While absurdism, nihilism, and existentialism all agree that the world and ourselves are meaningless, what makes existentialism a humanism is that it encourages people to have the courage to freely give meaning to anything and rise to the occasion even in the face of an absurd world.
The fulcrum of human society’s existence is faith and consensus. Cowardice and courage are not innate, and the world did not start out with the Internet, starships, Artificial Intelligence and the Metaverse. When action is not yet cast into the future, everything is nothing, but at the same time can also be everything.
Whether it’s social, gaming, entertainment or other fields, when we try to stand in the future to understand the present, we are actually looking for the non-mainstream in the mainstream group and the mainstream in the non-mainstream group.
In different time periods, trends will emerge with distinct characteristics and advantages of a certain field. When people want to follow the development of trends and penetrate into different target areas, they must follow the development logic and operation rules of the target area, and gradually show the corresponding characteristics and advantages on this basis.
The development of technology allows us not only to gradually make the digital image fuller, but also to meet the real-time interaction between people. When virtual characters can be independent of real people and participate in social behaviors, these avatars can not only establish social relationships and emotional links with real people, but also interact with other avatars, thus realizing more native social relationships.
I. Social Media and Social Network
Before the emergence of the Internet, people had already started to disseminate information through centralized media such as letters, newspapers, and radio, and on this basis they had established some of their social relationships. The development of information technology that gave birth to the Internet has not only popularized the production process of digital content, but also accelerated the process of democratization of digital content itself to a certain extent.
The development of technology has not only driven up the quality and volume of digital content, but has also correspondingly pulled up the demand for real-time interaction with high-quality images, videos, etc. As centralized media sites have seen a concentrated explosion, the supply of content has correspondingly increased dramatically. At the same time, the emergence of search engines on top of portal pages and content has helped people to access centralized information with greater efficiency.
However, the centralized output and distribution methods gradually failed to meet the diverse demand and consumption rate of digital content. As more and more people connect to the Internet, the data generated and distributed by individual nodes gradually increases, adding social chains of relationships between various digital contents. While connecting users, these nodes also bring social attributes to the media.
At the early stage of the Internet, digital content is characterized by a shortage of supply and demand, and at this time people’s social relationships have not been completely digitized, thus the demand for digital content is greater than the demand for digital social relationships. Therefore, in this period, digital content with media properties will gain priority over digital social relationships. Meanwhile, the limited number of production nodes further accelerates the trend of data-centricity.
The iteration of technology not only improves the production efficiency of digital content and liberates the limitation of content supply, but also increases the variety of media and the presentation of content. At the same time, as people become comfortable with new tools and build awareness, they will use new solutions to old problems, thereby building social relationships in the digital world. This social relationship will also become content itself because of the existence of digital media.
While centralization is still evolving rapidly at this point, the trend toward decentralization has begun quietly in parallel as more and more user nodes and social relationships emerge one after another in the digital network.
The emergence of something new will not immediately solve an existing need because people are not cognizant of it, but it can engage users by solving other related needs. In solving users’ creative needs, users will also build awareness in the process so that we can in turn solve existing needs.
When something new penetrates into different target areas in a new way, it must follow the development logic and operation rules of the target area and gradually show the corresponding features and advantages on this basis in order to solve the needs again based on the creation of needs.
Logically, in the development of the digital world, content with media properties will emerge before the social relationships that connect users. The history of the entire Internet industry and market development also verifies such a basic logic. However, since people have limited energy and cannot be heavy users on many social network platforms at the same time, social networks will become increasingly monopolized and centralized driven by the Matthew effect.
When digital social relationships amplify the contribution of individual nodes to digital content, the weight of centralized media will relatively decrease, which is itself a decentralized development. On the other hand, social relationships themselves generate content, and this content in turn becomes more influential as social relationships accumulate, thus allowing a portion of social relationships that should be completely decentralized to become gradually centralized.
Apparently, people access media content through social relationships in social media, while people are building social relationships by way of networking in social networks; however, in reality, they are all different ways of presenting digital content, or called medium (text, images, audio, video, games). At the same time, the development of technology not only limits the different ways of presentation, but also determines the efficiency of digital content in the production, distribution and consumption stages.
Whether it is centralized distribution or decentralized recommendation, social relationships and digital content will present a dynamic balance in a long evolutionary process. Except in case of war, disaster or other devastating events, at some level, the impact of technological development on society and people’s perception is irreversible. However, for digital content, this dynamic balance can be broken when there is more and newer supply and demand.
