This article is from WeChat official account:Red tide AKASHIO (ID: AKASHIO)< span class="text-remarks">, author: commentary corpse, title picture from: “Black Mirror” S04E01
In March 2021, the American game platform Roblox was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, igniting the concept of Metaverse, which was born in 1992. All of a sudden, many game companies, social applications and even completely unrelated remote collaborative office began to hardly rub Metaverse.
But seeing the craze of Metaverse, I only thought of two words: run away.
Roblox is Minecraft(Minecraft)’s main competitor. The two also provide a pixel-style open world sandbox, and the biggest difference between them is that Roblox provides more complex development tools, and allows players to sell their own design gameplay to earn real money, which also makes it Think more like Metaverse than Minecraft.
Metaverse is translated as “metaverse”. It is not a game, but an attempt to create another universe in cyberspace. It may have a game-like interface, a real-world physics engine, and a long-term real economic system. It may not have fixed props, because all props are created by the player, just like the real world. It may not even have a fixed gameplay and story, because all the history is written by the player himself, just like the real world.
However, unlike the real world, in these newly created meta-universes, Cyber God has the ability to monitor and control everything about us all the time. Capital and regulation cannot manipulate the physical laws of the real world, but they can in the Metaverse.
The manipulation and supervision technology is like a gun in a novel. Once it appears, it will inevitably fire.
1. Can I squat in the Metaverse?
On May 7, 2019, CCTV reported that in the online game Minecraft, some users used various functions of the game to post pornographic information, which was reported by many parents.
“A pixel game full of bricks, how does it involve pornography?”
This is the first question that almost all netizens come to mind when they see news headlines.
But in the detailed report, there are a lot of pornographic features in Minecraft. In addition to the normal chat involving pornography, the game’s interception mechanism for player item naming, room names, etc. is not perfect. .
The most outrageous thing is that a suspected perverter opens a room and attracts players to enter, and then uses his character to squat up repeatedly to simulate indescribable behavior. Although this kind of cyber rape does not cause physical harm to children, it is not what the game designer can expect, but anyone who watches it will feel very uncomfortable.
It is very easy to manage literal explicit pornography, but on the contrary, it is extremely difficult to manage this kind of “cyber rape”.
How do you judge a person who repeatedly squats in the Metaverse is sexually harassing or dancing? Or to put it another way, if it is forbidden to squat in a metaverse, can it still be called a metaverse?
The biggest selling point of Metaverse is that “it is not a game, but another world.”
People can get rid of the gameplay designed by the game designer and explore their own way of survival. Therefore, the reason why Metaverse can be established is because the player can experience more real and free than other games. Players must not only be able to move, run, jump, but also squat, lie down, think with their cheeks, interact with everything around and then be counter-interacted, and be able to leave traces in the world, and these traces must be able to affect other players. Make an impact. Its financial system must be able to support free trading among players, and its physics engine must allow players to reach different locations through their own creations and even redefine the map.
Based on this simulation, MetaThe verse has the opportunity to allow players to create innovative gameplay that game designers can’t think of in a lifetime.
Take Minecraft as an example. This is a game that uses bricks to compose everything. It does not have any official mainstream gameplay. Everything is like the sand and mud played by the post-70s and post-80s on the roadside when they were young.
But this also means that even all the functions (such as chat, private messages and item naming) that can directly deliver content are deleted, People can still directly use squares to form information that is enough to pose a threat to children.
For example, the simplest one-a pile of genitals.
In 2016, Canadian police uncovered a case of minors using Minecraft to spread child pornography
In the real world, anyone has the freedom to use the mud on the roadside to squeeze their personal organs. Some people may think that this is avant-garde art, and some may think that it is a bit vulgar, but only if you really put this kind of art work at the school gate will it cause public outrage and be quickly destroyed by the parents.
In Metaverse, however, everything follows a completely different logic.
There are no angry parents or justice police in the existing Metaverse. Its governance is different from the “governance balance” formed by execution in the real world. In this brand new world, there is only one powerful “Cyber God”, that is, an enterprise that Metaverse projects into the real world to operate games or apps.
The existence of “Cyber God” means that people have unrealistic demands for it.
Specifically, when there are enough childrenWhen the child is playing “Minecraft”, the appeal of parents is no longer to destroy an erotic artwork, but to ask companies to find ways to ban all expressions that may be related to eroticism.
Anyone’s anger on any content will directly impact the entity itself in some form other than the Metaverse, forcing it to make increasingly conservative decisions.
This kind of omnipotent monitoring ability either does not appear. Once it appears, it can only be abused.
This of course protects children, but it also hurts those who normally create and express themselves. Metaverse will gradually become the purest water without fish.
