Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse project doesn’t start the year off right. And is that if yesterday we were talking about the hypothetical rejection of Apple to this platform, today we can confirm something that was already easy to assume previously, but that we can practically take for granted. And it is that, unlike the idealized vision that the people involved and some enthusiasts of the theoretical concept have and / or sell, the little solidity of some of its proposals they have provoked, how could it be otherwise, responses that come to discuss these points.
The first big blow to metavers in this sense came from Intel, which as a response to that digital universe that would remind us so much of Ready Player One or, if we go to the source, the metaverse posed by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash (which of so much talking about this novel lately I am getting a huge desire to read it again), he replied with an argument so solid that it is indisputable: we do not have, nor will we have in the short and medium term, with the necessary computing capacity so that what Meta tells us can become a reality.
But hey, let’s be optimistic, in this regard, Let’s think that in the coming months there will be an unexpected qualitative leap and that we can achieve the computational capacity necessary for the metaverse to be a reality. Even so, with that limitation overcome, we find other limitations that could be even more complex to overcome. And when I say complex I am probably being generous.
With the metaverse, one of the proposals that have been raised is game interoperability, more specifically that their digital assets are interchangeable between various games. For example, that the skin that I have bought for Fornite can be used, if I want, in Minecraft, in Counter Strike or in Phasmophobia. The concept is undoubtedly very attractive, as further development, even more interesting. For a moment I imagined myself with Doom’s weapons in Minecraft, or with Minecraft’s netherite armor in Call of Duty. The idea is great.
It is such a special idea that, as we can read in Business Insider, lgame makers say it’s an unrealistic fantasy and will most likely never happen. And it is that what, for the layman (role of many of the people who speak of that ideal future) is simply a set of pixels with, in any case, some specific mechanics, and that should be able to be used without limitations in the metaverse, it is actually something much more complex, and designed to fit well into a particular development.
There is a fairly common error that consists of understand that digital consists only of what is seen, underestimating «the guts». The problem is that this cannot be done, since the result would be, in the vast majority of cases, as dire as trying to do the same in the physical world. Even if they are engines, you cannot take the one from a truck and install it on a motorcycle, making the adaptation would be quite a complex engineering job, right? Well, we must think in the same way when we talk about the transfer of digital assets between games.
This unfeasible proposal has, of course, occurred in the NFT boom, which according to its defenders would be the type of asset that could be shared between various games in the metaverse. And the problem is that neither from one side nor from the other it seems that technical disquisitions have been taken into account when “selling” a concept that, of course, if realistic, would be positive for both the metaverse and the NFTs, two proposals whose future, to this day, remains in question.
