The year is 2008, Barrack Obama has just been elected President of the United States, the first Iron Man movie is in theatres and your favourite celebrities in all your favourite magazines are wearing Juicy Couture tracksuits. 2008 was also the year Sony launched PlayStation Home.
PlayStation Home was a virtual 3D social gaming platform introduced by Sony for the PlayStation 3. It allowed users to create customisable avatars, interact with other players in a shared virtual world, participate in social activities, and play various mini-games of questionable quality. PlayStation Home aimed to provide a unique and immersive online social experience. Sound familiar? It sure LOOKS familiar…
(“I’m going to buy some sun glasses” - I love when official screenshots nakedly gesture towards the desired user behaviour)
You would be forgiven for not knowing about PlayStation Home or for forgetting it ever existed if you did know. It was eventually wound down for several reasons, most notably: Limited appeal, technical issues and declining user engagement
Under the rubble of PlayStation Home there is a valuable lesson that many of our present day 2023 tech evangelists and marketers can learn: Metaverses are kinda dull. I feel like this is a safe space so we can say it. Sometimes ideas are just sorta shitty. For example Windows Vista or the Nokia N-Gage. For every great innovation like Paypal there’s a turd in the punch bowl like… I don’t know, Google Wave.
(If you wanted to change the game card in your N-Gage you had to take off the back of the phone and remove the battery first!)
Conceptually, the idea of a Metaverse sounds quite fun and that’s almost exactly the problem. The reality (and the unavoidable achilles heel of all these Metaverse projects) is that they’re not fun. They’re dull, and kludgy, and more importantly, when you’re in one you feel lost and confused.
Its because Metaverses look like video games that many people are quick to conflate the two when in actuality video games are a product we should use for contrasting, rather than drawing comparisons.
Video games are fun. They’re fun because of gameplay loops. A gameplay loop is a fundamental game design concept that forms the core interactive experience of a video game. It consists of a sequence of actions and activities that players repeatedly engage in while playing a game. In Mario the core gameplay loop is traversing platforms, jumping on enemies and reaching the end of each map, in Call of Duty it’s aiming guns and shooting enemies. Over the decades, game designers have honed their craft and combined tight gameplay loops with things like objectives, variety, progression, rewards, feedback, repetition, mastery, risk and reward and so on. The result are modern video games, the making of which has been honed to something resembling fine craftsmanship.
Modern video games are tight, like the best live band you’ve ever seen. When you’re playing a good game there are no moments when you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing, there are no moments of confusion, you’re already in a flow state and you were expertly shepherded there without even realising it. Any opportunities for the player to be confused or lost have been trimmed and left on the cutting room floor because they serve no purpose.
So what if we took all the trimmings and off cuts from the video game cutting room floor and pasted those together? What if you created a 3D virtual world that had no objectives, no gameplay loop, no mastery, no risk or reward, no progression, no purpose? Well, you’ve just made a Metaverse. It should therefore be no surprise that these platforms are so often listless and confusing.
Inevitably the evangelists for the Metaverse concept always end up talking about Fortnite, partly because its one of a handful of games with enough of a social / hangout space use-case with a critical mass of users (see also Roblox) and partly because there are so few successful contemporary pure play metaverses. Outside of playing the main Fortnite battle royale game mode Epic Games have experimented with virtual concerts. Some have just been 2D videos broadcast to a big screen in the game world (lame) and others have been spectacular immersive spaces players can run around in. The Travis Scott virtual concert is a great example but the format has also been used for Lil Nas X and Ariana Grande shows.
Here’s the thing: These concerts weren’t compelling because they were in a metaverse, they were compelling because watching something live with other people is inherently compelling. Sharing something novel of the moment and in the moment with other people is the difference between watching the World Cup Final in a pub and throwing your drink in the air and hugging your mate when your country scores a goal versus quietly watching Match of The Day by yourself. We just like to be around each other when cool stuff happens. If Fortnite concerts are the answer then the problem Metaverses have is obvious: It isn’t practical to create and host a highly produced 3D concert or a World Cup Final every hour of every day in perpetuity. You need something that can hold user attention when nothing else is happening and that means you need objectives, variety, progression, rewards, immediate feedback, repetition, mastery, risk and reward and… Oh hang on, I’m describing a video game. Sony learned this expensive lesson fifteen years ago. It remains to be seen how long it will take todays crop of Silicon Valley futurists to arrive at the same conclusion.
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