Y’all know that Ready Player One was a DYS-topia right guys?
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But it was still owned privately. Ideally, the virtual paradise would use a federation method with an open protocol, so anyone could connect to it.
It was basically owned by Gaben who died and some other corporation tried to take over Valve.
That’s the idea the book tries to convey, but even to the extent it gets idealized we see that Oasis is overmonetized and poor people have a harder time enjoying themselves compared to those who are better off. At one point Wade gets stuck on the education world because he doesn’t have enough money to travel to other worlds.
Not that money doesn’t buy entertainment in our world also, but we have a variety of free options too.
Snowcrash was a dystopia too but that didn’t stop tech bros from jerking it to the metaverse.
I think most govts and corporations see the word “dystopia” and understand “how-to manual”
I mean, this is definitely going to be a disaster but I think the title and article here are a little misleading. The author implies that Warner Brothers is spearheading (and paying for) this venture, but I just read through the buzzword salad of a press release and it barely mentions them. The project is driven by an independent company that licensed the ready player one IP from WB. The whole thing very carefully avoids any details about money changing hands, but my guess is either that WB is getting paid, or they’ve negotiated a cut of any theoretical future profits. Of course, the chances of there ever being profits are slim to none, but I’d say at worst they’re net $0 on the deal, and at best they actually made some money by getting paid up front. They might suffer some reputation damage if it becomes a real catastrophe, but as the author of the article mentioned they are billions in debt, so its probably a risk they’re happy to take.
Crazy that this involves the author… We really can’t learn can we?
This is seeing the Titanic movie and saying, “yup, we’re building the titanic and sailing into an iceberg! Who’s coming with us?”
Now I’m actually wondering if the author thinks the Ready Player One world is worth living in.
He really does.
Ready Player One sounds, on the surface, like a searing critique of corporate capitalist bullshit, but in the end the actual upshot in the novel and movie is “We need kinder, gentler billionaires to be our feudal overlords”.
Nevermind that Wade in RPO doesn’t give a single shit to everyone else dying in stack collapses or any other form of cyberpunk misery which that world is full of. As long as his VR theme park doesn’t have too many ads.
Ernest Cline is a sellout who got lucky piggybacking off the success of popular franchises. I’ve seen high schoolers write better than that guy.
I agree. I couldn’t get through the first 10 pages.
Since I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere else in the comments, I thought I’d leave this here: https://372pages.com/episode-0-a-book-were-probably-going-to-hate
“372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back” is a podcast where Mike Nelson (MST3K, Rifftrax) and Conor Lastoka (Rifftrax) read and review books they’re “pretty sure they’re going to hate”. RP1 is the first book & source of the podcast title, since it’s 372 pages. It’s like Mystery Science Theater 3000 for books and it is hilarious, I highly recommend.
It’s easily the worst book I’ve read, and I only finished because of the unintentional hilarity of it all. In a story ostensibly about how evil media mega corporations are, the author wrote a hail corporateove love letter to top selling franchises without realizing the irony.
There was potential in it being a self parody, although in a way the whe situation is funnier because he was so earnest.
It’s a blur to me now but I just remember so many forced 80s references, and the plot was basic. Fan fiction vibes.
Ironically I found the megacorp produced movie version much more palatable both because it wasn’t stuck on making that which the author liked the only media worth obssessing about, it showed that fans of all eras enjoyed themselves equally in that world. And because it gave more of a human core to Halliday’s quests and the plot, rather than it just being about who’s more of a fanboy gets rich and gets the girl.
Seeing the book describe how Wade is so great at reciting every line of War Games just took me out of it. Am I supposed to be impressed by this second hand fawning over a different story? Is there even a point to that beyond Halliday/Ernest Cline thinking it’s cool?
I spent my first audible credit on that book. I hadn’t seen the movie…still haven’t. But it was narrated by Wil Wheaton, and I knew him from reddit. He did a good job. That’s all I have to say about it.
Same only way I heard it and the movie sucked ass. He is a sellout won’t even touch the second one.
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I’m sorry, the what?
Yeah i know I’m getting old when i have no idea what the headline means and I’ve only read the book. 🧐
“Fortnite, the real, actual closest thing to a metaverse we have”
Umm, what?
Funny thing is, a real life Metaverse has existed for over 20 years. The term Metaverse comes from a book called Snow Crash. The game Second Life was designed explicitly to be the Metaverse envisioned in Snow Crash, complete with it’s own economy tied to real life money (as in, if you made enough money in-game, you could cash it out for real-world USD). Companies used to build headquarters in the game world similar to how some do in Fortnite now, even going so far as to hold actual real world business meetings in-game as a form of teleconferencing. After a few high-profile events where live TV broadcasts of in-game events got swarmed by flying dicks, the media lost interest in the game, and companies abandoned the game and moved on to more business-oriented solutions.
Yeah I remember when Second life houses were sold for $1M usd. It was crazy and all years before other virtual marketplaces took off. It was ahead of its time and is now dead.
Not quite dead. On life support, sure, but the porn/furry communities keep it alive.
People don’t associate Fortnite with that due to the main game being just pvp instanced deathmatches. But it is, by far, the most comprehensive example of what a corporate * metaverse would look like, specially now that they have their creative mode or whatever it’s called.
*I know something like VR Chat or your favorite MMO with housing is closer to what people would want or imagine the metaverse to be, but that’s not what the buzzword is for the suits.