The supply-side impact comes from the change in the form of digital content. At this stage, the medium of games has not been fully democratized and the supply of gamified digital content has not been fully released, but what we can see is that many game contents with social attributes are breaking the social approach built on traditional media while acquiring a large number of next generation users.
When new forms of digital content stimulate new types of demand generated by people, this brings about a demand-side impact. Before this, people’s needs could not be stimulated because technology could not meet these new needs. When technology is able to divorce digital content from real people, it allows people to become fascinated and emotionally connected to the content itself. In fact, people have already initially built up their emotions for some digital content from ACG, film, anime, game and other cultures, thus allocating their time or other weights to the virtual world.
Of course, through UGC, users have already achieved decentralized production in terms of production tools and production process, but in order to let users have the power to freely choose and allocate their own data in the digital world, we also need to give users the power to privatize their data by means of blockchain, and let them decide the ownership, allocation and transaction of production materials.
Information technology empowers users to produce in the digital world in a way that is a “natural human right”. At the same time, behind the social and media content, it is each person who participates in the digital world that decides, through trade, the ownership of the digital content they own and produce.
II. Digital Identity, Digital Image, Digital Interaction
The ultimate dream of people in the virtual world is to become a cloud species and to socialize, live, work, and play experiences with such a digital identity. However, we need to go through several stages before we can achieve consciousness upload and enter the digital world.
In the current stage, we are gradually completing the digitization of identity, image and interaction. Compared to providing people with a more efficient way to exchange information, what is more important about the Internet is that it has changed people’s perceptions and thus their behavior in the real world. The later mobile Internet inherited the characteristics of the Internet, releasing the constraints of geographic location on digital nodes, thus allowing people to exchange data with the virtual world at a higher frequency.
Information technology not only opened the door to the virtual world, but also combined with biotechnology, allowing us to gradually begin to understand ourselves in a more scientific and rational way. Now, we can not only preliminarily access and recognize brainwave signals, but also implement some simple conscious control behaviors in animals.
History and experience have taught us that the relationship between technology and demand should be that we want to achieve a demand and use a technology, not that we want to achieve a demand because a technology is available. Until then, how to better understand ourselves by enabling deeper interactions in the open digital world has become one of the directions of technology development.
From text, image, video to game, the iteration of technology has gradually digitized the real world and people, which also brings new social needs for users. As the real world continues to be digitized, we ourselves are being mapped into the digital world step by step, which includes：
In fact, besides identity information is presented directly by means of text, digital image-based information and interactive information are presented through different mediums due to the technology.
Medium provides us with ways to achieve various information exchange in the digital world. For example, if we want to know other people’s name, gender, birthday and other information in the network, we can use text; while if we want to know each other’s looks, dress, etc., we need to use image technologies such as pictures and videos to solve the supply of such digital contents; in addition, if we want to interact with each other in real time or non-real time, we need to combine various mediums to achieve this in an integrated way.
When images are digitized, people are actually communicating through their digital images when they participate in social interaction through various online accounts. In other words, although people have multiple digital identities, this time people will default to communicate with the real person behind the digital identity rather than the digital identity itself.
This is actually a very interesting point, when people see various accounts and virtual images on the Internet, people will rightfully believe that interacting with these digital contents is equal to interacting with the real person behind them. And it is because of this perception that the classic Internet social logic is built: that is, through some digital content produced by people, to build social relationships.
At the same time, in the process of human-to-human communication, digital content suitable for different scenarios is also produced. In the past, non-real-time content interaction would occupy the mainstream, but with technological breakthroughs, content in the form of text, pictures, audio, video, games, etc. also became capable of real-time interaction, thus broadening the digital content that can be produced by social media.
III. Three Directions of Future Social Network
Socialization is one of the natural needs of people, and the way to achieve them will be influenced by society, cognition, personalization, emotions, etc. This will not only continue to emerge new user groups, but also split existing user groups many times and meet different new groups through various new products.
For the most part, many Internet applications address the same need, but they use various ways to give voice to different groups of users and meet their specific preferences, thereby competing for this group of users from other applications. In the process of continuous differentiation and rebalancing of user groups, we will use old approaches to solve the old demands of new groups, and users will generate dynamic values as a group.
