In the past year, Touch has been paying attention to the news of the "virtual world". From "blockchain" to "NFT" to "metaverse", the concepts contained in it are gradually increasing, and it is more difficult for people to understand the principles, just like 3 balls of wool that are integrated, entangled with each other, mutually utilized, and full of mysteries.
Today, when the metaverse is gradually out of the circle, integrating blockchain and NFT, and causing a lot of attention, we feel that it is time to take the line cluster apart and look at it.
For most people, metaverses, NFTs, and blockchains are just nihilistic things that don't have much of an impact on our real lives other than graphics card prices. Frying virtual coins earns natural pleasure, but not frying it does not affect anything. We may feel that something is indicative of the future, a whole new dimension, a virtual world, but this world seems to be far away from us.
Before we talk about them, we have to figure out what exactly is under the cloak of numbers.
Blockchain, NFT, and metaversms
The earliest of these is the blockchain. By definition, it is a huge, immutable database, and all the information recorded on the chain can be automatically updated at a relatively fast speed, while saving the data intact and unaltermined. Blockchain originally conceived of itself as a "distributed ledger," a fairly apt definition that you can think of as a large ledger with each page additionally ciphered for the previous page. This gives it an immutable property – if you want to change it, everyone can see it.
Another feature of blockchain is "decentralization", which means that the ledger does not belong to some "accounting firm", but only belongs to itself, no matter how large the exchange can not change the information already stored on the chain.
Therefore, "recording" has become one of the initial application scenarios of blockchain. People initially imagined the infinite possibilities that blockchain brings to life - a world where transactions are real-time, flowing, and transparent, but more than a decade later, in addition to the "virtual currency" that has made countless people rich or bankrupt, the only thing that can be called an application may be NFTs.
NFTs are a serious application in theory. Its full name is "Non-Fungible Token", similar to the "digital signature" used to distinguish ownership. This concept is very useful in distinguishing between the copyright of virtual works, and if used properly, it can resolve some copyright disputes and protect the rights and interests of individual creators.
But at present, most of the application scenarios of NFTs are games and speculative investments – that is, "speculation". We followed NFT games once before, on June 7, 2021, when I wrote an article titled "Does Blockchain Gaming Really Have a Future?" At that time, blockchain games and NFTs were not yet popular today, and a game called "Axie Infinity" exploded in the Philippines under the name of "playing to make money", and many Filipinos who lost their jobs during the epidemic relied on it to support their families.
Axie Infinity is a game that controls small pet fights, but the focus is not on playing, but on making money
NFT games, or games with NFT elements, are broadly divided into two categories, with early NFT games generally focusing more on "tradability" and partially ignoring gameplay. For example, Axie Infinity, which we reported earlier, its mechanism is to design two kinds of props in the game, "SLP" and "AXS", the former dropped during the game, and the latter is a key prop for in-game creature reproduction, both of which can be bought and sold on exchanges. In June, the price of SLP was $0.13 and the price of AXE was $5. Half a year later, the prices of the two became $0.03 and $100, respectively. In fact, for some blockchain gamers, this is not a "playing" experience, more like "studio practice" or going to work. When there are enough players, the same involution will occur, and the price of the output SLP will be gradually lowered, and the price of the entry threshold AXS will become higher. The cost of entering the game is now completely different from half a year ago, the efficiency is also decreasing, and it is difficult for Filipinos to "play games" to support their families.
Another type of NFT game, strictly speaking, is only a "game with NFT elements", especially this year, and the first one is louder than the other. First Ubisoft announced the addition of NFT skins and equipment in Ghost Recon: Breakpoint; then Peter Molyneux announced that his new game "Legacy" is an NFT game; and GSC Gaming World, the production team of the highly anticipated AAA game "Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl", also issued a statement that it will auction 3 "NPC in the game" places to players in the form of NFT, scan their faces and join the game.
It makes me feel a little bit that Ubisoft and GSC are both established developers, and Peter Molinu — perhaps you're more familiar with the term "Magic Cow" — is an industry heavyweight producer — "How did they get to make NFT games?" ”
The Magic Cow also went off to do NFT games
This view is not uncommon, and the "Add NFT Elements to the Game" news comment section is filled with angry and helpless players who do not want the game they are looking forward to be forced into the NFT element. Bias or experience, we can see that the public players are still somewhat resistant to NFT games, in their view, this kind of hard to add NFT behavior is "rubbing heat, making quick money". The NFT elements of Stalker 2 were slammed by netizens after they were announced, and two days later the developers announced their removal. Not only netizens, but even the developers of Ghost Recon: Breakpoint are questioning this decision.
In contrast, the metaverse is more of a "set-up," the latest and hottest of several new concepts. It reveals a virtual world — if you've seen Avalanche, Ready Player One, or Summer Wars, it's easier to understand, a virtual real world. In an ideal metaverse, people break away from the real world through a software or device and enter a whole new virtual world. Here you have an avatar and can also dress yourself up by buying NFT merchandise. What can and cannot be done in reality can be achieved in the metaverse.
How far away the metaverse is from us
As a result, concepts including blockchain and NFTs seem to be fused in the metaverse. People can live in a virtual world, tokenize their rights through NFTs, buy goods, and all of this is recorded on the blockchain — there's a virtual space where everyone can coexist, there's a transaction system, there's an unchangeable ledger of records — it sounds beautiful, right.
But we are still quite far from this future.
