Digital matter. Or how to materially constrain the Metaverse.
When you’re finished here, make sure to check out the rest of the articles from: The Universal Asset Framework Series.
Why would we want to materially constrain the Metaverse?
A property of the physical world we live in is that physical stuff (matter, atoms, etc.) are finite in amount. When it comes to building virtual worlds we have two options, to allow an unlimited amount of stuff, matter, virtual atoms… or to somehow limit their production and/or amount inside a virtual world. Both paths are viable, but the gameplay and experience opportunities would be very different, different people might prefer to spend their time in one type of world or another.
Materially restricted virtual worlds are a natural way to make things that live inside that world more “real” and valuable. It mirrors the world we know of, where a sword made of gold is intrinsically more valuable than a sword made of wood. If in order to materialize in-world any asset we first need to gather the material components to fabricate it. This is a dynamic typical of many current videogames. The question is, how can we implement this at the scale of the Metaverse?
No tokens, please
Our framework naturally suggests a couple of ways we might achieve this. We know that in order to have true interoperability, we tend to like having something that is independent of any individual virtual world, likely a Universal Primitive (UP). However, one might consider first the possibility of making digital matter/atoms in the form of for example, tokens living on a blockchain. Where each atomic element is its own token and has a real market price in terms of real money. I’m sure somebody will try this approach, and I think it’s a terrible idea!!
We have to be very careful how we mix real money and virtual worlds, we certainly want for some things to have real economic value and be ownable (this is why NFTs for interoperable assets makes a lot of sense). But we don’t want to create pay-to-play or unfair or unsustainable play-to-earn mechanics. It would be very dystopian if you had to pay real money to acquire fake digital atoms before you could use one of your imported items inside a virtual world.
There will be money intertwined with the Metaverse, but money should not give some wealthy players an unreasonable advantage over other Metaverse players. Which is what inevitably would happen if we started creating tokens for digital atoms. They would have a real market value, drive speculation, and the rich would hoard “digital-gold” to create better or more valuable in-game items. This might be tried as an experiment for some virtual worlds, but I don’t think we want to follow this as a blueprint for most virtual worlds of the Metaverse. However, the concept of being materially constraint is still very interesting from a gameplay and philosophical perspective, we just need to be careful to not mix it with real-world money.
If not tokens, how then?
I think it makes more sense for each individual virtual world to have their own in-world economy for “digital matter”, on the one hand it’s more complicated, because instead of one independent source of truth we have one per world. But as mentioned previously, the dangers of mixing real money with virtual worlds in this way I think is too dangerous, and current videogames and worlds are already familiar and comfortable with the notion of having in-world economies. We can however get some sort of interoperability, in a slightly more indirect way with the help of Universal Primitives (UPs). We could create a universal library of materials, where each possible material is a UP, each having a fixed chemical formula (perhaps even a crystalline structure, and further physical or chemical properties).
In order for this to work however, I think we would need to revolutionize how 3D objects are created and used inside virtual worlds. This is a technology we currently don’t have, but that we could build if we wanted to. We essentially would need a way to break any 3D file into tiny individual shapes/meshes (instead of 1 giant triangular mesh), and make each mesh be made of one particular material. Objects would be made of “gluing together” all these sub-meshes, and global physical and chemical properties would be derived from the sum of those of its individual components.
This would mean virtual objects would resemble much more closely real physical objects, but this is computationally and technologically much more complicated than having a single 3D mesh, so it might take us a while for consumer-grade hardware and software to be able to make this a reality. It would however give us many benefits, such as being able to give physical properties to any virtual object like mass (by multiplying the average density of the collection of all the sub-meshes of an object by its average volume), and even chemical or magical properties, all in a predictable and unambiguous way.
More importantly, whenever we create a Universal Asset (UA), we can now require the associated 3D file we’ll link, to be made of this family of sub-meshes, and for each sub-mesh to specify of what material it’s made of, which determines its chemical formula, and how much mass of each chemical element it needs to have. This is just additional information the asset would have, which when importing it into any virtual world that is materially restricted, would now require the player to acquire a certain amount of “matter” in-game, enough to materialize that item in-world.
