Raph Koster and Jon Radoff talk about the Metaverse, Online Worlds, MMOs and virtual societies

Jon Radoff: The way I tend to think of Metaverse is the point at which enough connections have been made between these worlds that started as fantasy lands. Right? They started as very segmented, separated things. But as we increment the amount of connections to the real world, increment the amount of replicated information, whatever, more mirroring,

Raph Koster: more, more stuff flowing in and out,

Jon Radoff: whether that be money, information, whatever it is. Right? There comes some threshold there where, and we're already edging over this line today. Right? There comes some threshold there where the data that exists in those mirrors matters to the real world as much as anything in the real world does.

Raph Koster: In this episode of Building the Metaverse with Jon Radoff, he sits down with Raff Koster. Raff Koster is the CEO of Playable Worlds Inc. He is a veteran game designer and creative executive who has worked at EA, Sony, and Disney, as well as run his own company twice. The lead designer and director of massive titles such as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. He's also contributed to writing, art, music, and programming to many other titles. He is the author of the classic book, A Theory of Fun for Game Design. In 2012, he was named an online game legend at the Game Developers Conference online. Let's jump into the interview. John, Raff, how is it going? We are getting ready to talk about what is the Metaverse.

Raph Koster: We are in the Metaverse right now, I think.

Raph Koster: That's my definition. That's one of the things I think we'll talk about today. What is this term? What does it even mean? I've been connecting with a lot of people all over the Metaverse, all over the Internet, and a lot of people have an opinion on this. I have my own definition. I'll talk about it. I really wanted to start bringing in folks who have been building games on the Internet and all this stuff for years and years because they have really interesting insights on that. Raff, awesome to have you with us today.

Jon Radoff: Oh, my pleasure. Looking forward to chatting about what it is and what it might someday be. There's quite a lot of that. Yeah.

Raph Koster: I think one aspect of it that we can look at is just sort of the Metaverse as a platform for creativity. I don't know how you feel about it, but I was a player of Star Wars Galaxy. I'll just get that out of the way. I really loved it. To me, the most fun I had was when we made a city. We figured out all these ways to make stuff that I don't think was necessarily part of the design. It was the emergent properties of being able to do that. I'm actually just curious to start there since that's my most personal connection to you. Where does creativity play a role in this and what Star Wars Galaxy is the Metaverse or the proto-metaverse?

Jon Radoff: I don't think it was. I think of Star Wars Galaxy as being a virtual world in kind of the classic sense. I do think, because I come from a virtual world background, I do think of the Metaverse as an evolution of virtual worlds. I do think that there's an awful lot that we really should be going back and looking at virtual world history much, much, much more than we are when we talk about the Metaverse, especially the various ways in which it relates to things like crypto or all of these other kinds of newer technologies. Because so many of the lessons from virtual worlds are still so, so, so incredibly valid. I think of Star Wars Galaxy as it was a virtual world. There's still players running servers, there's thousands of people playing on them. The creativity that happened inside it and around it, because all games have creativity happening around them too, it was really about that particular virtual world mostly.

Raph Koster: People were doing things like building fan websites,

Jon Radoff: building cities within the game, creating roleplay communities, running beauty pageants, bands on tour, all of that kind of stuff. All of that's great. I don't know that a lot of it is necessarily unique to virtual worlds, or even to any Metaverse.

Raph Koster: To be honest, my very first reaction when you said Metaverse as a platform for creativity

Jon Radoff: is that I thought to myself, well, at least the way a lot of people talk about it, it's much more platform for monetizing creativity. That's not the same thing. I think it's important that we kind of separate those ideas where people think of the monetization methods or whatever, or even having a stake in it as being fundamental to things like creativity, because they're not. People create for the love of it. They don't necessarily create for money.

Raph Koster: Yeah. Well, I guess we could bucket it out a little bit. So to me, the Metaverse isn't like a feature that, or a product that we're building with a feature list, and then we check all the boxes. So to me, for example, crypto and NFTs and that stuff can certainly be a feature of a kind of a Metaverse, but it's not like the one way to do it. And for that matter, you could look at something like roadblocks, where a lot of the creativity is certainly for commercial purposes, some people are making a lot of money in it, some people do it purely out of the joy of getting to create a game experience for a couple of friends. Minecraft, a lot of the creation happening there is just purely creative. So games have always been like this avenue for creativity for people, whether it's just expressing yourself to a character, or building a world, or even having more emergent gameplay like you have. I'm curious though, that you mentioned a little bit ago, like some of the lessons learned from virtual worlds. I was hoping you might be able to extend that a little bit. What are some of the lessons that maybe people are not paying enough attention to? Or what are the ones that they're really paying a lot of attention to? And it's helpful.

Jon Radoff: Yeah, gosh. I think some of the biggest have to do with just human nature. There's a lot of interest in decentralizing sort of these centralized servers and centralized institutions, companies, whatever, and distributing the power out. We've certainly seen, there's all kinds of desire to do that for excellent reasons. That is something that has been tried in virtual worlds, and it has not gone all that smoothly. It's been actually extremely challenging. One of the most famous cases actually arose in 1993 from a very famous incident that was on the cover of a magazine back when there were such things called the Village Voice. And it's a famous article called a rape and cyberspace. And this was about one user of a virtual world, and it was not a game world. It was a creativity and social world called LambdaMove. One player basically started griefing another. And it escalated into a form of sexual assault. Actually really interesting and strange form of sexual assault, where the assault happened not against the player's avatar, but against an exact clone of their avatar.

Raph Koster: And it led to a massive governance struggle over the virtual world.

Jon Radoff: Because shortly before this incident had happened, the idealist running the world had said, this shouldn't be our world anymore. We've been as gods to you all, right? Common analogy for virtual world operators. So we are putting down the keys. We are now bound by your vote. And here's a constitution, and here's a laws, and you can vote in new laws, and we will do whatever you tell us to. And then this incident happened, and the method failed. It blew up. It failed to work. And after some months, the state of affairs in the world had gotten so bad

Raph Koster: that the gods came back and took over running again.

