Does Epic Not Linden Lab Better Deserve the Title of Metaverse Builder?

Second Life is a predecessor of Epic's Fortnite, which is fast evolving from a battle royale shooter to a full-fledged virtual world, all of which leads JohnC to make this observation:

Well, as much as I love and will always be an SL addict, I have to say, that if ever there were going to be a company capable of bringing Ready Player One into existence, it would be Epic. No other company comes close when it comes to support and dedication to its player base. I got Unreal, the game, the day before it was released way back in the late 1990's. I got it only because of the editor that came free with it. For me it beat the hell out of the Quake editor that looked like an architects nightmare. Epic were always on the side of the artist, the creator, and they still are. As much as I would hate it to my core, if one day some creation of Epic killed of SL, then I would at least feel that in my heart, the far superior, truly player-aligned company won.

It's very true Epic has always been a strong supporter of user-generated level modding and other UGC. (Fortnite itself evolved into being from an internal game modding jam.) JohnC's comment reminds us that the idea of building a metaverse is not just a dream of technologists like Philip Rosedale, but has very much been a goal of many game developers for decades. Second Life co-founder Cory Ondrejka had a pretty extensive background in game development before coming to Linden Lab -- he even lead developed a fantasy battle arcade game which once sat in Linden's lobby! -- so it's not surprising that he was the main point person who showed off Second Life to game developer colleagues who ultimately went on to create Fornite.

Speaking of which, notwithstanding JohnC's distaste of the Quake editor, it was also intended as the precursor for the metaverse. Read this classic Wired article from 1996:

"I had read Snow Crash," says Abrash, referring to Neal Stephenson's fictional take on how cyberspace might be actualized, "and realized I could make 90 percent of it work."

He spent months trying to get Microsoft to let him create the infrastructure of cyberspace, proposing a game research project that would feature shared worlds. Eventually Microsoft approved his project, but gave another group responsibility for infrastructure design - the part Abrash most wanted to do.

"It would be an understatement to say I was depressed. I had been slogging through bug-fix and ship-cycle hell in Windows NT for two years, and the thought of this project was what kept me going. With it gone, I had nothing to look forward to but more managing, more meetings, more stress - with little programming, little personal development, and no fun. I thought I had resigned myself to that, but when Carmack visited again, he talked for hours about what he wanted to do with Quake. By the time he asked me about coming to id, I wasn't so sure I wanted to say no."

... "People can make new games just by defining new databases: maps, textures, sounds, figures, and programs in Quake's interpreted language. No new code. So we do Quake, other companies do other games, people start building worlds with our format and engine and tools, and those worlds can be glommed together via doorways from one to another. To me this sounds like a recipe for the first real cyberspace, which I believe will happen the way a real space station or habitat probably would - by accretion."

To sum up: The goal of creating the metaverse has always been a competition between technologists who wanted to create an open, non-gaming platform and game developers who wanted to evolve a metaverse from within a game platform.

"I wouldn’t have thought to build into a virtual world from a non-persistent game," as Cory Ondrejka noted, "though John Carmack, who’s often smarter than the rest of us, was musing on that idea back in the day." And I would not be at all surprised that this is the direction Unreal plans to take, more or less, with Fortnite.

Comments

[Taylor]

"I wouldn’t have thought to build into a virtual world from a non-persistent game"

Fortnite -- the non-Battle Royale version -- actually is a persistent game. Not only do you have a persistent inventory, but each player gets multiple fully persistent islands over the course of the game that they build up, defend, and can return to to play with at any time.

[Jorge]

Does anyone know Conan Exiles? or Dont Starve games? It seems a bit crazy for me to consider SL as a predecessor of Fornite. As much as i love SL u dont have there prefabricated objects, buildings tools are ok but not pro. etc etc

[Amanda]

Both Epic and Linden Lab as well as many other have influenced the future. I doubt either one "IS" the future.

[seph]

Everyone disagrees on the ingredients of a "metaverse" or "virtual world" so no one is ever arguing about the same thing anyway. A lot of us Second Lifers believe a virtual should include a user-to-user economy, 99.9% of the vertices and pixels on our screens being user-made, 99.9% of the text we read be user-made, the spaces be user-owned/rented, etc. Some think WoW or Minecraft count just as much as Second Life.

There needs to be a definition before arguing what is, and if it's as loose as WoW and Minecraft who cares really, inevitably MUDs will count and D&D and campfire stories. This latest push to count Fortnite as a virtual world/metaverse will go as far as trying to count Minecraft and WoW in the past; no where because those games don't have the same aim as Second Life and its kind of virtual world.