Universal primitives as in-game blueprints/recipes

If you haven’t, be sure to check out the prior articles in this series: The Universal Asset framework series.

TL;DR

In order to make anything you usually need 3 things: a recipe, the materials to make it, and the skill and/or knowledge to build it. The first two could be encoded into Universal Primitives (UPs), and we could leave the third part, the actual building part, for each individual virtual world to decide. This is more or less the idea we discussed in this very relevant past article, where we talked about materially constraining the Metaverse: https://medium.com/foundations-for-a-truly-interoperable-metaverse/digital-matter-or-how-to-materially-constrain-the-metaverse-b96deb45f32e

Separation of concerns

The important part to remark is that the first two parts of the process can be standardized and left for users to choose. This protects the creativity and expression of users, that can come up with any design they desire that can fit within the boundaries of these standards (the ones defining UPs). We can divide this more simply into two stages, design and implementation. Users are always in charge of design, virtual worlds are always in charge of implementation.

Design should be as easy and frictionless as possible, if you can imagine it, you can make a design for it. Tools like AI will be very useful in this regard once users can design an asset by simply having a conversation with an AI. However, we might not want the implemention part to be as straightforward — at the user level that is — it should of course be at the technical level smooth. But one of the things we tend to value and that give value to physical objects we build in the physical world is the effort and the sweat we put into creating them.

More meaningful digital assets

We don’t want to necessarily make designing something hard and difficult, this can be very demotivating, but in many narratives and games we often make the building part require such an effort, whether it’s gathering the materials, smithing, going on a quest to find a rare required item to boost its properties… It’s often implemented as a fun gameplay mechanic in games, and we might want to preserve that.

This is just one way to make any digital assets we create more meaningful, both at a personal level and in general. It’s basically free to imagine and design an asset, but to actually make it come to life inside a particular virtual world, it might require some additional effort. This reflects upon the nature of any digital artifact. Any digital artifact is just a bunch of 1s and 0s, and computers have trivialize the creation, cloning, transport, and modification of digital files.

This is great in most scenarios, but one scenario where it might become a negative thing is precisely in the realm of digital assets for the Metaverse. If there is no cost to creating an awesome legendary flaming sword, that’s really cool in the beginning, but how valuable can that sword really be? We naturally value more and deem more “real” things that are unique and take effort to create.

We can build-in this effort via fun game mechanics, but still preserve this separation with respect to the design part of the process. Some worlds might require a lot of effort to “materialize” an item into a world, while others will treat an item just as any other digital file and give it to you for free. We can have our cake and eat it too.

Final remarks

By letting virtual worlds be in charge of the “implementation” phase, we get an infinite amount of possibilities on how to go from a specific blueprint/specification for a digital asset, to a real item we can use inside of a virtual world. Worlds can make this as hard or as fun as they want, according to the particular workings and requirements of their own game/world. However, by letting the design in the hands of users, we free virtual worlds from this burden, and allow users to express their full creativity without worrying on whether the items they design will or will not be actually usable in the worlds they want to be a part of.

This separation of concerns is precisely what the Universal Asset Framework (UAF) and Universal Primitives (UPs) are designed to enable. This is what enables true interoperability of assets for the Metaverse.