Jon Radoff: There's a book written about this that I actually strongly urge everyone to go read, because it features some of the first incidents of doxing someone, for example. And all of those sorts of behaviors, there they all were, happening in a text-based world in 1993. The challenges around, if there's some people who have their finger on the power button, literally, they literally, they have control of the domain name, they can flip a switch on a server, the database, you know, they have database editing password. Can they surrender power? Really? Is really actually a question. And the question of can groups, particularly smaller ones, self-organize into something that resembles civil society, I think we, as humans, tend to forget that it took us hundreds of thousands of years to actually build up to governments, right? And yes, we have more models around today. But it's hard. It is much harder to build that kind of thing than people realized in the absence of legal frameworks and laws and things like that. And so, you know, I think to me, one of the biggest lessons is that there's always just sort of a naivete. When people start out with the idea of, oh, we should be able to decentralize, we should be able to self-govern or whatever, it's actually really, really, really hard.

Raph Koster: Even when players or users are given the tools, we did a lot of trying in

Jon Radoff: ultimate online to allow players to have freedom of action without there being a paternalistic government hovering over everybody. And the result was mostly mass murder. It was not.

Raph Koster: You know, it was one of those people committing the murders, Shane.

Jon Radoff: Right? Because incentives are weird, right? The people who were building things up had a lot to lose. And the people who were just there to grief had very little to lose. And so they could keep wearing down the civic minded over time. And the only solution turned out to be for the gods to step in again. So, you know, I've spent like my whole career trying to find ways to not have to have a paternalistic, you know, god-like kind of structure governing everything. But it's been

Raph Koster: really hard. Like, it's not a simple problem. Now, an extreme example of what you just described

Raph Koster: was this game called Shadow Bane. Sure, you remember it. But I remember. Well, so for those who don't recall Shadow Bane because it was a while ago at this point, not that many people played it in a grand scheme of things compared to what we have today. But it was a game that was very hard for everyone to fight each other everywhere. But the central mechanic was about building up a city. So you had a class of players that really wanted to invest in their city and they'd spend weeks or even months building it up. And then there was another class of players who thought it was just fun to roll over and destroy cities. The idea being that if everybody builds a city, then you kind of have this mutually assured destruction like a state of detente except that if you don't care about building a city and you just like destroying stuff, you don't care about that. So really interesting dynamic in terms of how things can result really in just a lot of rage quitting.

Jon Radoff: Yeah, one of the biggest lessons that came out of Shadow Bane actually is that civilization which did happen eventually on some servers had a an enormous cost and B was kind of boring. So there were, I call it Pax Guildiana. There were guilds on some Shadow Bane servers that won. They did so by exterminating all the rival factions entirely. Chased them out of the game completely, conquered their cities and salted the earth, so to speak. And then they actually had won. They said, where the only ones here let us create civilization, set up laws, prevented their members from killing one another, all the rest. And then went, wow, this game is now really dull. And they quit. Because civilization is actually not a great end state for a player versus player combat game. It's boring. It's all about predictable, safe life, not about excitement, which is what players came to that game for. I think lessons like these really, they jump out when we think about some of the cutting edge ideas like DAOs, because the fact that you can envision something like a democratic structure or envision something like a governance system doesn't actually mean that players are going to use it or use it in, at all, the way that you expected. People are frequently driven by incentives that are accidents or that aren't even things that you thought about. Like in Ultima Online for a while, we actually had most wanted lists. And the bad guys treated them as high score tables. So it turned into an incentive to do worse rather than

Raph Koster: a deterrent. Right? Yeah. So I love the way this conversation is going, because what we're

Raph Koster: really talking about is virtual societies, basically, like how do you organize groups? I know from running a number of guilds in my life, it's hard enough to get 25 people in a guild to agree in what you're going to do. It's really hard to do it at the level of an entire game world. So just to share some information with folks who may be running into these concepts for the first time. So a DAO or a DAO, decentralized autonomous organization, is this idea that's come out of the whole crypto blockchain sphere where you own tokens and the tokens which are obtained economically then allow you to have some kind of governance rights. And it can vary pretty widely in terms of what that means. It can be that you get to elect people to counsel. It could mean that you literally get to accept proposals. You might be able to submit proposals. It's whatever level that

Raph Koster: which that happens. I guess one of the things that's running through my mind graph is, how do you

Raph Koster: think that changes things when you organize a virtual society around economic participation, giving you the control? Where are the pros and cons of that? Because that's sort of like a shareholder

Jon Radoff: organization essentially. That's right. And actually, I mean, even your description did not much sound like a democratic society. It sounded like a system where the rich get votes and somebody else is using the system because it's driven by your economic participation. That actually conjures up a whole bunch of episodes from history. We'd rather not remember. Like only landowners

Raph Koster: having a say in governance, things like that. It's the analogies there. It's analogous. It's not

Jon Radoff: directly comparable. But it does speak to the fact that the incentives are not the same as what exists in the real world. There's a lot of folks who come to these things primarily because they want to speculate on tokens. And those people are going to have very different kinds of incentives. There are people who play Axi infinity because they want to cash out and supplement their real world income. They have a very different motive for playing than the people who are playing Axi

Raph Koster: because they enjoy breeding Axis. One of the big things that I've definitely had a lot of

Jon Radoff: conversations with my friends in the crypto space about is saying that in the real world currencies in general are it's not that they're antithetical to community. But currencies are used to bridge gaps gaps of trust. We use our currency in order to exchange things of value because we don't trust

Raph Koster: each other enough to just trade items of value. The currency provides a baseline that is understood.

Jon Radoff: It's like, okay, I don't know if what you're giving me is exactly an amount. And you don't know if it is either. And we can't easily barter because we can't agree on the relative value of things. And if I hand you something, am I going to get it get something back of value right now? currency is Greece. It greases the wheels, right? It provides this fungible generic item that everybody agrees roughly on what its value is. And it enables us as humans to transact across distances in ways where we don't actually have personal relationships. Society works in the opposite way. Societies are built starting with personal relationships and working their way up. And even what we think of as large scale governments, they're built from smaller governments, right? It's like governments and society all the way down. And those things down at the bottom level, we shouldn't forget what led, you know, speaking in terms here of like anthropology, right? Or whatever. We shouldn't forget what is it that leads human communities to come together, right? They come together around shared interests like survival. They generally gather around a central watering hole, right? It's very hard to find an old town or city anywhere in the world that isn't organized around a water feature, right? Why? Because everybody needs water. That leads to wait. We need to form treaties to make sure that everybody has access to the water. We all need to grow crops, you know, right? Out of simple agreements like that that are trust-driven, you start getting things like laws, you start getting things like communities, right? I think if we start ignoring those sort of human verities, right? We're at a real risk of losing sight of what a metaverse is going to be made out of people more than it is made out of tech, right? And that's the key thing we cannot lose sight of. If we just try layering tech on top of human reactions, you know, one of the one-liners I often think of is don't assume that blockchains can replace laws, because they