2. Metaverse more strict than Huangwang
Minecraft is not the first Metaverse application to encounter a regulatory crisis, and the Metaverse application will not only encounter a regulatory crisis in China.
In 2003, the online game “Second Life” was the world’s first large-scale meta-universe experiment. Different from many online games with fixed gameplay at that time, it was an open virtual social system with no fixed gameplay, and integrated certain elements of Sims and Sim City, so that people could truly start a new life in the Internet world. journey.
The game contains a complete set of economic systems and development tools. Players can use the in-game 3D modeling tools and Linden scripting language to create props, gameplay, creatures, buildings, vehicles, etc. that have never existed in the game before. These contents can also be transferred between players on their own through Linden.
In other games, “Krypton Gold” is different from the purchase of an existing skin or item from the game manufacturer. In “Second Life”, the clothes purchased by players may be produced by other players, and it is not the game developer but other players that collect Linden coins.
Because Linden Lab recognizes the copyright of residents’ creations, and the Linden coin can be exchanged with U.S. dollars in both directions on the black market (the official only provides one-way sales) , therefore, virtual enterprises that produce virtual goods quickly appeared in “Second Life”.
Compared with “Cyberpunk 2077”, the chicken pinching system in “Second Life” is much more complicated, and there are also special sales of different cyber Chicken’s virtual enterprise. Until 2020, there will be new cyber chickens on the shelves every month.
But with the rapid increase in media reports and the number of online users, the pornography and illegal issues in “Second Life” began to permeate the real world. Linden Lab also encountered a lawsuit in the real world. Because, since the existence of virtual enterprises in “Second Life” is feasible and can interact with the real world, virtual gangs and virtual terrorist organizations can also exist and develop.
For example, “Second Life” admits that the objects and content created by players in the game own the property rights and copyrights, which significantly increases the possibility of the company as a defendant in a lawsuit. In fact, a player who focused on the production of virtual items in “Second Life” sued the Linden Lab, forcing the latter to investigate another player’s piracy of the virtual sex toys he made.
By 2006, the game’s operating company Linden Lab had to require all players logging in to “Second Life” to submit a certified Paypal payment account or credit card account.
Although the main server of “Second Life” has always maintained a low-censorship strategy, they started from the main server in 2006. (Main Gird) Split a youth server (Teen Grid).
The server rigorously reviews all behaviors and content on the server to ensure that it remains at PG13, and has also implemented a server curfew that Chinese parents dream of-only open from 12 noon to 10 pm Pacific time.
It is worth noting that this is 9 years earlier than China’s earliest Internet real-name system regulations, “Internet User Account Name Management Regulations,” which requires “back-end real-name, front-end voluntary”.
However, the ending of the “Second Life” youth server was not good. In 2011, Linden Lab announced that it would shut down the youth server, and the data of all players in the youth server would be frozen and merged. Until the player is over 16 years old, his property can be retrieved from the main server.
This rude supervision method almost makes people feel disappointed in the “other world” promised by Linden Lab. During the same period, with the rise of the mobile Internet, the rise of social networks such as Facebook and Instagram also took away those who had tried Young people who build another society in “Second Life”.
In the following years, Linden Lab has experienced many layoffs, and its focus has shifted to the development of the VR project Sansar. It was not until 2019 that Metaverse became a capital outlet, and Linden Lab announced that it would refocus on the follow-up research and development of “Second Life”.
However, at the time when the Linden Lab made strong supervision, the public pressure it received in the real world can be imagined.
3. Governance balance and gray scale ecology
In 1785, the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed the concept of a “ring prison”. This prison order allows a guard to monitor all prisoners, and the prisoner does not know whether he is being monitored.
Prison has the legitimacy of monitoring prisoners, but monitoring prisoners in the form of a ring prison violates the most basic willfulness, which is unreasonable for prisoners who do not die. This is the reason why the ring prison has been criticized.
An abandoned ring prison in Cuba is now used as a ring prison model and kept in a museum. Only one guard is needed at the watchtower in the center to immediately monitor all prisoners.
In fact, the real society is neither black or white nor a greenhouse, but a gray-scale ecology under a balanced governance.
For example, urban management will not always monitor vendors who illegally set up stalls, nor will they turn a blind eye to those who frequently occupy roads during peak hours. In the long-term cat-and-mouse game, what is achieved is actually a gray-scale state that can not only meet the shopping needs of the citizens, but also meet the smooth traffic and the convenience of the citizens to purchase fruits and vegetables.
