she has built several virtual brands in Second life. In addition, she has created her own studio in the real world.
As the demand for images increased, virtual worlds created by another company were born at the stage. 2009 saw the release of Avatar Reality’s Blue Mars, a platform for constructing 3D virtual worlds, allowing third-party users to create virtual worlds, MMOG games, stores, entertainment venues, clothing, custom Avatars, furniture, virtual homes and other virtual objects.
Avatar Reality incorporates higher quality graphics into virtual worlds by using the then state-of-the-art CryEngine 2, an engine originally developed by Crytek for gaming applications. In addition, the platform includes motion capture animation as well as a 3D content editor (CryTek Sandbox Tool). Also, digital content can be created on third-party 3D image compilers, as long as it conforms to the required format.
At that stage, we can see virtual worlds going further in the direction of commercialization. Second life, Blue Mars or other virtual worlds with the same concept have created virtual currencies in their internal worlds, and this model that can be exchanged with real world fiat money gradually constructs a huge economic system.
Users can create or consume content in virtual worlds and can rely on this economic system to make profits in virtual worlds, thus further promoting the development of UGC. In addition, in terms of graphics, with the enhancement of graphics technology, the presentation of images in virtual worlds is more realistic, which makes the immersion of users in virtual worlds more intense.
Phase 5: The emergence of decentralized thinking
This phase started in 2007 and is characterized by the decentralization of the development of 3D virtual worlds. Solipsis, designed by Joaquin Keller and Gwendal Simon, is a free and open source system for sharing virtual worlds among multiple people.
The core goal of Solipsis is to create a virtual world that is as independent as possible from private interests (e.g. server ownership). To achieve this goal, it is based on a peer-to-peer model, rather than the traditional server model. Since then, many other open source projects have followed, including Open Cobalt, Open Wonderland, and OpenSimulator.
This reliance on peer-to-peer architecture makes it scalable, which means that the universe can accommodate an infinite number of participants. Since there is no centralized manager, the virtual world can be defined as common to all, and the inhabitants living in the universe are freer, and the imagination of the creators and developers contributing to the world is endless.
Also at this stage, the metaverse was discussed in the paper Solipsis: A Decentralized Architecture for Virtual Environments, published in 2008. He argues that the Metaverse is a huge system of many different interconnected virtual worlds, often user-generated worlds, all of which can be accessed through a single user interface. So according to this definition, the only Metaverse that fits the concept and exists is: the World Wide Web itself.
Many of today’s thriving virtual worlds are claiming to be the Metaverse, but in fact they are only part of it, just as websites are only leaves of the global web tree. So the authors believe that three things are needed to accomplish this vision of the Metaverse:
- Find a way to sustain large amounts of data and MIPS
- Develop a set of protocols to provide interoperability
- Need tools that can create virtual worlds as easy as creating traditional HTML pages
In the paper, the authors propose a series of solutions and architectures to achieve these key goals, and give tools to implement interaction with the Metaverse, namely a Navigator, which can be used to access the Metaverse as a standalone platform or embedded in a web page.
During this phase, the discussion on the development of virtual worlds focused on the proposal of decentralized protocols and the governance of virtual worlds, and there was a consensus that the construction of content in virtual worlds should be created collaboratively by all participants or developers. In addition, the path to the Metaverse was gradually explored during this phase.
A brief history of virtual world development:
Explore: the direction to go
In fact, combing through this, we basically look back at the whole development process of virtual worlds, from the virtual world based on computer text interaction, to the world with image interaction interface and social elements, to the world with 3D images and user-created content, to the world with economic system, and then to the virtual world with proposed decentralized governance.
Looking further, we can see that virtual worlds have evolved from small game scenarios to larger worlds, which is why we often confuse them with games. In fact, unlike games (with clear game objectives, mechanics, rules, etc.), virtual worlds offer a more open environment (without clear game objectives) and more diverse scenarios, similar to our real world life or culture, where users can define and execute their own activities and goals.
Furthermore, in addition to the new technologies and cognitions that arise and are applied at each stage of development, there are some more underlying fundamental characteristics about virtual worlds. With reference to the development process of virtual worlds, Gilbert, in his paper The PROSE Project: A program of in-world behavioral research on the Metaverse, identifies five basic characteristics of virtual worlds:
- Interactive interface with 3D graphics and integrated voice technology
- Supports remote interaction for large-scale users
- Permanent and sustainable
- Immersion, where users have a sense of “being there” or “living” in the digital environment, rather than being outside of it
- Emphasizes user-generated activities, goals, and provides content creation tools for personalizing virtual environments and experiences
We can see that several recently developed virtual worlds, such as Minecraft, Roblox, Sandbox or Decentraland, are highlighting or strengthening these features to varying degrees, either from the perspective of immersion or from the perspective of user-generated content, etc. No matter which path, virtual worlds are diversifying.
Finally, returning to the Metaverse, there is still no unified or unique standard for understanding the concept, but what is certain is that moving from Individual Virtual Worlds to the Metaverse will require a much larger network to connect, and will require a myriad of new technologies, protocols, architectures, companies, etc. to work together to accomplish this.
From Active Worlds, which included the concept of multiverse and multiple worlds 20 years ago, to Second life, with its innovative virtual economy system, to Roblox, which was born in the same era but is still thriving today, why is Roblox somehow considered to be closer to the Metaverse?
As its CEO Dave Baszucki says, there are 8 characteristics that the Metaverse should have: identity, friends, immersion, low latency, diversity, anywhere, economic system, and civilization. In fact these key features are basically mentioned as we sort out the development of virtual worlds, but no single product can contain all of these features at the same time.
But for Roblox, it actually highlights the identity feature very well. You can use this virtual identity to travel between different games, you can go to a game or leave at any time, all the actions that happen in the virtual world are generated by this identity, and even the social actions are connected to this virtual identity, not to the player behind the computer screen.
So it goes back to what we said before, that the Metaverse needs a larger network to connect to and a unified user interface to interact with different virtual world scenarios, which implies unity of identity. So on a more macro level, that’s why more protocols and technologies need to be built on the ground floor to support it.
And in terms of diversification, economic systems, civilization, and extension of interaction with users, we believe that regarding possible future directions or paths to achieve:
- With the popularity of UGC tools, the improvement of the virtual economy system and the increase of people’s awareness of digital assets, blockchain can play a role in the virtual world by confirming the rights and helping the reuse of digital assets. At the same time, blockchain can also play the role of decentralization to a certain extent, and DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) will help the virtual world to form a more diverse and open community.
- In addition, as the prosperity of the virtual world increases and the number of users increases, the demand for digital content consumption within it will rise with it. So when the rate of content creation by users cannot catch up with the rate of digital content consumption by users, there will be a gap between digital content supply and demand, and then AIGC can play an important role in it in a more efficient way. And it is Cloud that is at play when it comes to AIGC’s computing power requirements.
- Finally, in terms of interaction with the user, we believe that there will also be new ways of interacting. As with the Navigator created by Solipsis, we believe that Virtual Being is the key element that can connect different Virtual Worlds. From the point of view of creating native digital content, interacting with virtual people in virtual worlds will be more fluid and natural, and these are the directions we can see for the future.
Last but not least
Over the past 40 years, virtual worlds have evolved at an unimaginable pace, starting with computer text, to images, to Avatar, to social, to the ownership of virtual assets and the development of virtual world culture, to decentralized governance, and more, with each generation of pioneers grappling with the so-called meaning that can perhaps only be found in the process of discovery.
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