When we use established media approaches to meet the similar needs of different groups by dividing them into different user groups, we are in essence not actually creating new social needs. This dynamic value is a value that stems from a rebalancing process.
On the other hand, advances in technology allow us to generate social relationships with objects that gradually change from real people to virtual images, meeting new social needs while also bringing value derived from creation.
In most cases, it’s easy to think of socialization as a natural way of understanding the relationships that exist between real people, but in reality, there are several types of social objects: real people, avatars based on real people, avatars driven by real people, and avatars that are like real people.
As the form of media presentation will be limited by the development of technology, at first we will use a more static way to show the virtual image based on real people, one is a text-based digital image, such as the Internet software account system contains the user’s name, gender, birthday, signature, status, etc.; the other is a digital image based on images, such as QQ show, Taobao life, Zepeto, etc. .
The development of technology allows us to not only gradually make digital images become plentiful, but also to meet the real-time interaction between people. There are two types of human-driven avatars: those that can be interacted with in real time, such as those used by Vtubers during live broadcasts and those controlled by players in games; and those that are not interacted with in real time, such as those created by creators in movies or games through motion capture technology.
When virtual characters can be free from the control of real people and participate in social behavior autonomously, these virtual images can not only establish social relationships and emotional links with real people, but also interact with other virtual images, thus achieving more native social relationships.
In fact, there are three major directions of future socialization, and these three directions also represent different stages of social development.
Traditional social networking was born from people in the real world. The development of the Internet has not only increased the efficiency of social interaction, but also completed the digital mapping of people in the virtual world. This mapping, while becoming people’s identity in the digital world, has also become a link between people and their stand-ins, making us default to the idea that interacting with a stand-in is the same as interacting with a real person.
As mentioned before, although the crowd will be segmented by various attributes, within a certain period of time, the various needs of social networking will be bound by the development of technology, leading to similar solutions in a practical sense and the emergence of various social products with similar functions. Almost all of these products aim at the non-mainstream part of the mainstream group, or gather and cultivate the non-mainstream group into the mainstream group.
At the same time, several important technological breakthroughs have allowed the mass medium of digital content to evolve from text and images to real-time audio and video, and to support large-scale multi-person online interaction. People use their own stand-in images to find another person’s stand-in image and use it as an interaction with another person through various media connections. In other words, although this stand-in image is digital content, it is not the content itself that we want to generate a relationship with, but the social relationship we want to build with another real person through this content.
Although the scenarios ( life, entertainment, job search, leisure…) , media (graphic, audio, video, live) and content (marriage, interest, workplace, life…) in which socialization occurs, will vary depending on the diversity of the user community, none of them actually remain outside the traditional social sphere: i.e. finding another real person through the medium.
Excitingly, current technological developments have liberated the volume of information that digital content can carry, enabling not only real-time human-content interaction, but also a degree of intelligence and anthropomorphic interaction.
When this human-like interaction can be achieved in a more reasonable and realistic way, people’s perception of avatars will change: from digitized real-life stand-in content to digitized virtual characters. The result is a change in the way people interact with each other. Thus, this social interaction between real people and avatars is a new type of social interaction that is different from traditional social interaction.
With technologies on the logical side (artificial intelligence, big data, cloud technology, recommendation algorithms…) and image-based technologies (motion generation, image rendering, …), avatars will have several distinct differences from real people.
- Real-time: Users interact with avatars in real-time at any time and any place in the network environment.
- High concurrency: Under certain computing power and communication conditions, avatars can interact with super large-scale users at the same time. For example, a virtual KOL can communicate with users from all over the world at the same time and share their daily life.
- Personalization: For different user interactions, avatars can provide dynamic personalized responses and interactive content based on their own characteristics. For example, avatars with shy or extroverted personalities will show different characteristics of shyness or extroversion through different responses (dialogue content, facial expressions, behavioral actions, etc.) when users interact with them in the same way.
- Nurture: When users interact with a virtual image for a long time, the virtual image will learn the user’s conversation style and behavior, and gradually present the interaction content and expressions that belong to a user only. For example, a virtual character developed by an introverted user will be more gentle and proactive in its interaction.
When users interact with avatars, they will establish unique emotional links and social relationships with them. Such avatars are not just digital content, but early “species” that have some intelligence and are capable of continuous evolution.