Raph Koster: probably can't, right? Yeah, well, so I think an important point that was just made is the metaverse or where we're going with it. This is why I think of it not as a product, but a bunch of trends. Some of the trends are technological. They're enabling certain capabilities. A lot of the trends are entirely social and human-driven. I think one that I'm just super interested in is just how much more people have now invested in their digital identity, the whole mainstreaming of like what it even means to have an online identity. Like I'd say like when I met my future wife in an online game years ago, that was very, very weird to do at that time. Actually, I was playing a female character when she met me. She didn't even know I was in female. I feel like I was a real trailblazer in terms of a lot of exploration of identity and marrying someone I met online. But these days, all of the above is not that unusual anymore. Lots of people do that stuff. Millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions for all I know of people do that. But this is sort of the important trend, though, which is now we have multiple generations that have grown up with the idea of what you do online is really important. How you express yourself online is really important. But also, many people just experimenting with different forms of expression of themself online. I'm just curious your thoughts on that trend and where that will play out in online games and virtual worlds from here. How is it different now that we've gone through several generations of that?

Jon Radoff: Yeah. You know, Dr. Richard Bartle, who co-invented the virtual world back in 1978, outright says that virtual worlds are for identity exploration. He outright says that is their purpose. That is why they exist. I don't think it was that he set out to build them to be that. I think that was an insight he came to after having built it and run them and played in them and so on. It is certainly true. I too, by the way, my wife and I basically, you know, it was not even in a game. It was using an early form of online chat on black and white max on our college campus that we were really connected. But, yeah, I think we've definitely had lots of folks come up through,

Raph Koster: basically, a process of online identity generation. I think we've all gotten used to the idea

Jon Radoff: that was always true but is now very evident that everybody is always walking around wearing masks. Right? And it's just that digital really, you know, it makes that explicit. Right? And Instagram identity is not the same thing as a LinkedIn identity. It's not the same thing as a Facebook identity. It's not the same thing as a Twitter handle because we choose to show different aspects of ourselves or try out parts of ourselves that we don't get to very often and so on. I think this has always been true. The visiting your grandma person is not the same you as the quiet time with your spouse person and never has been. Right? Like, the person who goes to church is not the same person who goes out drinking on a Friday night. We have always worn masks. Right? We've always done that. But digital makes it explicit. Right? It really conjures it to the forefront. So, you know, again, we're still people. The frameworks don't change that. Technology is enabling us to do it in new and different ways.

Raph Koster: Yeah. I mean, Josh, you're right. In this, you have a TikTok channel. Like, is the TikTok you? Is that different than the true Josh? There's definitely something that happens as soon as you hit record. Right? There's always that like, oh, the show has to start now. Right? Versus like trying to, and it's, I mean, it's something that as a creator, I've tried to become more and more genuine over time, right? To take off those masks to just be me to have a greater connection. But they still, anytime I hit that record button, like radio voice starts now, you know what I mean?

Jon Radoff: Yeah, you probably get dressed and shower beforehand. And, you know, I mean, I mean, even those things are masks, right? It's certainly not how we come into the world. So, yeah, I mean, we're always performing to at least a little degree, right? It's just that online, particularly, you know, we see the pressure to be performative online. The pressure for that

Raph Koster: can be pretty high, socially speaking. All right. So, we've talked about digital identity and that just being a trend that's really the consensual to our society. We've talked about virtual societies and all this experimentation that's probably going to happen around Dows and other non-crypto-based way of doing governance and organizing games, worlds, guilds, everything in between. We haven't answered the main question yet that some people are coming here for a rough,

Jon Radoff: rough, what is the metaverse? Sure. So, here's, and I think everybody does have somewhat different answers about this, right? Because there are certainly some folks come at it from it's

Raph Koster: it's Web 3 or whatever, right? To some degree, I'm a little bit of a traditionalist in this because,

Jon Radoff: you know, I remember when Snowcrash came out and I was actually part of the wave that got into virtual worlds at the time that everybody had just read Snowcrash, right? Although, weirdly, I, you know, I got into them early enough that I thought Snowcrash got all kinds of things wrong day one. But anyway, I guess I do start at virtual world, okay? So, and I like thinking of virtual worlds regardless of what the tech is. They're about an alternate place somewhere you can't be physically speaking, right? Being someone else-ish, okay? I say-ish because we all wear masks, right? You know, and, and so a lot of the appeal of the game worlds is being someone you aren't in a place you can't be with other people, right? Because that's that, you know, the with other people is pretty important, right? Even if you don't spend a ton of time interacting with them all. So, the notion of alternate worlds, multiplicity of worlds or environments is pretty core to it for me and partly it's for a technical reason, right? Yelp or Google Maps or ways or, you know, any of these things that we could call mirror worlds are just putting in data into a map. Whether that map happens to be a fantasy world or a real world doesn't matter to a virtual world server, right? I mean, a server is just going, there's a somewhere else with a digital representation, right? So, to my mind, as we continue to annotate the real world, make more mirror worlds and merge digital and real, we're still talking about having virtual worlds stuff going on on the back end, right? It's still a place you can't be. The world of Google Maps Roads does not much resemble the real world except in one way, right? It's very selective about the way in which it resembles the real world. The rest of the time, it might

Raph Koster: as well be fantasy land, it might as well be Azeroth or whatever. So, I start there. Then we get to the

Jon Radoff: question of multiplicity of worlds, right? And this has always been sort of a big part. If you go reach Snowcrash, you know, oh, well, I wandered through the, you know, sort of weird, idealized Japanese,

Raph Koster: Yakuza kind of thing, and then I go into, you know, now I'm in a different cyberpunky area and

Jon Radoff: whatever, right? Like there's always been this notion, and I think Ready Player One really crystallized it for a lot of folks, of a multiverse of varying worlds that I can move between. And that is actually an idea that is not only old but has been implemented in functional form since the early 1990s, right? All it takes, and I put that in quotes, all it takes is for two different worlds to agree on exchange formats for their data. If you can agree on exchange formats, and let's not minimize that problem, then copying something from one environment to another is doable, right? Like you can say, aha, I can move X from one world into another world because we agree on what the bits of X are and what those numbers mean or what those text strings mean. In practice, this has always foundered on getting the agreement. That's actually what has been

