In Praise of Rec Room's Live Creation & Teaching Features -- and a Defense of Its Cartoonish Graphics (Comment of the Week)

Many interesting comments in last week's post about Philip Rosedale's desire to bring back in-world, collaborative creation as the gold standard, including this one by Martin K., going into detail about how many resources it has for that feature.

Have a look at this page, it links to Discord servers of dozens of classes that are taught live in VR. (Discord is typically used for scheduling classes and other asynchronous communication.) These are not videos but live classes in VR. 

How many such live classes about creating worlds are there in VRChat? In Second Life? Supporting a culture of live teaching is probably reason enough to support live collaboration.

Rec Room the company also has a very active YouTube channel devoted to in-world creating and scripting (see above).

Writing further, Martin somewhat objects to my comment that Rec Room's cartoonish, blocky graphics may not be broadly appealing: 

While that sentiment is not wrong, it can be said about any artistic style - including the best "realistic" graphics of Second Life and VRChat. In fact, it is especially true for the best "realistic" graphics of Second Life and VRChat because avatars in that style are deep inside the uncanny valley. That might not be obvious in still shots, but it's painfully obvious when you compare the pre-canned movements of avatars controlled by keyboard and mouse against motion-tracked avatars.

Ask any VR player in Rec Room what they don't like about screen-mode/mobile players and you are likely to hear a rant about their robot-like appearance. The sentiment that computer graphics should be ever more "realistic" to become more immersive has been called "the immersive fallacy" in the classic book Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. It is simply not true that more "realistic" graphics are automatically more immersive.

One reason more "realistic" graphics might be less immersive is the Uncanny Valley effect. Another reason is the development costs for more "realistic" graphics that leads to budget cuts in other areas and apparently resulted in less deep gameplay. Raph Koster argued that online virtual worlds reached their "peak complexity" in 1992-2003.

And even the players who are attracted by more "realistic" graphics soon find out that they need a powerful PC to be able to enjoy those graphics - but only with other players who have access to powerful PCs, while players on low-end and mobile devices enjoy virtual worlds with less demanding graphics but populated by larger communities. In any case, the commercial success and broad appeal of Nintendo Wii, Minecraft, and countless mobile games speaks for itself.

I definitely agree there! In fact, the largest (broadly defined) metaverse platforms in terms of users are Minecraft and Roblox, both decidedly blocky and cartoonish. Then again, I do still think that aesthetic holds them (and Rec Room) back demographically, with their main user base being teens and young teens, while platforms like VRChat not to mention Fortnite with their more expressive art appealing to older teens and the early 20s crew.

More reading here:

• Rec Room Has An In-World, Spatial, Embodied, Full VR Programming Language Called Circuits
• Rec Room Creation Community & Development Features More Powerful & Robust Than Many Assume, Argues Rec Room Creator

Comments

[Luther Weymann]

If you are not already doing this, I encourage you to try it a few times. When you are out and about in SL, like a big dance venue or out on the mainland, look at your nearby avatars and see if there are any Day 1 avatars near you. Then do the unimaginable, say Hi to them, and ask them if they need any help on their Day 1. You're going to find out many have no idea how to rez, that they don't know about the SL Market or that it has tons of free stuff or how to unpack, they have no idea what a sandbox is, how to click a dance ball and join in, or most shockingly, they won't answer your IM because they don't know they have IM. And you'll find that the long walk the avatar was supposed to take at the birthing center and read all those How To signs was a total failure. The first hour of SL noobies is a nightmare of corporate thinking about how to build and sustain a user base. I offer no ideas here because I've been offering good ideas about this for over a decade and a half, and no one listens. But it would help if you gave it a try. Say Hi to Day 1 avatars and tell them you can help. You won't believe what you are going to hear back.

[Martin K.]

Thanks for featuring my comment!

> Then again, I do still think that aesthetic holds them (and Rec Room) back demographically, with their main user base being teens and young teens, while platforms like VRChat not to mention Fortnite with their more expressive art appealing to older teens and the early 20s crew.

I've thought about the reasons for the demographics quite a bit.

Sometimes there are probably feedback loops at work that lead to somewhat homogeneous demographics. One feedback loop for games with user-generated content and non-personalised world recommendations might be this:

• A large group of users engages consistently with specific worlds.
  
• Those worlds tend to do relatively good in the non-personalised world recommendations for all users.
  
• Users with similar interests will benefit from the recommendations, while users with other interests will have a harder time to find interesting worlds.
  
• The result is that the specific group of users will grow and engage even more with the specific kinds of worlds, while other groups of users will shrink.
  

Another feedback look for games with monetized, user-generated worlds is probably this:

• If the majority of money-spending users prefers certain kinds of worlds, creators will be incentivised to produce such worlds.
  
• As more such worlds are created, the whole game becomes more attractive for users with similar interests as the majority of players, while fewer worlds are created for users with other interests, potentially making it less interesting to them. Thus, the majority grows and other groups shrink.
  

In this and similar ways, players sort themselves into "their" communities, which become relatively homogeneous. (This kind of sorting is not limited to communities of computer games, you can also find it in the real world, see http://www.thebigsort.com/ .)

How can games overcome this trend towards more homogeneity? By breaking these feedback-loops, in particular making sure that all world recommendations are based on individual preferences. And this is not a new idea: it's just the reason for the success of Web 2.0 as Amazon, YouTube, and social media learned to personalise recommendations. And, yes, this will lead to many small echo chambers - but that might still be better than the whole community being a single, giant echo chamber.

[globle]

I enjoy your presentation style and value your brilliant ideas.