For another example, pirated CDs and pirated paper books hurt copyright owners far less than piracy in the Internet era. Because although the former is more difficult to monitor, the former is also difficult to spread on a large scale. In the absence of the Internet, buying pirated CDs and buying paper books must be based on luck. Pirated CD factories and pirated book factories are also facing greater criminal risks. But in the Internet age, any user can become the source of piracy, which greatly accelerates the spread of piracy. Before the Internet, there was also a gray zone between the “information inclusiveness” role of piracy and the “infringement of the interests of authors”.
Similarly, in the era without the Internet, minors cannot directly obtain pornography, violence or extremes from serious channels (such as TV) information. But they will always pass by vendors with bad books, pass by adult goods stores, and be touched by those “bad classmates”, and gradually enter the adult world-this is more in line with the natural growth logic, because humans are not on the day of 17 years old. Grew up at 24 o’clock.
But in the Internet era, all governance balances and grayscale ecology have been broken.
An e-commerce seller that is not under supervision can sell billions of prohibited goods, a pirated website can cause the copyright owner to lose more than half of the expected income, and a pornographic website that slips through the net can enable junior high school students to follow Become an “adult” within 2 hours. This has also become the “foundation” for violating regulations and all major platforms to rush to kill all illegal content.
The fierce conflict between “control the child, save the game” and “control the game, save the child” is actually a sign of the complete failure of this governance balance in the Internet field. inIn the 1980s, a “wuxia novel” could make children forget about sleep and food for a week, but a game without an anti-addiction system could keep children addicted for several years.
The Internet has greatly compressed the possibility of grayscale dissemination of information. It is impossible for you to construct a network environment that allows adults to obtain a small amount of adult content. This is the same as the governance dilemma in Metaverse mentioned above. Or not at all.
Grading is not helpful to solve this problem, because the grading in the Internet age has serious problems in implementation.
The classification system established by Europe and the United States in the field of physical publications is almost completely ineffective for minors after the Internet is popularized. Minors can use almost all channels to obtain any pornographic content they want to watch. This situation is not difficult to understand. A minor has to take a great risk to buy a physical “yellow book”. He has to find a store that is willing to sell to minors illegally, and has enough private space to hide. The yellow book must have time to read without being discovered by parents and teachers.
After taking such a big risk, the “untimely information” he can get is only the amount of a book.
As for any minors who log in to pornographic websites, as long as they click “Yes” when they are asked whether they are adults for the first time, they will no longer be blocked.(Credit card verification only appears when purchasing members). And even if you add credit card age verification, the effect will not be very good. We can refer to the game field in China, how many children are using their parents’ accounts to indulge and spend in games.
Many of the enlightened parents born in the 1980s who grew up reading banned books, but felt that their three views are “not crooked”, may not realize that Huang Wang and the pornographic books he obtained when he was a child under restricted conditions are in terms of the scale of information and the impact on children. The impact is completely different.
The prompt popped up by the English community Reddit when accessing 18X posts or sections. This represents the typical state of the European and American Internet classification at the implementation level, highlighting a “seal of ears and bells”.
Therefore, the grading system basically acquiesced to Neil Botzman’s criticism of television in “The Disappearance of Childhood”: let children above junior high school reach adulthood all at once.
But everyone knows the disadvantages of non-grading. It creates a sterile greenhouse to a large extent, causing all adults to feel miserable.
It can be said that neither model has succeeded in restoring the governance balance and grayscale ecology in the real world. For Metaverse, the more it advocates “degrees of freedom”, the easier it is for us to hit the “air wall” of governance.
For example, one of the most weird phenomena is: We can attack each other in the game, but we can’t insult each other in the game.
Overseas, “Fortnite” has always been more popular among teenagers than “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds” because many teenagers in Europe and the United States regard “Fortnite” as a cyber playground.
With the deepening of urbanization, the declining birthrate is becoming more and more prominent, and the corners of the city for young people to play freely and safely are becoming fewer. The rich and interactive main scene of “Fortress Night” just provides such a supplement. In this game, many young people in Europe and the United States simply ignore the main goal of the game (to defeat the opponent), but only with a group of friends in the game scene Play some interactive games with each other, such as kicking a ball, racing, hide and seek.
The construction system in “Fortnite” allows young players to better explore and complete gameplay outside of the game
However, in this cyber playground, there is a logic completely different from the real world: you can shoot at the player because this is the normal way of playing the game. But you can’t say Fuck to anyone, otherwise your account will be banned.
Is it wrong to say bad words? Of course it is wrong, but young people have the right to make mistakes when they know it, and bear the consequences of being caught by their parents or parents.
In the feedback chain of the physical world, adolescents can learn to express anger in what occasions and under what people. In cyberspace, due to the existence of Metaverse God, this natural social learning process is broken.
