Gaming in the Metaverse
Metaverse Series: Part 1: The Metaverse Landscape| Part 2: The Metaverse Economy | Part 3: Gaming in the Metaverse
It is not a stretch to say that the metaverse spawned from video games. It is not difficult to recall games like Second Life (a massive sandbox game that has lost popularity from its early days) or massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft, and then today, games like Roblox, another open, sandbox game with a titanic user base. Part of the reason for producing virtual worlds and a so-called Web 3.0 is for the possibilities it could introduce into the world of gaming.
Though it is not obvious at first, gaming, and video games, are also part of the metaverse’s economy. As I touched on briefly in previous sections, gaming is an essential use-case for the metaverse as a whole, but also for non-fungible tokens. Any item in a video game can be considered a non-fungible token. Even today, weapons, support items, armor, and the like are sold on marketplaces in what we have of the metaverse. For example, take the game Fortnite, and then imagine selling your mythical rocket launcher for real (well, crypto) money. Despite items technically being considered similar (no video game has infinitely different items — there are bound to be some that are similar or identical), each item is still considered a non-fungible token and as such, unique, because the items are all different, can be at different levels, and have unique identification tags on the blockchain associated with proof of ownership.
A huge part of the metaverse’s gaming “scene,” for lack of a better word, is play-to-earn gaming. Play-to-earn gaming, as the name indicates, is the concept of gaming to earn rewards. It can also mean playing video games that are connected to the purchase and sale of NFTs. Games can be played specifically to earn money (cryptocurrency) through succeeding at levels and ranking high within the game. They can also be played to acquire rare items within a video game that can then be sold for a profit on the video game’s inbuilt marketplace. The vision for the metaverse of the future is to have items that can be sold within a larger marketplace, rather than just one provided by the game. This would involve peak interoperability — as an effective way to convert items from game to game would need to be produced. In any case, the NFTs that you buy or sell can be exchanged for cryptocurrency assets or fiat currency.
The prospect of a virtual world to play video games in with friends has appealed to the human psyche for as long as video games and computing have existed, and perhaps even further before that. In a previous section, I touched upon Facebook’s idea of doing something very similar through Oculus and their Horizon worlds. This is the chief use of the metaverse — though it is true that it can be used for a variety of things, from office work to concerts, gaming is the future of the metaverse, just as the metaverse is the future of gaming. Having the ability to build and create virtual worlds and pull friends in to play in those worlds is a dream for many, and it is no stretch to say that any company that manages to achieve this on a large scale would soon see profits beyond their wildest dreams. For the metaverse, virtual and augmented reality gaming is key, which is why so many companies are pushing to achieve it.
For a more personal example, let’s take a look at the game Minecraft. It is no stretch of the imagination to consider all of the metaverse-related applications that could come from the game, which I myself sank many hundreds of hours into as a preteen. It takes a large amount of effort to acquire a netherite sword with the best of best enchantments on it. The same could go for enchanted armor or an elytra. Now imagine selling those on some interconnected game marketplace run by Microsoft, which of course is already investing in the metaverse in itself. Furthermore, a large part of the game involves building and construction. It would be trivial to build a house and sell it on a virtual real estate market, or any number of other creations. People in Minecraft have worked to build entire cities — its open-source world may already be considered a metaverse, honestly, with all of the servers that exist within the game. Why not take things a step further, and fully embrace the possibilities of the metaverse?
Concluding Thoughts
Over the past few days, we have discussed the metaverse and dove into NFTs and the gaming communities. Many individuals and companies are working to produce their iterations of the metaverse for various reasons: some hope for profit that will grow the economy of this new digital marketplace and digital assets; others seek to engage with people in new, three-dimensional ways, and in labs, like UNC’s Blue Sky Innovations, startup offices, and basements; others still are working on new, yet to be seen, use-cases for the metaverse. The metaverse is a shared virtual environment that aims to produce an immersive experience for people of the world to treat just like real life, through entertainment, a decentralized marketplace, and even employment. It will have significant implications in all aspects of society, including education, politics, and the economy.
