Companies in the tech world have expressed their ambitions to build the metaverse, the hypothetical next iteration of the Internet that technologists suspect will be less like the text-based Internet we have today, and closer to a digitized version of the real one. world. And Greene’s vision of the metaverse is a world owned and shared by everyone.
PlayerUnknown Productions, the Amsterdam-based studio Greene founded to develop “Prologue” and Artemis, sounds more like a research and development lab than a game developer. Greene told Hit Points that the staff includes nuclear physicists and mathematicians — definitely not the kind of workers you’d normally find on a video game team. But Artemis is not really a game in the traditional sense. Greene described it as a decentralized interactive world where residents are free to create or play whatever they want.
“I’m very diligent about this,” Greene said. “It has to be made a certain way. The only way this exists is if it’s made for everyone, and not for money.”
It’s a big vision that requires skilled management, which is why Greene brought former Ubisoft Massive director David Polfeldt to the PlayerUnknown team as a senior advisor.
The technology to make something like Artemis doesn’t even exist yet. Creating a 1:1 scale virtual Earth with thousands of people exploring the fully realized biomes is currently an impossible task. The tools for creating a metaverse mirror of the Earth don’t exist yet, at least on a scale that’s practical. That is why PlayerUnknown Productions is particularly committed to building a game engine, Melba, that will be supported by machine learning.
Building Artemis, Greene said, would require an absurd amount of labor for human engineers, but it could be feasible for an AI capable of producing an entire planet of trees, plants, valleys, rivers and mountains at a relentless pace. . It could also potentially populate Artemis with animals and even human NPCs that behave and interact in realistic ways – as long as the AI is well built and has the right data. Greene told Hit Points that his studio has already filed several patent applications for some of the technology it developed, and he shared a little bit about how it works.
“We’ve created some new knowledge here: mapping the terrain, filling it with trees and assets, inserting artist-created sites into that terrain,” Greene told Hit Points. “And it all happens generatively, as you move through the world.”
All this is going to take a long time, about 10 to 15 years according to Greene’s estimate. Polfeldt is optimistic about the project’s success, calling the team’s small staff an advantage rather than a hurdle. For Polfeldt, this means the team can take out the many targets ahead – task by task – as they steadily march towards the white whale of a planet-sized digital playground.
Greene has remained open to using blockchain technology. Because anyone at Artemis can make or do anything they want, Greene said, they need a way to verify the title deed or some kind of currency to exchange for providing a service.
“We’re building a digital place,” said Green. “It must have an economy and systems must be at work. … But it’s not about, like, Chanel and Louis Vuitton. It’s a guy called AwesomePickle who sells cool skins because he understands what people want.”
The dream is that Artemis is an open source world that anyone can customize with decentralized ownership. All residents of Artemis will have their share, with PlayerUnknown Productions eventually fading into a “maintenance” role to make sure everything runs smoothly, Greene said. It’s a place with a framework, but “no real rules,” he said.
Open world games – even those with limited scope and strictly controlled ownership relative to Artemis’ field – have already created some fascinating emerging moments, unplanned and often unforeseen by the developers. In 2007, a woman in New York City posted an ad on Craigslist offering sex in exchange for 5,000 gold in “World of Warcraft” to buy an epic flying mountain (the woman claimed to have found a customer in a follow-up post) . In 2012, the zombie apocalypse’s title ‘DayZ’ inspired discussions about human nature as players chose to team up or kill each other over cans of beans in the game’s cutthroat world. In 2005, a “World of Warcraft” glitch that acted as a viral epidemic forced the developer to temporarily shut down the game to prevent the “virus” from infecting all players.
Greene was referring to English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web who also gave his creation away for free with no copyrights or patents. More recently, Berners-Lee has been highly critical of the Silicon Valley giants that control large swaths of the web, warning of what he termed a “digital dystopia” future.
To that end, PlayerUnknown Productions is going to build Artemis, but Greene wants its citizens to decide what it becomes.
“We want to make our engine easy to modify and open source so that everyone can participate,” Greene told Brown. “It won’t be PlayerUnknown’s Metaverse, just like it won’t be Tim Berners-Lee’s Internet. It should belong to everyone.”
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