These virtual characters will participate in any scenario in the virtual world, thus interacting deeply with the user, and we will also follow the lives of these avatars and listen to their stories in the virtual world, such as who they are playing with in what game today, what interaction they had with the anchor in whose live streaming room yesterday, what clothes they tried on in Taobao the day before, etc.
At this stage, due to the emergence of new social relationships, almost all social relationships and corresponding scenarios in the real world can actually be done again in the virtual world. With the popularization of intelligent avatars, the recognition and acceptance of real users will gradually increase, and avatars will gradually transition from the PGC model to the UGC model, thus completing the stage of democratization.
At present, the market often sees products or sections that use avatars to make social interactions. In fact, they are not very successful. The reason is the difference between digital content and avatars.
First of all, the technologies currently used in these products cannot achieve several characteristics of avatars: real-time, high concurrency, personalization, and development. Therefore, avatars are only digital content in the form of a substitute and do not have the attributes of intelligent interaction. Secondly, people’s cognition of virtual images does not include the social part for the time being, and only regards it as a kind of digital content that can be easily interacted, so people will not regard it as an object that can establish social relationships.
When there is no technology to achieve this, and the user’s cognition and needs are not established, any product that attempts to establish a social relationship between real people through virtual images can only be classified on the traditional social track. Then fierce competition for users with other products.
Of course, if it is only used as a kind of digital content, its attributes are more media-oriented. On this basis, people make the characters in games, movies, and animations into virtual artists, which are packaged and commercialized through the way of artist operations. However, this method will be limited by IP resources, and under the existing production process, the output of digital content at the virtual artist level is not efficient and the supply is insufficient. This not only hinders popular production and consumption, but also further restricts people’s cognitive iteration of virtual images.
When people have enough awareness of virtual images and established normalized social relationships, in the next stage of social development, new social relationships will be generated between virtual images. We can think of it as the native society in the virtual world. Virtual creatures can not only socially interact with real people, but also generate unique social methods, economic systems, and division of labor among virtual ethnic groups. This systematic social structure is also one of the necessary conditions for the formation and operation of Metaverse.
IV. Socialization in Games and Gamification of Social Network
Whether it is digital socialization, media, consumption, entertainment, network communications, corporate services, etc., the virtual world itself is a super-large-scale multiplayer game.
The form of the media not only represents the interactive experience that people intuitively feel, but also represents the way people interact with digital content. From text, images, audio, video to games, we will find that the development of the entire Internet is a digital revolution, allowing digital boundaries to cover every corner of the real world. In fact, the media form of games, while integrating text, images, audio and video, also provides people with a real-time interactive experience.
We can almost think that after short videos, games are the next medium that can be democratized and popularized in the production process, and this kind of interaction will exist in two ways. One is to exist as digital content, and the other is to combine with other fields as an interactive way to form a new species.
In games as digital content, a very interesting phenomenon is that if the game has multi-person social elements (creating, sharing, communicating, trading, teaming, confrontation, etc.), and as long as the player reaches a certain size. The goal of players participating in the game will change: from simply experiencing the game content with the player, to knowing and interacting with various players through the content carrier of the game.
In the development of video games for decades, people have been using this medium to simulate our real life. Therefore, the behavior of players in the game is actually very similar to the behavior in life.
So far, whether through the real or virtual world, our needs for real people’s social interaction have not changed, but we have moved part of the real world where social relationships can be born to the Internet. The game itself has a specific scenario, in which participants have similar and equal rights, and everyone can communicate, collaborate, fight, and trade through various gameplay methods under the established game mechanism.
Therefore, the essence of social interaction in games is to show social interaction through games, allowing users to socialize during the game. And gamified socialization is to integrate the game mechanism into the social system, so that users can have a game-like experience in the social process.
In the early days of mobile Internet development, mobile devices divided people’s time into fragments, and huge information streams and digital content distracted users at all times. In order to attract users to stay and use mobile phone software for a long time, developers have begun to combine various functions and game mechanisms.
The sign-in, check-in, lottery, upgrade, achievement, etc. that we often see in social media, social networks, and communities are actually some of the more explicit game mechanisms. In e-commerce, in recent years, the hotter mechanisms such as group joining and bargaining are some relatively hidden game mechanisms. They can be compared to the scene where players team up and play copies in the game.