Raph Koster: the hard part, right? Like it's a social problem, almost more than a technical problem. Getting

Jon Radoff: two worlds to agree on database schema is what we're talking about. And that's actually really, really hard problem. It's a very difficult problem. I just wrote an article for the Playable World's website about the challenges. You can't move a Nintendo me into Final Fantasy 14. They had the data structures have just about nothing in common. How do what what class and level in Final Fantasy 14 is a Jedi from Star Wars the Old Republic? Like there's no good analogy. It gets worse if we're talking about, well, what about an avatar from IMVU or from Second Life, right? Like the commonality and what even an identity is. It's actually quite low, right? And so multiverses can be done, but they have historically been done when one party says, here's the transferable parts and kind of just imposes it. But of course, if you're decentralizing, then a lot of people don't like that idea, right? So on that point, like I like there's multiple

Raph Koster: views of this. Like some people think the notion of interoperability is really important. They want to have the Ready Player one experience where I'm dressed up as Mario hanging out with Batman or

Raph Koster: whatever they said in the in a book. Like it's how important is that interoperability to your

Jon Radoff: notion of the metaverse? That's actually a really good question because again, if we get, if we do real talk, is that Batman licensed? Was that a skin that somebody purchased? We shouldn't forget Ready Player one is actually monoppa the monopolisistic oasis run by one company, right? That's so did they license Batman and Mario or are those pirate skins, right? Like those are actually real questions we need to answer that are those are pragmatic questions. Plenty of players are happy with the pirate Batman. And we know this because we've seen it in Second Life. We see it in VR chat. We see it in Recrow. We see it when you're like, people are absolutely happy to just pirate those kinds of things. Right? And is that enough? Probably because when we talk about identity and identity exploration, it isn't about the stats, right? It's about the psychology and that's the one part that isn't actually digitized. That's the part you always get to move between worlds for free because it's in your head, right? So yeah, it's not a couple of really important problems with

Raph Koster: this whole idea of interoperability. One is just the legal framework. That's interesting. Some people think NFTs is a solution for that. It's it's probably not a complete solution for solution, right? Another is just sort of the technology that how do you get multiple different variant worlds, games environments to actually be able to exchange it in a useful way? A third I think that we could talk about is just is that even desirable from like a game design standpoint? Like if I'm if I'm the architect of Azeroth and in World of Warcraft, not sure I want Mario or Batman walking

Raph Koster: around. Yeah, you absolutely definitely do not. Right? Like no, but I think that is a key crucial

Jon Radoff: issue and it actually cuts to the heart of a lot of things that come up as questions around interoperability, right? World of Warcraft would break like break if you could bring in a blaster. Right. Like and if you do that, you could literally just destroy all of the value built up, social value, monetary value, etc. That is built up inside of World of Warcraft. So, you know, games in game design circles, there's this phrase called the magic circle, which is, you know, it is the ring that exists around every game. There's sort of the boundaries of the fantasy. Inside of it, it is okay to be an asshole to your friends. And the minute you start doing it outside, it's bad. Inside of it, it is okay to shoot them in the face. Outside of it, it is not. Right? Like the magic circle is, you know, it's it's a complicated philosophical construct, but it fundamentally boils down to the idea that even though this is a permeable, you know, it's permeable, you know, anybody's ever played diplomacy knows that the resentments from the in-game stuff carry out on afterwards. Right? We've all had that rivalries between sports teams. Last off the field, right? And all the rest. But there's this idealized idea that what happens on the field stays on the field, right? Whether that's the boundaries of a chessboard or the boundaries of World of Warcraft. Making that too fungible can potentially be a huge problem. Think of what happened to Scrabble when Scrabble dictionaries went online and had instant answers. It upended the way that for example, online Scrabble gaming happened, right? So there's there's real questions about what is the desirability of that level of interrupt?

Raph Koster: Quite beyond the feasibility of, so if I take a blaster into World of Warcraft, how does it even work when there's no blaster code there? Right? Because that's also a reality that there is no way to easily move that across. Yeah, so I think sometimes people talk about this

Raph Koster: subject very focused on like the individual person who having all the sovereignty and being able to express themselves however they want and be able to travel to whatever these worlds are and just continue to express themselves in any way. And certainly I get the desire behind it. There's another creative agency at work too though, which is the builders of worlds, the people who have a particular vision with how you're going to interact within that world. It's not as if they don't

Raph Koster: have a say in what that experience should be like. And it isn't just the builders of worlds, right? Let's

Jon Radoff: let's consider for example the possibility that you do get to the place where a world is governed by some kind of autonomous collective or whatever, be it, let's say that there's a government there. Okay, that government might say no, you can't come in here with this. Right? They might say it's not desirable. And then we're right back at, aren't we just right back at passports, questions, or gun license questions, or you know, who can cross borders like or tariffs or whatever, all of those things. This is I guess the big thing that I always want to get across the people who have not thought deeply about virtual worlds. In a lot of ways, they're just machines for replicating and almost underlining why we have real world things, right? Like, oh, that's why we have the concept of a police force. Oh, that's why we have the concept of a constitution. It's not until you're actually trying to solve it yourself that you go, oh, this is why over the course of millennia, we developed these structures, right? Because it turned out maybe the best answers we came to for

Raph Koster: solving what are some really gnarly problems. And I guess the last point, because I didn't answer

Jon Radoff: what is a metaverse, right? To me, the way I tend to think of metaverse is the point at which enough connections have been made between these worlds that started as fantasy lands, right?

Raph Koster: They started as very segmented separated things. But as we increment the amount of connections

Jon Radoff: to the real world, increment the amount of replicated information, whatever, more mirroring, more, more stuff flowing in and out, whether that be money, information, whatever it is, right? There comes some threshold there where, and we're already edging over this line today, right? There comes some threshold there where the data that exists in those mirrors matters to the real world as much as anything in the real world does, right? Where you can no longer draw a clean line. And you know, that's the point where, oh, I've got a washing machine, but it's also a smart object, therefore, all of the information about its repair history is available in the same way that the information about the repair history of my sword could be available in a game, right? At that point, we've sort of mirrored all of the functionality. Oh, well, I am a person. Okay, but there's a digital me too. And imagine, you know, somebody getting banned off Facebook, or you know, if somebody gets their Instagram, their Facebook, their TikTok, their YouTube, their Twitch, you know, if all of their social media disappears, just completely. In today's modern world, that is actually deleting a pretty substantial

Raph Koster: amount of the actual person, right? Because... I'm so sorry, I'm just thinking about...

