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Excerpt, Making a Metaverse That Matters:
Interoperability continues to be a grail quest for many metaverse evangelists, partly spurred by the flawed assumption that the Internet should become the Metaverse. The World Wide Web is interoperable, the argument roughly goes, enabling us to leap from one website to another; so too must the Metaverse.
In my chat with with Neal Stephenson, the web metaphor seems exactly what the Metaverse should not be:
“[Immersive experiences] should be linked in a kind of spatial arrangement,” as he put it. “It’s what is lacking in the World Wide Web — you've got this web of hyperlinks all over the place that jump you from one site to another, and there's not really a kind of spatial organization that ties it all together.”
The Metaverse was never envisioned as the totality of the Internet. At its heart, it is a virtual world: dynamic, real time, immersive, with a base consensual reality shared by a community of active users within it. Analogizing this to the web — flat, relatively static and asynchronous — misses this essence.
This web analogy is among the many factors that caused Second Life to lose its growth momentum; updating its user interface to resemble a 2D medium grafted onto an immersive real time experience only contributed to new user confusion, and an open mutiny by veteran users. You can click from one web page to another; you cannot click a mountain and then expect to somehow end up in an underwater cave.
The web experience is more or less the same between different web browsers, because they stream the same underlying content. The user interface of a virtual world, however, is part of that world, and cannot be altered substantially from one user to the next.
While many advocates will strenuously disagree, metaverse interoperability for the most part seems like a solution in search of a genuine problem. I would put this problem in the form of a question:
“Is your vision of the Metaverse really just Steam with a few less steps?”
Because the interoperable vision, usually described as a network or federation of many virtual worlds that users can teleport to, is really not too different from what consumers already have with Steam (or Xbox Live, or the PlayStation Store, etc.) Experientially, we already travel from one virtual world to another on these platforms after several clicks and minutes of loading time. Beware a vision for the Metaverse which offers to replace this with something only slightly better.
Veteran MMO game designer Damion Schubert likens the interoperability vision to an ambitious but naive startup attempting to create virtual cars which somehow work in wildly different online racing games such as Forza, Wipeout, Need for Speed, and Mario Kart. Each of these game experiences imbue the virtual cars within them with unique physics, game mechanics, and interactivity that simply does not translate.
What is also forgotten by interoperability advocates is that it’s been tried before.
NEXT — What we learned from the OpenSim experiment, and what really matters in metaverse platform interoperability:
At the peak of Second Life’s success in 2008, Linden Lab partnered with IBM to develop and showcase early stages of interoperability, enabling users to teleport their avatar from SL to OpenSim, an open source spinoff of Second Life. Intel and other tech companies and organizations also contributed development resources.
"Interoperability is a key component of the 3D Internet and an important step to enabling individuals and organizations to take advantage of virtual worlds for commerce, collaboration, education, operations and other business applications," an IBM executive announced in the PR push. “Developing this protocol is a key milestone and has the potential to push virtual worlds into the next stage of their evolution."
Exactly the opposite happened. While the real evolution went into the mass market growth of decidedly non-interoperable consumer game platforms like ROBLOX and the rest, the project driven by IBM — one of the world’s most profitable technology companies — floundered and rapidly lost steam, bogged down by governance issues around IP rights and security. Perhaps more pressing, interoperability attracted little interest by everyday virtual world users. (As for OpenSim, it exists to this day, but as a very niche platform mostly supported by a few thousand educators.)
Finally (and most key), interoperability misses the core realization that people and the communities they create, not any technology stack, make metaverse platforms meaningful and worthwhile.
As such, interoperability as generally understood, runs counter to a core principle of successful metaverse platforms: Community Creates Value. No matter how expensive or hard-earned, virtual items detached from their original social context tend to quickly lose their value.
I’d suggest a corollary to that: Only Community Must Be Interoperable.
As long as denizens of one metaverse platform are able to export contacts to their friends and colleagues there, most other interoperability questions fall away.
In any case, a level of community interoperability has been created already, with or little or no oversight by metaverse companies — virtual world friends tend to quickly connect with each other on Discord, TikTok, and other platforms, and often spend as much or more time with each other there, than in the actual immersive virtual world.
In his own book The Metaverse, Matthew Ball briefly touches on a concept of interoperability that’s different from how it’s generally understood: Not to enable 3D asset transfers, but to address metaverse platforms’ broadly shared desire to tap down on racism and other anti-social behavior by trolls — the small but incredibly radioactive subset of users whose main goal is (with an impressively dedicated sociopathic zeal) to abuse these platforms and the players, until they are finally banned from a particular world… after which, typically, they migrate to another platform, and once again fire up their special feedback loop of assholery.
In cases like this, Ball suggests, interoperability on the user account level would be a powerful way to identify and blacklist this behavior.
“So what you're talking about is interoperation of data and identity,” he tells me. “This is much easier technically. And I think it's a lot more powerful.
This specific version of interoperability definitely has value (if carefully managed to avoid false positive trolls identification). It’s also a corollary to my principle, Only Community Must Be Interoperable.
Call it: Only tools that support the community must be interoperable.
Please read (or hear) the rest of my book:
Painting by Jeffrey Lipsky — read about it here.
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