In fact, there are a lot of scenes in the game, such as NPC dialogue, collecting materials, building equipment, exploring maps, and fighting battles. Therefore, there is still a lot of room to advance the process of gamification in various Internet fields supported by traditional media.
We can give collecting attributes to social behaviors, so that users can collect various valuable items through social methods. For example, we can allow users to set a reward, which can be text, pictures, voice, video or other user-generated digital content, and consists of multiple parts.
Users can randomly get several parts during chatting or participating in an activity together. We can even add the equipment system to it. Users can integrate these parts into other props or special items, and use them to show personalization in the social process, or treat them as personal digital assets for transactions.
Even, we can make the entire social software into an “open world”, and the digital content created by different users is different levels and plots. In the process of socializing with different people, users can use the “equipment” mentioned above to unlock the stories behind different people and view each other’s dynamics.
Of course, this method is very blunt and unfeasible, but gamification design ideas can indeed bring unexpected effects to many traditional fields.
People love games not only because they can get pleasure in overcoming unnecessary obstacles, but also because they can understand the stories, ideas and values that creators want to convey in the process of experiencing game content. At this point, after the game mechanism combines text, pictures, audio and video, it seems that it can better provide users and players with a very real and immersive interactive experience.
V. From Internet to Metaverse: Interaction as a Service
In the past, games existed as independent products, which corresponded to the Pay to play business model. Players buy out their specific content and become their own assets. However, players cannot experience the game content before purchasing, and face the uncertainty of the quality of the game content. Coupled with the frequent gaps between the pricing of different games and the actual experience, some players choose to give up buying, some turn to piracy and private servers, and some choose to wait and see.
Games in this period, like lottery products, cannot be obtained without paying. Therefore, this uncertain consumer experience has also spawned the emergence of game media, community forums and player reviews. They have gradually become the new standard, saving the distribution of paid games to a certain extent. However, uncertain game quality and information asymmetry still exist, and consumers will still be troubled by trust issues when they consume.
In order to solve the problem of players’ trust and experience in game products, manufacturers have begun to adopt timed payment, which lowers the player’s experience threshold. If it is fun, continue to play, and if it is not fun, quit. In the game market in early 2000, the two games World of Warcraft and Fantasy Westward Journey were representative of this model. Of course, this is only a mode of experience and consumption. The quality of the game content itself is still very important. Various gameplay methods continue to extend the experience time of different types of players in the game, thereby directly increasing the revenue of manufacturers.
Although players are experiencing game products on lease, both manufacturers and players still treat the game as a “complete product” in the transaction. In order to obtain more users and profits, manufacturers once again set the game as a free experience, and set more payment points in the game.
With the birth of the Internet, free games have not only eliminated the barrier to payment experience, but also greatly improved the audience base of players. In the Internet wave with free as the slogan, the Chinese game industry has formed a systematic methodology in in-game purchase. Thus, by designing, producing, promoting, and operating games like operating Internet software, users can pay more for games.
The development of China’s mobile Internet initially provided a lot of low-cost traffic, allowing free games to enjoy the dividends of industry development and massive new users. These users experience the game like an Internet product and see what they see and play; developers can quickly launch a product in a short period of time, and obtain millions or even tens of millions of monthly sales through traffic operations. Due to the extremely low customer acquisition cost, if DAU and revenue drop significantly, manufacturers can quickly adjust the direction and make the next one, forming a rapid iteration.
Compared with the European and American game industries that are accustomed to making high-quality 3A products through high investment, the Chinese game industry has gained a lot of rewards through a series of free games when quickly learning the experience of the game industry. As players’ awareness, aesthetics, and expectations of the game increase, and traffic costs increase, paid games have gradually divided into two groups: on the one hand, there are large companies with more capital and wide channels, and they can invest higher costs to obtain Larger revenue base; on the other side are independent games represented by independent game developers with low cost and less financing. Their income is extremely unstable and the probability of failure is also extremely high.
In this context, we can also see the emergence of various business models. Pay to win most often appears in RPG online games. It allows players to become stronger than other players through recharge, but this will undoubtedly affect the balance of the game. At the same time, manufacturers have also introduced a way to obtain revenue without affecting the balance of the game: Pay to cool. Players recharge to look better than other players and meet various needs.
At the same time, in the path of acquisition, game manufacturers are also trying various ways to deal with player expectations and happiness. For example, draw cards, open boxes, turntables, collect fragments, etc., and even add event restrictions, festival restrictions, linkage restrictions, etc., so that players can spend a higher price to get satisfaction.
