Game Interoperability Isn’t Silly

I got a wisdom tooth out yesterday and am oozing, in quite a bit of pain and have a temperature. The perfect time to write something about the current game interoperability conversation happening on Twitter!

This all really kicked off when some guy in a band posted an asinine take on the potential role of NFTs and crypto in creating shareable game assets. This isn’t a new thing but the status of the guy means everyone wants to jump in and dunk on it. And the dunks are wide ranging but ultimately simplistic. There’s a reason why a huge amount of the games industry missed out on the rise of Roblox and that’s because we often diddle with the things right in front of us and aren’t particularly good at looking outside that bubble.

I want to kick the NFT/crypto part of the conversation to one side. Partly because I don’t like crypto either and I think that dislike clouds the issue more than it really should. But also because I don’t think it really adds much to the interoperability conversation. There’s little that crypto provides that can’t be done more efficiently in a different way as people have explained at length with way more diagrams than I’m ever going to make.

So the dunks are good?

Yes but they’re pretty descriptive of the current state of things. Is the idea of bringing your Fornite skin into CoD laughable across technical, business and legal axes? Yes. Is it silly to think that you can just drag any item to any game or that game developers will magically write in support for whatever you happen to own? Yes. These are the dreams cooked up by people who don’t understand game development or really games deeply. But I do think there is something there and it’s both the crypto dislike and the bubble effect that stop people really engaging with the ideas of interoperability.

Why?

Successful closed interoperable ecosystems have existed for decades. Second Life launched in 2003! But more recently we’ve had VRChat, Rec Room, Roblox (sort of), Fortnite (sort of) and a bunch of others. I even work for a company that is making a non-crypto closed interoperable ecosystem! These ecosystems all have real amounts of users. And guess what, it’s fun and amazing and I think holds a lot of potential both as a way for people to get into game development but also as a way of creating a wholly different set of games. Being able to share assets, common ways of doing things and whole bits of other games makes it really fun and pretty easy to kit-bash together new games. And from a solely business perspective there are now VC funded companies who purely exist to make games for Roblox, asset stores are a thing and cosmetics in games are booming.

Is it for all games?

Of course not, there’s a reason all of the above are largely multiplayer with a strong sense of personal identity that continues between games. It does mean the games are different, from shared co-op narratives to mingle-player games through to more traditional competitive multiplayer games. This isn’t a threat to traditional gaming, just another market for developers that is quickly emerging from the niche that Second Life represents. It’s totally okay not to care about interoperability but being aware of it might present some new opportunities.

Are we stuck with closed ecosystems?

I wish we weren’t but in my view it’s basically inevitable. Even if we invoke the dreaded metaverse word and keep our fingers crossed for good intentions from Epic, Roblox and Facebook. The spirit and material conditions that created room for communal development and spawned the Internet and the web disappeared long ago. I don’t think it’s possible we’d be able to recreate the web today outside of private hands and we can definitely see attempts to fence it off from big-tech incumbents. It’s also in many ways antithetical to the culture of game development. We don’t share well, are infamous for secrecy and we tend to view technology that isn’t “ours” more through the lens of something to beat than something to join in with.

It’s no surprise that there are basically zero, production-ready, open-source game engines that didn’t initially begin as closed-source. The idea of there being common standards implemented across a broad range of engines just seems to be impossible to reach.

Even where open-source projects exist, like OpenSimulator, they are furiously outcompeted by the commercial alternatives both technologically but also in terms of aggressive user acquisition. It’s simply much easier with a boatload of cash and complete control to solve all aspects of building this sort of incredibly complex project.

So what?

I guess my overall point is that quickly and casually dismissing something can be as thoughtless as some of the bad takes we’ve all seen. Within some of these conversations are nuggets of information and thinking deeper than “LOL thats fucking silly” is a way to find new opportunities or interesting things to think about.