Jon Radoff: Well, identity again. Yeah, it makes it harder for them to find a job, actually. People go, how is it you have no social media trace whatsoever? Something must be off. Why isn't your resume here, right? Like it actually starts making people suspicious, right? So to me, the metaverse is when we have started importing an enormous amount of our ordinary life into virtual worlds and vice versa.

Raph Koster: Ever since he said the washing machine, I'm imagining now a future with AR goggles, where I'm looking around the world, and there's going to be some guy out there, and he's like

Raph Koster: level 17 at maintaining his washing machine. The thing is, that's actually like,

Jon Radoff: putting that in a game that would be trivial and easy and obvious. I think this is the underlying thing, I think, that I always want to get across to people who advocate for this, or think that it's

Raph Koster: a desirable end state, or whatever, right? I think there's two big things that we need to realize.

Jon Radoff: Just like virtual worlds tend to replicate all the real world things, that means we're also going to replicate all the virtual world things into the real world. So let's think of random things that we may not like. I was personally surprised that we didn't see more Pokemon Go muggings. Like that surprised me. I think the only reason we didn't is because Pokemon Go was a non-zero sum game. It was a game where if one Pikachu spawned, everybody could have their own Pikachu. Of course, that's almost the exact opposite of an NFT. So if Pikachu were an NFT in Pokemon Go, I bet we would have seen peak amurders. Right? It's very easy to extrapolate that out. Think about the crowds in Santa Monica. If there'd only been one Mewtwo, would there have been a riot or violence? It's really easy to envision. Yes. I don't know if you remember in World of Warcraft,

Raph Koster: there was this incident, the blood plague. I remember it, but why don't you tell everybody about it?

Jon Radoff: Yeah. And not be up to speed. In short, an infectious disease. There was an infectious disease that happened inside of World of Warcraft, where avatars could infect one another and then

Raph Koster: resulted in everybody falling over death. Literally, that acted like a computer virus.

Jon Radoff: Okay? But of course, a computer virus is what a virus looks like inside of a virtual world. But what happens if that starts happening to people in the real world? Okay? Like, if we are all walking around with goggles, I'll give you a nightmare scenario. We're all walking around with

Raph Koster: goggles. Great. These goggles are good. Let's say they're so good that we can actually annotate over people's heads. We can do that kind of thing. Well, I mean, tech is up there now where we have things

Jon Radoff: like Photoshop, Heal brushes or whatever. Some entrepreneur is going to go, aha, I can solve racism

Raph Koster: by making goggles that replaces everybody's skin tone. It's a hopelessly naive thing to do,

Jon Radoff: but somebody's going to do it because they don't understand human nature, right?

Raph Koster: Worse, somebody could very easily say, I just wrote a virus that infects goggles and makes red lights look like green lights and vice versa. Who's gonna, who's poo police is that? Right? If you

Jon Radoff: have a truly distributed future, how do you police that? With Photoshop, Heal Brush type stuff, happening in real, at real time speed, they could delete cars off the road while you're driving. I don't want to get all that out. Now, the thing is, those kinds of tricks are just aim bots and wall hacks. If you put them in a video game context, those are not wacky science-fictional ideas. They're everyday things that happen all the time right now. Yeah. Right? So it starts raising the question, if you are operating an augmented reality or cloud AR or whatever we call it,

Raph Koster: kind of environment, are you a government?

Raph Koster: That's a little question. You're a something. You're a virtual society of some kind that you've organized, which I suppose is the same as an virtual world or game universe with more than one human playing it at a time. I want to go back to something you were touching on a moment of go though, because I want to play with this idea that everything that's virtual can come back into the real world. I'd love to explore that a little bit more. Maybe just challenge it a little bit. It just seems to me that in virtual spaces, virtual worlds, there are not as many constraints as there are in physical reality. So for example, if I wanted to throw a virtual music concert, for example, I can have infinite front row seats and I can give every single person the experience of being at the front row seat and do a lot of things that just is not possible in a universe where the front row seats are basically rival goods and you can't put people into it. So I don't know that you can take something like that back into the real world and there's some opportunities to bring like a really abundant set of experiences, which are very finite in the real world to people. What are your thoughts on that? Or am I missing the point of like

Jon Radoff: mapping the virtual back to the physical? Yeah, I guess the way I would put it is we already have crude forms of making everybody into front row ticket holders. That's what the concert film does, that's what the concert live stream does. They're just not great UI, they're flat, they don't feel totally immersive yet. But we already virtualize those things. We already do that and it's not hard to envision a goggle future where you can have your front row experience and just spawn it in your living room. Right? Like we can envision that, that seems actually not a giant leap from things where we are now. Right? So I think the bigger question is going to be around what are the social things, the non-code things that we end up replicating into that. So for example, and I think you use the term near and dear to my heart, you mentioned rival goods and non-vival goods, right? And one of the most interesting things about virtuality is that it makes everything non-vival. For those who don't know what the terms here mean, a rival good is something that if I have it, you don't. So we, you know, I have to give it to you for you to have it and then I don't have it anymore. Whereas a non-vival good, when I give it to you, you're basically getting a copy, you're getting

Raph Koster: more of it and we can always just mint more. Absolutely, everything digital is non-vival.

Jon Radoff: And the process, you know, when Mark and Dresan talked about software eating everything, what he was talking about was the process of making everything into non-vival goods, non-vival data. Right? But of course, real world economies are mostly based on rival goods. And, you know, the whole point of blockchains and the like is mostly to create rivalry with digital objects. It's to recreate those kinds of economic characteristics. So if we had the, the question, here's where it gets pointed, if we have the ability to give everybody front row seats to go see, I don't know, Beyonce, will we, or are we going to sell crappy seats to just so we can get price differentiation? That's the human question that underlies this. Because we kind of do have the ability already, and yet we still have ticket scalpers and high ticket prices and a whole bunch of other things. Right? The fact that the capability comes along does not suddenly make us into people who are willing to give away the best experience for nothing.