In addition, in order to make players pay again for the game content itself based on the free experience, manufacturers will combine a series of game tasks through DLC or subscription-based battles, gaining experience, rare props, achievements, etc., so that players will “gift” related to the behavior they are supposed to complete. The player will be “rewarded” with related items based on the behavior that he or she is supposed to complete.
When players do not pay for the game as a whole but for parts of the game, they are actually gradually considering the game as a digital entertainment service rather than a digital product.
A paper published by Arnold Tukker in 2004 refers to a product-service system that makes a gradual distinction between products and services, from left to right representing the gradual transition from pure products to pure services and the different ways in which value is embodied.
The first type of product is called: Pure Product. The user uses a whole object that does not contain any services, such as a tool-type app, a fork, etc.
The second type of product is called Product Oriented. These are products that are mainly integrated with a small number of services that are closely related to the product and enable the user to use the product more smoothly. Product related means that after the user purchases a product, the supplier also provides services that directly solve problems related to the use of the product, such as installation, commissioning, repair, and maintenance. Advice and Consultancy refers to the services that can indirectly solve the problems of product use, such as training and consulting, provided by the manufacturer after the user has purchased the product.
The third type of product is called Use Oriented. This type of product is still based on the overall product, but the supplier does not deal with the consumer in a packaged asset transaction, but provides the consumer with the exclusive right to use the product (Product Lease), a period of time (Product renting/sharing) or a shared right to use (Product pooling). In this process, the supplier will also provide the corresponding supporting services to ensure the normal experience of users.
The fourth type of product is called: Result Oriented. Activity management is similar to outsourcing, where a specific goal is assigned to a specific service provider; Pay per service unit is a pay-per-volume service, where the content of the service is quantified to meet different needs; and Functional result is a service that considers the result of the service and provides the service according to the final value. The pay per service unit is a pay-per-volume service, which is based on quantifying the content of the service to meet different needs.
The fifth type of product is called Pure Service. These are objects of a consumer nature that do not depend on any product for their existence, and address needs purely by way of service.
We can see that when the attributes of a vendor’s product change from product-oriented, to usage-oriented, more asset investment is required to be able to provide a more standardized solution, and revenue and profits will be reduced in the short term. The productized approach, on the other hand, has the ability to support a larger number of users and thus generate more expected profits in the future.
In this stage, the relationship between products and services will be at a more balanced point. Users can quickly experience both products with a certain degree of standardization and various services that cannot be standardized.
When product attributes change from use-oriented to result-oriented, the products or services provided by suppliers will maintain a closer relationship with users, which also means that more products or services will have more and more personalized attributes. The relationship between pure product and user often ends at the moment of transaction, while the relationship between pure service and user only begins at the moment of transaction.
Of course, the relative relationship between services and products also depends on production technology and efficiency. Under certain conditions of products, the more advanced technology can meet the more personalized services, thus obtaining a larger user LTV.
In fact, we can also see that games as a product or form of interaction are constantly slipping from the product side to the service side. The earliest games were actually Product Oriented, with dedicated customer service to help install and handle game issues after the game was sold, while later games were more Use Oriented, except that manufacturers chose to attribute assets in different ways, such as copy sales-based games. For example, a game based on copy sales is a digital asset with exclusive experience rights.
In contrast, Free to play + IAP (Pay to win & Pay to cool) is more like a game where players pay a rental fee for the use and ownership of different digital assets during the runtime, optionally topping up and receiving corresponding items or rewards; once the game stops operating, these digital assets no longer belong to the player.
In the near future, with the gradual increase of service attributes, the product form and business model of the game actually have two directions. One of them is located on the service side, in a certain degree of standardized products, through technology to achieve the addition of richer and more personalized content interaction services, players pay for personalized services.
However, in-game services are more often realized through leasing, users do not have ownership of digital assets, and as soon as the server is shut down, the player’s history will disappear with it. When players cultivate and shape their image, equipment, and achievements within the game, it is actually the players’ long-term behavioral data and different digital assets that are fused, and people will thus have emotional links with these digital assets.
Logic dictates that players deserve to have some ownership of these digital assets as they go about their use and experience, but in practice, game vendors do not offer such an option. In shutting down the servers, the vendors not only deprive the long-standing data value, but also choke off the players’ emotional links.
