by PonderJaunt
The metaverse is not coming — it is already here. The rules that define it will never be written, they will be forged by experience over time. The game is entering a new phase — one that seems to want to build around the concept of MMORPGs or Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games. But these new games involve real people, real ideas, real content and certainly real value.
How people choose to play games moving forward may create new ways to generate value for others at an even faster rate than games have in the past. Which roles they assume will not only impact this reality, but a new one that is being built between the past and the future.
The Metaverse is not coming — it is already here.
It sits in the middle of the way; the path is blocked and the player must choose what happens next. The consequence of these choices will affect the outcome of a gambit made before the choice was revealed to the player. They feel betrayed by this event, exposed and even entrapped. And this is the hero’s journey: Choice.
The choice to move forward or backward becomes valuable — or not — and in an instant, both are realized at the same time and for an instant, the person becomes the player; they are the same because the choices become the same. The game continues because it must. It exists to give choice to us as humans. To force us as humans to play with the rules of the world in which we exist.
Games are not distractions they are directions — they are tools to learn the best and worst of what it means to be human. Choice is a fickle thing. Choice provides endless opportunity and infinite constraints, and that is why we all play games with choice as a feature. We walk along with these choices like tight ropes — some much more precariously than others. And yet we all fundamentally understand that choices are almost purely represented in the games we all love to play to educate us about the power of choice.
If you are reading this piece, you have chosen to learn about the future of gaming. You have chosen to understand how value may be accessed by players who are looking to change the rules.
So now I introduce a new game. One that involves the metaverse, because it is already here. And the best part is that you can play this game with your mind — you are the player.
Shall we begin?
The MMORPG always starts with character creation. Why? Because you must choose to exist in that world first. The first choice is always the hardest. The next choices snowball from the original and we start to see the power of games revealed. We revel in choice and the risks and rewards that are consequences of our gamified actions are non-trivial. It is profound. We celebrate great choices and revile those who choose wrongly.
Your first choice is to choose to continue reading — or not.
I hope you choose right. However, right and wrong don’t exist in games, truly. These are human rules, and they change very quickly. This was so frustrating to other humans that it was decided that math could help solve making choices that didn’t count for silly things like morality. Math allowed a science that affects almost every decision that is made within a complex system to start to define what choice was for many things — and it changed how we valued choice in most human systems.
Game Theory is the branch of mathematics concerned with the analysis of strategies for dealing with competitive situations where the outcome of a participant’s choice of action depends critically on the actions of other participants.
Some may not see those choices, these gamified decisions, made every second of every day. Yet, they exist. These games are so much more complex, that when the rules change, they create new games inherently. And then new participants, new players, seek them out just to analyze them — to observe — this observation is a very new game and it is very valuable. Keep this in mind as we continue.
The world loves to play games. We as humans tend to embrace the ebb and flow of culture with some disdain, but we will ignore cultural flows to compete against each other fanatically — and these are called games too. War is gamified; Love is gamified. Tradition and progress pull at opposite ends of the same rope — and this itself is a game called ‘tug-of-war’. There remains a single constant in this continuous dynamic struggle towards the future of human conditioned systems: our games.
Games bring together the best of humanity to compete and collaborate for common goals and aspirations. How these games might grow into a new valuable global economy has much less to do with the flashy terms thrown around by techno ideologists, and everything to do with whom writes the new rules by which players participate.
The ‘metaverse’ is never going to write any rules, nor will any participants ever agree on any one set of rules to play by — it, the metaverse, is going to incentivize running from rules. It will reward the architects of new games. It’s going to create every possible opportunity to play games-within-games, in-between various rulesets — this is rather meta if you ask me.
This is how the metaverse will learn what value is to other players, other humans, through experience — XP.
Let X = Experience; Let P = Players; and let R = Rules; when games are comprised of XRP, where the product of Players’ Experiences are multiplied by all the Rules that govern those experiences, which results in a potential exponential value for all players over time. So far we have XRP=Value/Time
Let’s consider this ‘XRP’ a player too. Why? Not because it’s human, but because it’s comprised of humans — as players experiencing rules over time. And over time more players will most likely become non-humans — ‘non-player characters’ (NPC)s — and they will have every incentive to not play by the rules either.
Equations are silly like that. As soon as you begin to move things around, the rules seem to change. Science is even more fascinating when you consider that it’s entirely based around a set of rules to break rules made by man over time.
Why? Because humans make choices. Some are wrong, but the right ones create so much value for all other humans, that breaking the rules became celebrated — and some bad decisions are tolerated because their risks hold value to other players who see bad choices as rewarding. All of this leads to a simple hypothesis:
Humans will choose to make a participant that can make choices for them as players in a grand game.
This is perhaps the ultimate game is it not? Westworld. These NPCs will become real over time, seeking value just like the rest of us humans. Artificial intelligence in games is not coming — it is already here.
We built games, and we built players, and we built new value systems around these concepts. The board is set, the equation is defined, and only one piece remains: Value. So let’s solve for that. CASINO COIN & ARTFX META 4 In a world that runs like an arcade — do the coins rule the system?
This may be true from a players perspective, until one realizes that an operator can change the rules of the game too — so that coins become tokens that allow us to choose actions in a new grand game where operators can choose to facilitate such actions or not — choice is universally applied in this experiment.
The value of a coin or a token can change if the rules of the games in which it enables action changes. This is only fair seeing as all the rules of all the games potentially being played are changing constantly. The choice to play games with coins is valuable itself to the player who holds the coins and any other participant that wishes to play specific games — or take specific actions.
However, if we were to describe these systems to something that had no concept of what a game is, or how choice could be valuable, we require a defined constant.
In this arcade-world-MMORPG-thought-experiment that we are all hypothetically playing, let’s call this constant ‘Time’ and enter a new level of the thought experiment where we start to experience value over time together playing games.
Not so far of a stretch of the imagination — especially if you have read this far — a rewarding choice; not right or wrong, with tolerable risk. You are a true player.
For players, the question becomes how do participants protect their valuable experiences over time — how do we play these new games together?
Remember, if the metaverse is here, and experience over time can create new rulesets — then shouldn’t we change the games we play? Ought we change the value of time not only for ourselves, but for others too?
In a world where time is money, how people spend their time creates a unique value proposition for others at a faster rate than ever before. I would hypothesize that your choice today will continue to generate new opportunities to build new games at an accelerated rate. Such a great choice — which one will you make next?
New games require new rules. Playing by the rules would result in no new games — and that is not valuable for anyone. So games will have rules, which will be broken by players who seek to build new games. And as everything breaks and builds around us all, the coins become a measurement of choice over time — that we call experience. And Experience is valuable because we use it; we spend it to make new choices.
Thus, we cast the die again knowing that at the end of the day, we chose to be here, experiencing a world built around rules that are always changing — and that is the metaverse.
ARTFX META is excited to join as a player in this new game with CasinoCoin. The rules are changing, but the Metaverse is already here.