Raph Koster: I guess the question though then becomes to what extent does the various platforms and the technologies that enable this create a lot more competition for those experiences so that you've really reduced the incentive for what you just described, which is I'm going to do the concert where we give people lousy seats at the cheap price and then a front row seat at the expensive price. And it's just replicating the real world because I, because I can think of numerous examples where the initial instinct around e-commerce for example or any number of things online was let's replicate the same margin structure and then, you know, Bezos came along famously saying, well your margin is my opportunity, like it feels like a lot of that will happen in the metaverse or virtual worlds or

Jon Radoff: any of these things that we're talking about. I completely agree. Oh, this is, so one of the things that I was going to talk about in one of the upcoming metaverse articles, right? I'm doing this series on how virtual worlds work in order to try to explain why some of these things get hairy, right? You know, I'll start with an anecdote quite a while ago in Second Life. There was this tech invented called Copybot, okay? Creators were going through the process of carefully crafting cool

Raph Koster: things and then uploading them into the world. And of course, the entire economic structure is

Jon Radoff: premised on the idea that these would be rival goods that you would emit. So many of them are cell one and the other. But then of course, every client to a virtual space is an analog hole, okay? Analog hole is the old term for sure. You can say the music's copy righted, but I can always record it off the radio. If you put in DRM on a DVD, well, I'll pull out a video camera and film the screen. Okay? I can always get around your restrictions by going analog. Okay? There is no way to fully protect something that is digitalized, right? Like there is no way to do it. So, you know, effectively, every viewer is a decryption device, right? So as long as you can hack the viewer, or if the viewer shows it to you at all, you can always get the info out, right? This is, you know, as we know from the NFTs, this is right click, save has of course, but it's an old old problem, right? Or problem reality. It's not even a problem. It's just, he's how it is, right? Let's say that. So Copybot in Second Life was this issue where people wrote a tool that if you saw something in Second Life, you could right click save as it without having to buy it and then just re-upload it yourself. And the fact of the matter is this is going to happen. So then the question becomes about almost tiers of meaning, okay? Because yes, you can have, there's the object itself, the data that it represents, and that's sitting in a database somewhere, right? Whether that be, you know, an Axi is, even though it's on the chain, it's also sitting in the Axi database because it has stats that code needs to operate against, right? So there's a clump of data. Then there's the machine that knows how to read the data, right? Like a song is not an

Raph Koster: MP3. A song is in an MP3, an MP3 is a container, it's a format. Then you have, call it an ownership tag

Jon Radoff: that is attached to it. And historically we've attached the ownership tag to the container. Not, you know, it not to the actual thing, right? Copyright and patents are attempts to attach ownership to that data itself, right? But in practice, you know, there's all kinds of things from

Raph Koster: statute of an on-forward, you know, mechanical rights and music, like everywhere could go on.

Jon Radoff: There's a whole body of law and practice around containers can be resold, but that doesn't mean

Raph Koster: you own the guts and the what's inside and that that, right? Digital and blockchain and virtual

Jon Radoff: worlds and all of these things really make these lines brighter and force you to deal with the issue that a lot of them have never made a ton of sense.

Raph Koster: Many people ask the question, well, if I could make a copy of the NFT piece of art, what value does the NFT have? Now, my answer to that is usually something along the lines of, well, I can buy a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. I know full well, I do not own the Mona Lisa if I'm wearing a copy. Really, I just own a piece of material with a replication on it. And I know, and I know in the real world that that's really meaningful, it seems like people are coming, and whether you care about NFTs as a specific technology or not, it does seem that along with this idea of virtual identity being really important, just the general mainstream of virtual goods and virtual societies is this notion of you can have real virtual property versus the facsimile, and that that distinction is actually meaningful to at least a growing number of people,

Raph Koster: particularly in NFTs, but maybe in other stuff as well. Yeah, I think of it, the closest analogy I

Jon Radoff: can come to of where this happens to us in the real world is actually property deeds down at the courthouse. Sure. Right? We can think of the blockchain as being the courthouse where they've kept a record of property deeds. NFTs is like a title system. It's got proveness. It's like everything's just like it's like it's exactly it's provenance and it's title. On the other hand, it's also well established in real world law, possession is an intense of the law, there's a really old saying for a good reason, right? And you can own title to land in the real world, and people move in, and if you don't do something, title can actually pass to them. That is built into real world law and a whole bunch of places. Because it's pretty hard to pull off, but yeah, it is pulled, but yes, well, but we say it's hard to pull off, but I mean, it's also what drove the formation of nation states, right? Conquering land. So, you know, it's also we take for granted that that it's it's kind of how the world has always worked, right? So a key thing there is, the courthouse is only really valid if people agree that the court that matters, right? Like, that's a key thing. The other half of it is that digitized goods are not the same as a Mona Lisa

Raph Koster: print because they are actually identical. They are actually perfect clones. And that raises sort

Jon Radoff: of this interesting question, right? Of, um, call it a utility question. Presumably, you want the Mona Lisa hanging on your wall because you like looking at the Mona Lisa. So there's two different utilities there. One is the utility of the person that cares about provenance to them. The utility is tied up and this is the original like its utility can't be severed from that. They're they're linked. But to the person who cares about the this is something nice to look at, the copy is identical in their utility value. And so this starts getting us into like economic theory questions about well, which is its actual value? Is it the value of its utility or is it the value, right? And then we're going to land in arguing marks and arguing, you know, like whatever, right? Those are not settled questions is my point. Um, and so it raises just really interesting questions because it's it's where the the player analogy that the machine that can read the data part also matters. We're hitting this with JPEGs because everybody has a JPEG player, right? We're not hitting it with

Raph Koster: axes because there's only one axi player in the world. And it is axi infinity. But if there were

Jon Radoff: other axi infinities, then in theory axes could move. But the only way to do that is to standardize

Raph Koster: just like JPEGs got standardized, right? Yeah. But once you do that, then making a copy will be as valid as owning it unless they agree to share an ownership system, right? Like it it basically every time you open a box, there's another box inside. Yeah, I mean, I I think there's this aspect of

Raph Koster: the virtual good, which is its representation digital art is in some ways the the low hanging fruit we can talk about because it really is just looking at something. Game objects have different behaviors

Raph Koster: that are maybe more interesting. But that aside, like, I think there's a it's not when you own

Raph Koster: this virtual item, you're not just owning its immediate representation, you're owning the metadata around it as well. And the provenance to me is a really interesting form of metadata. So for example, if I'm someone who loves following a particular esport and I want to collect costumes worn by someone who won a world championship, I really care about the provenance of that. I don't care about having a cheap copy of exactly what they were wearing. I want the real one that was really worn in the tournament. And it seems to me that that's an aspect of virtual goods as well that

Jon Radoff: absolutely. Yeah, it's that's what I meant by there's basically two kinds of utility, right? You know, I certainly remember a time when everybody was buying copies of Michael Jordan's Jersey. Right? But there's still also the actual Michael Jordan jersey, right? And within the universe of Michael Jordan jerseys that were not his actual sweatstained one, right? There's absolutely that provenance utility for that one. But then you have the other people for whom the utility was,

Raph Koster: well, I want to look, I just want to have the look. And then that one starts breaking apart in,

Jon Radoff: well, I want to have the official look. Why? Because it's expensive. That's what gets called a veblin good. Okay, it's a good whose price is driven higher just because it's more expensive, just because it shows off status, right? And we definitely see like the entire art collecting market. And therefore most NFTs today is veblin goods. Yes, exactly. Those are veblin goods. The interesting thing though about veblin goods is that they're not particularly democratic.