If the retention and use of these data assets can be determined by players, who wouldn’t want to be able to spend more time with the characters, objects, etc. that they have spent so much time with?
This demand seems to be a problem of game products, but in fact it is a problem of ownership of data assets. When the player is able to autonomously decide the retention of his characters, objects, etc. in past games and pay for them, the player owns the digital assets as a product, and also owns the data generated in the process of interaction with them, thus becoming the person who gives “life” to these virtual characters.
Players can invite others to interact and experience with their digital assets and embed personalized tweaks and displays, which will allow players to pay not only for the product but also for the asset.
If we take games as the center of our perspective focus, then this is where games as products and games as services will be the primary form of existence for some time to come. And if we look at games not only as a content medium but also as a way to interact, then it will exist in the future of digital interactive experiences in a way that approximates infrastructure.
In fact, we cannot conclude that the Metaverse has emerged by a particular event when we start talking about it. One thing that must be acknowledged is that there is still a large distance between the Metaverse in its current stage and its ultimate form, except that due to cognitive dissonance, its presence is not directly felt by everyone.
We perceive immersion in so many ways, one is intuitively through the visual level of image interaction directly to the brain to provide information about the scene, such as the current variety of games, film and television, animation, etc.; one is through text, voice and other ways to stimulate the brain’s fantasy, such as text, books, music, podcast, etc.. It is worth mentioning that Clubhouse has no image content, but it can connect people all over the world, and people can listen to the content shared by others by joining any Room at random, and then fantasize and experience different scenes in their brains.
From the past to the present, people continue to make images in the digital world more and more realistic in an almost paranoid way, trying to make users and players feel like another real world. However, it seems that the image quality and level of detail supported by current technology enters the realm of the Valley of Terror effect. These images are very much like real people, yet people always feel that something is not right, and can even feel disgusted and uncomfortable.
The reason is that the lower limit of the immersive experience we get is determined by the volume of logical information, while the upper limit is determined by the volume of information such as image, audio, and touch.
Compared with the visual impact brought by the game graphics, the game’s inherent mechanics, logic, story and background seem to be more capable of immersing us in the fantasy world. When we experience or recall the game, a series of key nodes and events will first appear, followed by the characteristics of the scenes in which these events occur, the characters’ images, the way they behave, etc.
It is such logical information that allows us to understand and experience another world in fantasy, and the role of images is to expand the amount of information conveyed by different scenes, reinforcing and highlighting their characteristics, thus bringing a better sense of immersion.
Today’s technological developments are primed to generate logic and images of a certain quality on a large scale, and to constantly liberate the supply of digital content. When the supply of a thing exceeds a certain volume, a new demand is born. Based on people’s current perception of avatars, they either think of it as animations or movies that cannot be interacted with, or game characters that cannot communicate like real people.
Game engines are actually already capable of animating various modules and components in digital characters from the image level, but how these images should move is actually a matter of generating logical instructions. These instructions allow virtual images that can show reasonable, realistic and interesting responses in interaction and can be generated automatically on a large scale.
Only when this problem is solved will people gradually build new perceptions and new demands for virtual images. At the same time, these virtual world natives will be able to develop the Metaverse and provide us with another way of life.
Last but not least
We are often better able to seek the meaning of life when, after serious and rational reflection, we take a vague but correct future as the driving force to move ourselves forward. From an existentialist perspective, freedom is not absolute; human freedom is the freedom to choose. It is not who we are that defines us, but the choices we make.
While absurdism, nihilism, and existentialism all agree that the world and ourselves are meaningless, what makes existentialism a humanism is that it encourages people to face a dystopian world and still have the courage to freely give meaning to anything and rise to the occasion.
While absurdists choose to live more absurdly than the world, and nihilists deny all forms of the pursuit of meaning and choose to give up on themselves, existentialists like Morty in Rick & Morty still go on to hold on to the meaning of friendship, love, morality, and pursuit.
The fulcrum of human society’s existence is faith and consensus. Cowardice and courage are not innate, and the world did not start out with the Internet, starships, artificial intelligence and the Metaverse. When action is not yet cast into the future, everything is nothing, but at the same time, everything can be everything.
Many things in the world are between doable and undoable at the same time. There is no such thing as worth doing, only willingness to do it. The future is created by young people, and as long as young people still have hope for the future, there will be hope for humanity.
