Even if you don’t play games, you have spent years of your life in one or more virtual worlds.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and WeChat are lightweight versions of virtual worlds. They don’t offer terrain for avatars to explore, but they are neighborhoods within cyberspace where we store assets, develop relationships and, in some instances, might even choose to hide behind an alias.
The faces we present on these platforms are different from the ones we show our friends in person. While we usually use real names and photos, our presence on Twitter and Instagram is an avatar of sorts. What we do (and do not) post, how we say what we say, how we portray ourselves through selectively chosen (and often edited) photos — it’s an online persona. The aim — conscious and subconscious — is to build social capital within the particular cultural environment of these virtual spaces.
(This is part two of a seven-part series about virtual worlds.)
The social capital gained or lost within a virtual space can connect directly to social capital in the physical world. The worlds are separate but intertwined; what percent of news stories these days revolve around what someone posted on Twitter or Instagram?
Social media apps have virtual economies the same way as games like Fortnite do, they’re just smaller and involve fewer users thus far. There is constant trading of goods and services that exist only within the virtual world of a social app. For example, individuals and companies spend real money on trading Twitter handles, buying Instagram followers, purchasing special image filters and on Twitch memberships that put a badge next to their name to signify their status as a financial supporter of a specific streamer.
On this point, CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson told me, “there’s not much reality in reality anymore,” given how much of our daily lives in “the real world” are about creating, consuming and interacting online, noting that many social media influencers earn more money in these virtual worlds than factory workers can make building physical items.
Science fiction has trained us to think of virtual worlds as siloed spaces like the virtual worlds portrayed in “The Matrix” or “Ready Player One.” We don’t think of Twitter and Instagram as virtual worlds because they are intertwined with social capital and economics of our physical world, becoming part of the normal, everyday real world.
A growing base of social media users seem to be exhausted by posting-based social media and concerned about their use of such apps. Since the early 2000s, the model of social media has been posting written, photo or video content to a feed for the whole world or for your whole network of acquaintances to see. Social capital is attributed based on the size of one’s following and the number of simple interactions with one’s posts (a Like or Retweet or brief comment).
Within this model, each individual is a one-person newspaper or TV channel incentivized to maximize their following and compete for engagement. Social media isn’t about doing things together, building constructive things or holding deep conversations; instead, it’s a game of making your avatar into a mini-celebrity. For all their benefit helping us keep up with distant friends and family or get discovered by new people, social apps have become toxic environments of shallow interactions and sensational content.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey of American adults in March 2019 found that 57% believe “social media does more to divide us” than bring us together, 55% believe “social media does more to spread lies and falsehoods” than to spread news and information, and 82% believe “social media does more to waste our time” than to “use our time well.” Moreover, two-thirds of U.S. adults say “uncivil discussions about news” are a “very big problem” or “moderately big problem” on social media.
Tellingly, a Pew Research Center survey in 2018 found that among 18 to 35-year-old Facebook users in the U.S., 47% reported taking a multi-week break from Facebook and 43% reported deleting the Facebook app from their phone for a period of time. Anecdotally, I encounter so many people who mention they’re trying to spend less time on social media that it’s a tired expression. Social media apps seem to increasingly be something we view as unhealthy addictions, or at least as junk food to limit our consumption of.
The social dynamics of broadcasting-based social media are artificial. Unless you’re a major political leader, TV anchor or superstar musician, no human normally talks to thousands of people at once on a regular basis. Nobody takes out a picture they took and runs around trying to get as many acquaintances as possible to give them a thumbs up or three-word response. There are obvious benefits to modern social media, but the social dynamics of interactions on these platforms are contrary to the social dynamics of our physical world interactions. When in person, our social pressure is to engage a small number of people around you and to avoid conflict (or at least temper the tone of disagreement).
That’s why gaming is so interesting from a social network perspective. MMO games are based on a limited number of players actually participating in an activity together, often collaboratively in teams. Multiplayer games engage each user as a participant in an ongoing activity with one-on-one or small-group interactions. Even if the context is different, the basic dynamic of those interactions parallels the physical world.
Social media apps are, to varying degrees, adapting to consumer demand for more intimate social interaction. There are clear signs that people are seeking more meaningful online interactions with a more private or curated group of people. Most notably, Facebook announced last spring that it is redesigning its core Facebook platform around Facebook Groups and that “the future is private.” The newcomer to the social app landscape, TikTok, is designed to be more inclusive and community-oriented — replicating trending dances makes it easy to participate in group activity and less about creating unique posts. Even so, they are both still based around broadcasting: posts in a feed rather than doing things together in real time.
Recognizing the popularity of gaming content and the socializing that surrounds gaming, major social networks have been embracing games for years. On YouTube, game streaming is now one of the most watched categories of content. Google’s new cloud gaming service, Stadia, will have an integration so viewers can hop into the game they are watching a video of at the click of a button. Facebook has had games like Farmville for many years and Instant Games within its Messenger and News Feed since 2016, then launched Facebook Gaming last year as a live-streaming hub like Twitch and YouTube Gaming. It also recently acquired PlayGiga, a startup-building cloud gaming infrastructure. Snap, meanwhile, added multiplayer games to its Snapchat app last April.
As all-purpose social hubs, these major social apps are where hundreds of millions of people talk about what’s happening in virtual worlds. On Facebook alone, there are 300,000 game-related Groups involving more than 100 million active users, according to Newzoo.
In China, the largest social media company, Tencent (parent of WeChat and QQ), is also the world’s largest game publisher and the most active strategic investor in the global gaming industry. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, launched a gaming division last year that has already hit 1,000 employees.
As gaming companies adopt functionality from social networks, social app companies have been turning to games to provide more fulfilling interactions between users.
Virtual Worlds EC-1 (Special Series) Table of Contents
- Part 1: “Games already are social networks“
- Part 2: “Why social networks want even more gaming”
- Part 3: “What virtual worlds in this transition era will look like“
- Part 4: “Why didn’t this already happen?“
- Part 5: “Multiverse virtual worlds will be healthier for society than our current social networks“
- Part 6: “Making money from games: The future of virtual economies“
- Part 7: “The companies that will shape the multiverse era“
Also check out other EC-1s on Extra Crunch.