Raph Koster: They are not decentralized. They're the opposite. They are historically the playground of elites

Jon Radoff: with lots of money to spend, right? And so you then get, okay, well then there's the high cost, official, low-goed, you know, Jersey. Then there's the knockoff jersey, the fast-followed jersey, the one that spells his name wrong on the back and was made by somebody at low cost and some sweatshop. I, you know, I go down the line. Those are the real kinds of problems that we are going

Raph Koster: to end up importing and replicating. The fact that now there's a provenance tag that is available

Jon Radoff: is one thing. But at the same time, you can have infinite copies of the highest quality Jersey. Official logo and everything, right? Because it's digital. And so we're going to end up recreating aspects of an ecosystem that frankly most people don't even really understand. To me, one of the most fascinating things about axes, okay, is that the price of axes very quickly escalated to the point, you know, that the story on axes is supposed to be, look at these people who are playing to earn. But very quickly, the price on axes escalated to where you needed $1,500 to join the game. And then that resulted in people who could afford to join the game,

Raph Koster: doing fractional renting of axes. Sure, scholarships. So suddenly now we have, what are we recreating?

Jon Radoff: Are we recreating rentiers? Are we recreating virtual landlordism? I mean, right? Like, is that actually what we meant when we said play to earn that you can farm my digital plot and get a cut?

Raph Koster: Played it later, earn we could talk for it for a long time, just about that subject. We probably shouldn't talk about just that subject at another point. But I want to return to a subject that we barely touched upon earlier, which was when we were talking about interoperability, that's sort of the idea that you can take something and move it somewhere else, basically, which is a lot of what

Raph Koster: we've been covering here. Now, another part of interoperability, I think, is linking between things.

Raph Koster: So on the World Wide Web, we have that. It's called a hyperlink. You can click on a link and you can wind up in someone else's website and they do whatever they want there. And if they feel like that they can link out to other people, it feels like to me, I call it a hyper portal. We need to have something in the quote unquote, metaverse or in someone's metaverse implementation for providing that embedding and linking capability for 3D real time immersive content to start really absorbing that ability to collaborate and link together like we have in the more transactional text-based

Raph Koster: web. Absolutely. That's what you think of that. I've built it more than once.

Jon Radoff: It's actually a big part of what we're doing here at Playable Worlds. There's the logo. And tell us about that. Yeah, yeah. Sure. Yeah. So let me answer the question more generically. Part of the reason why that happened with the web. First, web was a protocol. Hybrid text transfer protocol. And people don't remember this because these days we never type HTTP colon slash slash. There used to be FTP colon slash slash go for colon slash slash. A whole bunch of others. Actually, email still works as an FTP still works. Browser still support these. If you want to game specific example, there were two major ones. Since text mods, the interdiluvian online world, we're all text. You access them via a protocol called telnet. Telnet is actually the protocol that sits underneath, but frankly almost everything. Okay. Like these days have been patched up with security patches by now. But it used to be you could tell that into an email server, manually type in email headers and send email. You could tell that to a web server port, manually type in HTTP requests. Right. Because the ability to just send plain text over a socket is the primordial internet technology.

Raph Koster: Totally. I could tell that to port 80 anywhere I want anywhere you want. Yeah. The dock.

Jon Radoff: That's right. Yeah. You can't as much these days because the protocols have all gotten locked down.

Raph Koster: And I did HTTP. That's more since a little more complicated. It's a little more complicated. Yeah.

Jon Radoff: But that's how it used to be. Everything was down at that basic level. It was just we all agreed

Raph Koster: on what text strings you sent over the wire. That was your protocol negotiation. That is why when you connect to a web page, the very top still says HTTP. Okay. Right. So those early text-based

Jon Radoff: worlds, since they were just text over a wire, all used telnet. And that meant that you could hop between muds just by having an active telnet link and saying disconnect for me go connect to that other one. And so people did it. That existed. We had multiverse of hopping between worlds using what was called intermod protocol in the 1990s. It existed. You know, the thing about standards like that is they accrete one stacks on top of another. Right. You can unfortunately not use the old text-based links browser to connect to any web page today because web pages have overloaded so much additional crap. I mean, it's not all bad crap. It's good crap like this video, right? But that poor text-based browser can no longer handle it. Even going to most pages on the internet, you just get nothing. Right? Because standards accrete. So everybody agreed on what the web standard was. There were games that were graphical. A lot of people don't remember. There used to be a tank battle game on the Mac. Called Bolo. And guess what? You connected in between Bolo worlds using Bolo colon slash slash. The first version of the Unreal Engine. You were intended to hop between Unreal tournament worlds using Unreal colon slash slash. It's still in the engine today. That is how you switch maps

Raph Koster: in the Unreal Engine. It's by referencing a URL. Because URL is not web-specific. It's a uniform

Jon Radoff: resource locator. We just only think of it as being a web thing these days, right? But it isn't. So at my previous startup Meta place, we actually just parked worlds at the end of a URL. You connected to it. Your client was browser embedded. It just launched that world. And your client, like a browser, did not know what world it was connecting to. We've built that for 3D worlds here at Playable Worlds. We have a generic client that can connect

Raph Koster: to a generic server. And just like on a web page, a web server doesn't know what content there is

Jon Radoff: related to the web page. The same web server can serve up Amazon or eBay, right? The same game server can serve up an RPG or a shooter. And that's the tech that we built here at Playable Worlds. Because we do believe that is a fundamental step on the road to the Metaverse. You need to start establishing some standards and some protocols and the like that are held in common so that you can do things like move between spaces without common protocols. It's going to take one Z2Z agreements between operators forever.