Since virtual worlds will have their own internal economy in non-real currency for how much worth “digital chemical elements and materials” are, each virtual world is materially separated from others, and we don’t need to worry about players going to one world where materials are cheaper, “minting/forging” an interoperable virtual object like a sword, and bringing it to another world where materials are more expensive, and try to make a profit with the difference or have a gameplay advantage over other players.
If we did wanted to try the idea of minting or forging objects in one world, and being able to move them to other materially constrained virtual worlds without having to mint the object again, there could be some sort of alliance between worlds and or standards, where worlds can issue to any object a verifiable credential (this is a DID thing (decentralized identifiers)). And that be enough if other worlds accept that. But I don’t know how practical that would be, and if most worlds would take that approach.
My chemical Metaverse
The general prospect however of giving physicality through essentially “virtual chemical elements” to the Metaverse I believe is very rich and interesting. Not only that, but besides a regular periodic table of normal chemical elements, we might even create a periodic table of new elements, even one for magical elements!! So we can now have magical objects inside virtual worlds, and still be materially constrained. The task however is pretty daunting, we would have to create a universal library of Universal Primitives (UPs), one for each type of possible material (wood, steel, ceramics…). There would likely be thousands or millions of instances.
Nonetheless, world-builders would take advantage of this system and use it across their entire virtual world. Unlike more complicated UPs for weapons and other assets that need to be manually supported, the hope is that such a library of materials would be simply a one button import for world-builders, so all they would need to design are the systems and economies of how to handle “matter”, but not worry about individual materials.
Now every time any player wants to import something into a virtual world, they need to gather in-game the required amount of chemical elements, which are encoded in the UA, once the player has them, they can create that object in-world and use it. The virtual world can keep track at any moment of how many atoms the entire world has, and tweak how players can mine or earn these digital chemical elements, increasing or decreasing the difficulty as needed. They just become another typical in-game economy, which world-builders and videogames already know how to deal with.
Maybe Tokens?
The concept of making digital tokens be digital atoms still has some appeal though. If there were a way to mine these tokens with some sort of Proof of Work mechanism, or similar, that is easy for your average user to obtain without having to pay money for them, then these tokens could be used across several worlds. Tokens/digital atoms could be locked along-side an asset, and virtual worlds could check this and give extra properties to these items in-game. This would avoid having to mine digital atoms in each new world one visits.
Final remarks
The concept of digital atoms opens the door to a whole new multiverse of possibilities, where virtual objects have a real material cost, which I believe makes them more real and valuable (subjectively, and inside any given virtual world economy). I would imagine it would be typical to smelt items to regain back materials to forge newer ones or just get some in-game currency or create new items. Imagine for example a PvP world where by defeating a player that had a sword made of gold you get that sword, but your play-style of combat favors a pair of daggers, so you take the gold sword and smelt it and get back a gold ingot, which you now use to cast a new pair of gold daggers — now that’s what I call recycling! We can potentially create materially/energetically-closed digital universes!!
We also only need to put a system like this on interoperable objects if we want, so other objects in the world could be completely free of any material cost. Although it would be very interesting to see virtual worlds where every atom from a tree, rock, mountain is minable, recyclable. So many possibilities. And of course, some worlds can still decide not to have any material costs at all and follow their own bespoke rules. But now by asking creators to specify what a UA is made of, we get an asset that is usable in both materially and non-materially constrained worlds. It means something to say a digital asset is made of gold, silver, iron…
PS
I believe such a system where we have a universal library of materials might have another unexpected advantage. Since every material now has a UP, we could give them a canonical texture/appearance (so they look the same across worlds), perhaps use completely physically-base rendering of materials without any textures at all. But that is next-level tech we don’t how to build yet. Still, very intersting to ponder what the future of the Metaverse could look like.