We look back at the future vision of the metacosm, a decentralized virtual world in which all people can "live." Today in 2021, we have some so-called metaverse games, with VR head-mounted monitors that look great, with networks that are enough to download movies — but are they enough for the metaverse? A bit hard.
Let's start with "decentralization.". Whether it is the metaverse, or the blockchain, or the NFT, this concept is frequently used, it is like a symbol, representing the spirit of ordinary people rebelling against big trusts in the Internet age. When society develops to a point where the control of large corporations over society and ordinary people is high enough, people start to think about how to rebel, and this is the core idea of "cyberpunk" literature.
We can certainly think of the metacosm as a revolt against vast capital, but so far, the relatively reliable resistance is some big companies, even big trusts like Facebook (Meta).
Does Mark Zuckerberg genuinely feel that "the metacosm is the future"? I don't think so
From the conception of the metacosm, it will eventually be an incomparably huge world. Based on today's 7.9 billion world population, how many people will there be in a virtual world that can match the real world? 2 billion? 1 billion? And how many people will be online at the same time? The number of active players at the peak of World of Warcraft was 13 million (not simultaneously online), and they were also distributed in countless servers in countless regions, each with thousands of people at best, and more had to queue up to play the game - so what technology can solve the problem of 1 billion people active at the same time?
In World of Warcraft, players can do some of the things that the game prescribes, such as tailoring, alchemy, and engineering, but they are all done in the form of "reading notes". What the meta-universe hopes to achieve is definitely more refined than "World of Warcraft", the tailor has to really help people tailor-made, the alchemy needs to be mixed with its own potions, and it takes 4 years to read a degree before doing engineering... 1 billion people in the same world doing incredibly fine things, can this really be done?
Even if this problem is solved, we will still face the next question – who will run the largest platform in history? If any company has the power to push it to work, it must be the largest trust in the world, and the metacosm is antitrust. The only way to do that is for countless small fragmented metaversms to hook up with each other, like a web, and each node is part of the metacosm, but who is going to connect them together? Why would these metaversms be willing to be connected? You know, even if it is a "simple" cross-platform connection, the game companies have discussed for 10 years without a result, how many 10 years will the future of the metaverse be?
If we simply look at the development of technology, we first have a blockchain, then virtual currency and NFT, and finally a metacosm, interlocking, but think about it carefully or a bit of a problem. Blockchain is a technology, NFT is "the application of solving problems with technology", and metacosm is "the application scenario of technology in the future". It's like we've created more things in order to apply a certain technology – wouldn't it be more reasonable if I had a metaverse to provide a scenario, then invented a blockchain to solve the problem of decentralization, and then used derivative NFTs to solve the problem of virtual item transactions?
The consequence of the reverse order is that we will be forced to face meaningless applications and treat them as treasures. For example, virtual currency, meta-universe speculation and many NFT elements added to the game. These happen to be the parts that people have the worst impression of similar technology. Games have been moving closer to the "Ninth Art" over the past few years, trying to make it into the art of film, music, and painting, and the increasing use of NFTs in games has clearly pulled it further away from the Ninth Art.
Flipping houses in the meta-universe is quite boring
Seriously, do we really need a metacosm?
Sometimes, we seem to be caught up in the assumption that a metacosm is a given future, but is the metacosm really the future?
In the science fiction world, there is an evolutionary process of predictions about the future, and at first, the future was imagined to belong to space, with motherships across the sky, interstellar wars, intergalactic migration, and "C-rays shining in the darkness of Don's Gate of Don Huaiser." Later, after the end of the space race, people's interest in the unknown world gradually cooled, and they did not know whether there would be a chance to witness the next human landing on the moon, so the imagination of science fiction writers for the future became the "thinking about the nature of human beings" and "thinking about social forms" in the New Wave period, and later gave birth to "Neuromancer" and the cyberpunk style of later generations.
Neil Stephenson's Avalanche was published in 1992, it was the embryonic period of the Internet, and his imagination of the future relied on a new technology at that time. I'm afraid not.
Science fiction literature is the vision of human beings for the future under the current technological ability, not a prediction, and its relationship with science is almost one-way - science feeds science fiction, but it is not to develop science according to the vision of science fiction writers. This is the same thing in the metaverse, it is by no means the only solution to the future. If one says, "The future is the space age of 2001: A Space Odyssey" or "The future is the dark ages of Death Stranding," would people believe it? We prefer to believe that the metaverse is the future, but because we live in a period of rapid development of the Internet, it makes this false future seem extremely real.
Speaking of metaversals alone... We often use Ready Player One as an example, but would you really rather live in that world? In the background of Ready Player One, people hide in the virtual world "oasis" in order to escape the chaos of the real world. The real world there is "high-tech, low-life", and people are not happy. But in a real-life abundant – at least less barren – do we really need a "virtual world" future?
The real world in Ready Player One is not very good, so people will choose to enter the "oasis"
If we look a little further afield, guess the future after the virtual world of Avalanche – will someone abandon the real world and devote themselves to the virtual world? There will always be. The gradual increase in this kind of person is bound to open the future of "consciousness uploading", then robots may occupy the real world, and human consciousness hides in the virtual environment. And then what? Will human consciousness begin to merge? Will robots counterattack the virtual world? Maybe our future is "virtual humans vs real robots", or "the fusion of all human consciousness and the strongest computer consciousness" in "The Last Question", who knows?
But who would be as sure that these are our futures, as they believe in the metacosm?