Metaverse does not need to be 3D: the value of on-chain gaming

Transcript

hi everybody uh yeah so uh happy to be here to present um something i've been thinking for some time and it's kind of the idea is to to think about the metaverse a bit maybe differently that what we have been accustomed to um and yeah before that just a little intro so i'm a game developer that fall into the rabbit hole of ethereum back in 2016 and my passion have always been building games so i've been building games using it since since that time but i also play with various projects so you can see all all the little things some smaller some bigger

and yeah so most of them is about having using the blockchain at its core so if i do a native nfc project the svg will be generated on chain if i do a game the rule of the game will be on chain and that's what fascinates me and it's kind of the topic of of this and the idea of this talk started with my realization that my vision of the metaverse didn't there was a division in the community somewhere about what metaverse really is like is it is it really 3d what is it what really mattered to us or is it something else and so i got some replies and then i decided to kind of okay let's dig into a bit a bit

more and so one of the books that i decided to read was no crash which which invented the term and so i'll mention actually a bit about that um and yeah this idea of foundation uh by bodan world so niraj is building um like is basically doing experiments with other games around the ecosystem on with moonstream and then boudin is building his own on-chain game so um called me mithrail and so i think maybe if you ask someone like what is a metaverse you might think of this ready player one is a movie where you kind of use something and you pick up you become part of the world and maybe in reality what you might think is

actually a second life a kind of a place where you can meet other people but maybe you go further in your field like you go further down the line and you realize actually matrix is a representation of what the metaverse could be whatever whether you like it or not [Music] but um but i think in in in this conference uh you might think of something else you might think about this three uh project uh which adds something uh to the previous one something about ownership something about nft and and so that's where i think the first clue that uh it's not so much about 3d because we had that before but about

something else and i think what i basically kind of go is like what if i told you that in some way you can have this field of metaverse without any of the treaty because what mattered to you i mean if you are blind in the first place it really might not even mean be interesting to you and it's about the feeling of being present in the world and that's kind of i want to see how it went to to be and so it's about basically it's a bit of a presentation about the word and the meaning of the word and metaverse is at the ages currently and meaning so in this graph represents the basically words that are still evolving are the edges they are not they're linked to other words but not so much

and so for and there's new words being linked to them so for example metaverse didn't have webtree now there is webtree associated to it um and also we see metaverse itself be an evolution like so i mentioned snow crash being like the first to talk about it but if you look further you you see all the indication of the metaverse interestingly the two first like other plane by so basically other plane was the name of that plane of that metaverse by vernorvinge and william gibson to give the cyberspace but if you look at the basically the book it's about this idea that when you connect to this world of data your brain is going it's not so much the metabolism that we that we talk and i think

basically everything started with no crash and when you read snow crash you feel you really feel this the thing with we feel in web3 this idea that um first of all it's interesting he talked about protocol so he didn't have there was no bitcoin there was no this idea that we could run something decentralized and actually to some extent snow crash is a dystopian version the version of the metaverse where bitcoin was not invented and but also you look down and you see that the metaverse the 3d part he acknowledged that this is not the important thing like i mean the foundation is not the 3d space and snow crash is all about this realization that if you had such a thing the avatar will take a big place and this is what the book is a lot about the two main

protagonists are actually the creator of the avatar and the technology behind them but i mentioned it's a if there is a few things that in snow crash that are interesting like you have this restriction based on the hardware the hardware seems to be very important in in that world and in some way to me it feel like yeah it's dystopian because you you can't you are not in control this is a person running this device maybe they do kyc or this kind of thing and um but obviously this was before web 3 became something and so webtree comes and i think what is that is this idea of nft ownership and they are independent of third parties and interestingly you see that it's no crash too in some way because in

stockholders you assume basically that is okay there is a protocol there is cooperation and if you are friend with them or you do nothing bad they keep you enjoying what you have and hero the protagonist basically he's able to to buy he was early on so he managed to buy some landings in the metaverse and so he's very feel like what some players experience but i think if you look at what the current metaverse are they only are scratching the surface of this they are looking at this ownership as something immutable that have you owned it that's it it's forever yours and yeah you can show them off you can run you can go in these spaces but these spaces are server-based they're fully centralized they define what movement

you can do they even can censor you they you you cannot express too much yourself and they are basically social hubs basically where convention there is convention but no rule beyond themselves but obviously in this case avatar shines and and that's the beauty of this space so actually to kind of explain this myself i decided to build so i have an open source framework now you can launch your your little metaverse and to have two examples with voidrunners and me bits and you you can basically play in in in a multiplayer world but basically the server is is doing the access control etcetera using this uh nft but if you go further where in the

domain of unchained games you realize that you can give more more tangibility to these things you can give rules to the nft themselves and by restricting funnily enough by restricting them to a certain role you give them more meaning you give them utility inside it and it also gives them more independence because suddenly this and ftr have something to place and there is few on-chain game in the past a lot new now is i mean um so i mentioned i've been building uh a while but now unchained is becoming a trend and we have seen like um so like and there's different kind of category of games so some of them are like the the game is the hula hound chain uh like tug of war and dark forest

but the game at the end so you the universe stop at the point or you can obviously launch another version and then keep track but the the connection between the two is uh is the social uh rules and there is other game like uh conquest uh where the rules the game never stops so any rule any asset you own in that game uh there is nobody that can change them and and so and i think you can go even further so conquest do that so it's a game i'm building and it also introduces idea of risk so if you want to join in in that metaverse you have to take your risk with you and suddenly it bring in immersion so there

is an interesting article by lars do say on metaverse in general and especially on the on the issue of land scarcity et cetera and in this article he mentioned interesting uh the way to find like solve the issue with the tax but one particular tax mentioned is the idea of blue blood tax this is basically what conquest implement by and what it means that you if you want to own something in that game you have to fight for it and and this this is basically at the new level of immersion because now uh part of yourself is inside the game the money that you put in um is basically uh become an extension an extension of

yourself and um so what what i for me what it mean is that it mean like you are basically making the metaverse independent creating an alternative reality uh yeah simply because um if you have nothing to lose i mean why why would you bother um in the first place like i mean of course winning is important but um in some way if you don't have something to lose you will have a people that just join but never come back and so to me metaverse to go back to the beginning like metaverse is about

reality independence and so the metaverse is the substrate on which this world lives on so obviously this is what blockchain offers and if you go back to snow crash the metaverse rule will be the i mean we are now living in a network of blockchains which would be this um kind of network and then anything built on top will be uh will be this world and to for me the main ingredients is so blockchain give us permissionlessness immutability and persistence and i will even add the interoperability and to me the metaphors that fit this definition of the are the world

that inherits this property and if you lose any one of them uh you are losing uh independence and and the fact that they offer this they have to me at least they are an invitation to build because whatever you build on them they are forever they are they are not restrained by um any third party that could decide to say actually i don't want your avatar in my space for whatever reason so yeah that's it any question no you are very clear i think

thank you okay great you