Raph Koster: Yeah, really interesting. So that's awesome that you guys are building some of that. So I feel like this has been an amazing conversation. I also think people have been listening to this and their minds are getting blown right now about everything from virtual societies to the purpose of an even meaning of virtual property and standards and technologies. So, Rath, I want you to think for a moment about what should people just be thinking about with respect to the Metaverse? What can they maybe take away from this conversation that they should keep in

Raph Koster: their minds? What's really important for you to convey to them? And I'll just kind of start with

Raph Koster: sort of things I think people should be thinking about and you either add to that or tell me I'm wrong about anything but I think there's just a few important trends to be aware of because like I

Raph Koster: said at the very beginning I don't think the Metaverse is like product with a feature requirements list

Raph Koster: but I think some stuff that everyone should just be super aware of is number one just be aware that digital identity, digital realness is a thing. It's been going on for multiple generations now and that just changes how everybody in the world will be relating to online worlds and technologies and conversations and identity and whatnot. Another thing that I think is just interesting to think about is what happens when the creator tools become far more accessible to people so that you can just make stuff right? So, we didn't really even get into that but like there's been this whole progression through you know when it was all coding to then it was Minecraft and then Roblox and it's just getting easier and easier to make stuff. So again not a feature but think about what does it mean to have mass numbers of humans being able to create stuff in this space and then what is it also mean to have the idea of embedability and decentralization and just the ability for people to kind of own a piece of it not own the Metaverse like Ready Player One that's my nightmare scenario by the way it is. It's Ready Player One and like a trillionaire owns everything and I think we can name some trillionaire. We won't but we could name some trillionaire wannabes who probably are thinking that they'll do that but I think it's much more interesting to think of it as the next

Raph Koster: generation of the internet where everybody can build their own stuff and have sovereignty. Anyway

Raph Koster: that's my piece. Those are some trends that I think everybody should think about from my standpoint.

Jon Radoff: What do you think? What would you add or subtract? I think the number one is it's about the people. I'm trying to you know, restrain myself from comma because it is the single biggest thing that technologists tend to overlook. There's a cool technical kind of thing but the fact of the matter is that these are social technologies and human nature doesn't change because you digitize things. Okay so that would be number one. Why far right? Like we shouldn't believe oh well I created a tool for X that therefore that's how people use it that's how human behavior will change magically whatever. It's far more likely that you're going to replicate aspects of human reality than you are to invent a new human reality. Okay that's just sort of how things work. We look at old letters and postcards that people used to send back and forth and they're not that different. Okay from what people post on Tumblr where people are still people I guess is I really just always want to hammer that home. Second that governance is not a technology problem and has never been a technology problem and this is something super super related to the previous point. Okay governance is not about the tech. All of the tech solutions for governance go places we don't like. They go to totalitarian surveillance systems and the like right so it's one of those things that we need to to always bear in mind. The third thing that I always hammer home particularly for folks who are super invested in AR Cloud and XR and the like is to say it's not about the goggles. It is never about the rendering. We had virtual ownership of digital goods governance questions distributed networks of worlds all of those kinds of things were happening in text. Okay the action is on the servers whether those are peer-to-peer distributed or whatever doesn't matter right the evolution line the trend line towards this has always been that the rendering piece is not the part that matters. It's the data on the back end and certainly in a post-facebook world we should all have that like tattooed on our foreheads at this point right but it's been evident for a long time that the rendering has never ever ever been the point. So when we think about dreams of the metaverse it's really important we not get caught up in kind of the front end aspects of it because a lot of aspects of metaverse not only do we have adequate rendering now but a phone was adequate rendering quite a while ago right we already have a portable device that we can look up the the I can immediately look up your level 17 linked in on on my phone whenever I meet you anytime I can get the reviews for the restaurant and its transaction history anytime we already have those I didn't need goggles for them right so it may feel like I'm pointing out the obvious but I think that is sort of the big thing there's something about the word metaverse that makes people overlook the obvious and so I guess I would end by encouraging people to pay attention to the obvious on some of these things right don't don't get caught up too much we do need the big dreams but we also need to just kind of look reality in the face because speaking from really personal experience having built worlds with hundreds of thousands millions of people playing in them building in them working in them loving in them living in them it is really easy to fuck that up and build worlds that make people's

Raph Koster: lives worse rather than better or that don't just don't improve humanity's lot in life right like

Jon Radoff: so you know if we have big ideals about this it's super important to go in with open eyes

Raph Koster: the proper dose of cynicism the proper dose of humility right because the kinds of problems that

Jon Radoff: somebody building bits of the metaverse is tackling are some of the signature problems of civilization

Raph Koster: they are not oh yeah I've got a good algorithm for that I love that you said humility I frequently

Raph Koster: tell people that if you don't have any humility now try being a game designer you'll gain a lot of humility but follow the incentives is partly what you're saying like and you often don't know

Raph Koster: what the incentives are that you're embedding into a system but humans are gonna are gonna follow

Raph Koster: the incentives if you understand what they are you'll probably be able to figure out what they're gonna do and I love that you said that the server is sort of everything I mean that's what I'm in the business of is helping people create own their own servers because it's really hard to do and do it well and do it at scale so beamables out there to help people launch their own virtual worlds and actually own it and not be dependent on some of those infrastructure so awesome so for those of you who are watching right now you might want to follow Raf and listen to some of his

Raph Koster: butt or read some of his blogs like how how would they do that Raf Raf Coster.com our APH

Jon Radoff: short for Rafiel like the Ninja Turtle so you can go to RafCoster.com you can follow me RafCoster on Twitter so that's easy you know if you're interested in playable worlds that's playable worlds.com pretty straightforward I do I've written books those are all available at your standard bookstore things and you know whether you call it metaverse or online worlds or something else 25 years a quarter century of lessons learned often painfully learned lessons in article and talk form on my website so it's a really big archive if anybody wants to dive in. Awesome that's great

Raph Koster: I I encourage everybody to do that and if you like conversations like this by the way you know

Raph Koster: subscribe down below and you'll see more of this stuff you'll see some of the other things I

Raph Koster: posted about the metaverse you can follow me on Twitter where I'm Jay Raidoff and my company's beamable.com that's where we're building a lot of this infrastructure to help create the metaverse

Raph Koster: and help create games and give people an outlet for creativity.