But it is, by far, the most comprehensive example of what a corporate * metaverse would look like,
Roblox seems to fit that more than a pvp death match game with some events tacked on.
It’s not just some events tacked on. I’m pretty sure you can create your own game experiences inside of Fortnite much like Roblox.
I would kind of agree, that and Roblox. No VR though.
roblox is the best place
Inb4 Bloxchain
When I hear about concerts, and hotels reproducing their entire layout inside of Fortnite, I can actually respect the comparison. Of course, I’ve also seen many advertised attempts at “maid cafes” within the residential districts of FFXIV, so there’s multiple people trying it - Fortnite is just the most well known.
If you take the Ready Player One’s example of a metaverse, that is, one where people get to cosplay their favorite famous media properties, I don’t think it’s a wrong assessment.
Otherwise I would say VRChat is a much more honestly realized version of that.
I thought we were done with web3 nft bs
They’re desperate to make it happen because the potential benefits to them are so great that they become blinded by greed.
Don’t forget the sunk cost fallacy!
NFTs for just art I’m not sure what’s going go happen, but NFTs are never going to go away when they represent an actual useful digital thing like a concert ticket.
The tech and industry just needs to further mature.
But you don’t need NFT to make a concert ticket… a barcode or QR with a simple unique number works just as well.
You don’t need anything to anything, it’s just a theoretical improvement.
No one is hacking your email and stealing the barcode, or figuring out the algorithm and generating fake barcodes. There’s no risk that if I sell the barcode to someone else that I also didn’t sell it other people as well.
Ticket fraud is huge. (Edit its a multi billion dollar problem)
To then solve those problems you bring in middle men and they charge fees.
Reselling a concert ticket securely (from my perspective, not companies) cost me and the user 5% each. And that’s if a service is even offered.
An NFT concert ticket legitimately solves a lot of real problems more efficiently than existing technology.
But ease of use of crypto and transaction fees are still too high to make this a mass market solution. That’ll change though.
NFTs are supposed to be cryptographically secure and blockchain-tracked certificates of authenticity for digital goods. “This is a unique original work by so-and-so”. Any duplication wouldn’t have the same hash and thus is not legitimate.
There are plenty of good uses for this if you are of the mindset that digital goods need to be protected and proven as unique and original works. In a proper setup, it would negate the need for DRM and enable the legal sale and trade of digital media/games in the secondary market, by preventing unlawful duplication (piracy). This is beneficial because piracy, as GabeN prophesized, is an issue of service, not price. Consumers are typically willing to pay good money for good entertainment. They do not want to pay good money and find that a game is incomplete or poorly optimized, or to have less product (digital good) for the same price (physical good) (i.e., not being able to re-download after an arbitrary date, not be able to resell, lack of boxart, bonus content, etc).
NFTs do not solve the problem of proof of ownership. Nor can they. If someone steals it from you - whether by trickery, force, or any other means - it’s just as lost to you as any other stolen thing, digital or physical. (Not to touch on the fact that NFTs to date have just been URLs to web hosted media, i.e. ridiculously non-unique and insecure.)
Also, your whole paragraph about theoretical NFT replacement for DRM is just describing a different kind of DRM.
You’re describing DRM in another form and shape.
DRM is never about consumer rights, it’s about taking them away, it’s about making sure that the consumer never gets to own a piece of digital media and is always dependent on some online service so it can be revoked and resold. Because it’s ok when Disney sells you the same movie 5 times but not if you resell it once, right? 🙄
DRM-free media (such as GOG games) do much more to guarantee continuous ownership than NFT could ever do.
there is absolutely nothing an NFT can do, that we can’t already do in a much simpler, less resource heavy, way. nothing.
everything you describe can be done without NFTs and easier. NFT’s have zero value.
Absolutely. Seeing that a concert ticket is tied to a venue with limited space, the venue can set how many tickets ought to be available for a show. Ultimately it depends on centralized verification, therefore there is no point in using NFTs for it.
The book was crap so I wouldn’t expect anything else. I honestly think it was one of the worst books I’ve read.
I haven’t read the book, but the movie was crap too. It was just a slide show of '80s and '90s references that completely failed to capture what made those good, or even understand them.
The book ran full off 'memberberries as well.
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WB execs are currently in the #1 position on the list of dumbest motherfuckers of 2024. And boy are they setting the bar REALLY high.
Not even going to joke about this, but I am really hoping nobody there gets the bright idea to make a Barbie blockchain or NFT or anything like that.
Speaking of “Ready Player One”, the author Ernest Cline also wrote literally the absolute worst, grossest, most misogynistic poem I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading in my life. Now you’ll have to read it too to make sure the “Reqdyverse” never succeed and thus, zero possibility of Barbie blockchain.
This was really sad and arrogant
That was so fucking weird and gross. Thank you for sharing.
lol wtf
Dunno when he made that (1990s? Early 2000s?), but nowadays even those “nerdy, smart” women are easy to find in porn. Hentai also has that in droves.
Just when I thought the WB’s DC cinematic Universe was such a huge Trainwreck, it looks like they plan to top it with this.
Oh and remember Space Jam?
DCEU was and is a trainwreck but the trailer for their game DC online game was banging: https://youtu.be/0WYwXer0sgU?si=XN_Xp6wyS10X2SID
i thought metaverse thingy is dead?
It is. Of the 3 big emergent techs, vr, crypto, and AI, ai is the only non bullshit one, and the meta verse bet on the other two…
Torment Nexus strikes again