We don’t yet know what it means to grow in a cyber greenhouse like a ring prison.
But unfortunately, there seems to be no choice after 00.
4. Run into the ring prison
Before the problem of governance balance is solved, the more people devote more time to the Metaverse, the greater the conflicts and contradictions will be.
And there is almost only one path to solve this problem, and that is a completely distributed Metaverse.
There are two film and television works that can explain the difference between the existing Metaverse and the Distributed Metaverse. One is the oasis in the American science fiction movie/fiction “Ready Player One”, and the other is the game world after the death of the original villain of the Japanese science fiction animation/novel “Sword Art Online” Kayaba Akihiko.
The difference between the two is that although Oasis is a seemingly endless open world, in fact its basic rules of the game and various permissions are directly controlled by Oasis. In theory, if the company’s founder hadn’t deliberately left clues about control, the protagonist and his group would never have the opportunity to lead civilian players to comeback in the world of Oasis.
In the end, the improvement of the oasis in “Ready Player One” also depends on the moral drive of Tai Sheridan, the protagonist of the new swordsman.
When Tai finally gained control of Oasis and decided to shut down the Oasis server two days a week for everyone to “return to the real world and family life”, he never considered those who did not want to return to reality at all. Such as the feelings of terminally ill patients. Tai has become the new cyber god, but he is still trapped in his position in the real world.
How long can the oasis relying on the morality of the protagonist group be able to maintain the science and technology for good is a question mark, because in the original setting, the reason why the oasis falls into the evil is also due to the power vacuum caused by the death of the last “god” of the oasis.
And Once the “cyber god” itself is more inclined to “evil”, we will face more serious manipulation and exploitation than in the real world.
The Metaverse, which uses the oasis as a template, relies too much on the impact of individual institutions or individuals on the moral level and supervision of the entire world. There is no mechanism or technical way to guarantee the long-term existence of utopias, which is why these utopias go against their original intentions.
This is the same as the early concept products of Metaverse that are currently hot in reality, Minecraft(Minecraft), Fortnite(Fortress Night) and Robolx’s dilemma are exactly the same.
Robolx has been connected to the “Human Interaction Audit System” of Community Sift, a third-party company, since 2017, and uses artificial intelligence to ensure the purity of games for minors in real-time and manual retrospective punishment.
Minecraft is slightly better because it allows the establishment of personal servers, but it is still not an open source solution that can be modified by anyone, and there is no mandatory force to restrict Microsoft to always allow the existence of Minecraft private servers in the future.
And more importantly, These Metaverses are currently all held by tech giants that are not trusted by the public.
And in Sword Art Online, the original gameAfter the developer Akihiko Kaaba died as an evil BOSS, the protagonist open sourced the entire “Sword Art Online” virtual world game resources and underlying code. Under this premise, in the stories of the next few seasons, the path of technology and application will develop in a completely different path from that of Oasis——
In the follow-up world view of “Sword Art Online”, different companies, units, organizations and even individuals have built small worlds with completely different rules and gameplay through open source code. However, they follow a unified interface for the transmission and storage of user data. Although there are companies or organizations that can control a single small world, no one can control the flow of user clones between different worlds.
The decentralized Metaverse can ensure that it forms a certain balance of governance and information like the real world-censors cannot eliminate all “bad information” at once, but in the same way, people cannot get all of them at once. “Bad information”. In this balanced state, Metaverse can be more like a gray-scale and pure real world in terms of information flow and social form, which not only satisfies creative expression, but also satisfies social stability.
But it is even more difficult to achieve this distributed and balanced Metaverse. The reason why Metaverse has become a new outlet in 2020 is because of the development of technology. Jingwei Venture Capital stated bluntly in its earlier article:
First of all, the turning point of technological maturity seems to have arrived. The VR/AR/MR, AI, NLP, computer vision rendering, cloud virtualization, brain-computer interface and other technologies required by Metaverse have all developed to a certain stage. This laid the foundation for the landing of Metaverse.
In this series of technological breakthroughs, none of the technologies does not rely on centralized Internet or capital giants. It can be said that it is precisely because of the progress of various types of stacking technologies that have become the main driving force of this round of Metaverse tuyere, which will undoubtedly be further intensified.The centralization and oligopoly of the Internet.
The true decentralized Web 3.0 is still in a difficult stage where a microblog cannot be reproduced.
So, are we really going to enter the Metaverse era now?
The head picture is a still from “Black Mirror” S04E01 “Federation Starship Carlister”, depicting a Metaavese world we might face, If you are more interested in the topics discussed in this article, you can check it out.
This article is from WeChat official account:Red tide AKASHIO (ID: AKASHIO)< span class="text-remarks">, author: comment corpse