Universal Primitives are simply predictable inputs.
This will be a short one. When you’re finished here, make sure to check out the rest of the articles from: The Universal Asset Framework Series.
A simple yet powerful idea
We’ve discussed a lot in the past about what Universal Primitives (UPs) can be, the many types of UPs we could create, but it’s always helpful to keep in mind the bigger — and simpler — picture.
As a set of standards/specifications UPs are at their core a predictable interoperable input. Something players can create outside any given world, specify/customize within some parameters defined in the specification of that UP by creating a Universal Asset (UA), and hand over to virtual worlds who can recognize and process the information associated with these UPs.
World-builders only need to use this information as a starting point, after which they can morph, transform, ignore, add, move, modify… into other objects, rules, mechanics, primitives… Whatever is needed to make sense of that information inside any particular world. This is a very simple yet powerful idea. Predictable inputs eliminates complexity, dependencies, and uncertainty. We only need to agree on the necessary specifications they must adhere to. If we want these UPs to be truly universal, this requires a form of decentralized Metaverse government.
Interoperability is as much a social commitment and effort as a technical challenge, if not more. People will need to make decisions to support some primitives over others, discuss what’s best for the inhabitants of the Metaverse, decide how these primitives need to be maintained and evolve. This is why realizing a true Metaverse must be a collective effort, something we haven’t done before. We currently don’t have such a concept of a truly universal primitive in the gaming industry, at the level of players being able to participate in the process of creating or customizing such primitives.
Part of the reason we haven’t tried this before is because it’s easier for every game and company to do their own thing. Universal interoperability of assets has been too much of a burden until now. But the Metaverse will be different. The Metaverse is not 50 game studios building and shipping a game every few years, the Metaverse will be a revolution where every person will be creating and sharing virtual worlds, just as today everyone has a camera in their phone and takes pictures.
Universal predictable inputs means different worlds can leverage them in different ways, those that are the most rewarding and popular amongst players will become more common by demand and commitment of players and world-builders to use and integrate them. Different people might decide to create new utility for a UP, but the primitive itself doesn’t need to change for others to take advantage of this, world-builders simply need to find an equivalent way to achieve the same result/output with the same predictable input, the primitive, finding a way to replicate the desired outcome.
There is something called the smart cow effect. From Wikipedia:
The smart cow effect is the concept that, when a group of individuals is faced with a technically difficult task, only one of their members has to solve it. When the problem has been solved once, an easily repeatable method may be developed, allowing the less technically proficient members of the group to accomplish the task.
The term smart cow effect is thought to be derived from the expression: “It only takes one smart cow to open the latch of the gate, and then all the other cows can follow behind.”
These predictable inputs, our UPs, are the smart cow effect on steroids. They are a fairly stable (or at least slowly evolving) type of digital primitive. There might be thousands of different ways to leverage these primitives, and it only takes one person to discover them, for everyone else to use them in the same way, since the primitives themselves don’t have to change and are presumably already in use in many worlds, or if not easy to adopt. It’s important again to remark these primitives are not a final result or output, but inputs, a starting point. World-builders decide how to leverage these inputs, what to do or not do with them, players customize and provide worlds with information and preferences in the form of data and metadata attached to these primitives, in a language virtual worlds can understand.
Final remarks
The idea is as simple as it is powerful, and I’d argue most of the challenge is a social one, getting a large collective of people to agree to create and support a minimum set of universal primitives, not the technical difficult of creating such primitives. In fact, we wish to have templates that would allow anyone to create new primitives or derivatives of existing ones that can live in our Universal Library. But then we need a social consensus on which limited number of primitives most worlds will decide to support and integrate.
The bigger point is that in my opinion this is worth the effort. The resulting Metaverse we would get, the explosion of creativity we would get. It’s a whole different type of Metaverse than the current trend towards we’re heading, one that doesn’t look all that different from current games and virtual worlds. Isolated silos, that will be come increasingly ever more beautiful and immersive yes, but still disconnected. A truly universal interoperable Metaverse will not be built for us, we have to fight for it, we have to build it. Every single one of us.
