How can metaverse companies

step closer to people in real world?

It has been over half a year since Facebook changed its name to Meta. Still, the interest and investment in tech companies for the metaverse are soaring, but we still need much thought about what its implementation will suggest to the public. WIRED’s question that metaverse cannot be clearly defined because it has not been implemented yet is quite convincing. Moreover, some commercial products related to VR and AR technologies tend to deliver a distorted understanding that the metaverse will be limited to the already existing technology-intensive industry.

As the WSJ points out, Meta’s recent ambitious attempt, Ray-Ban Stories, encounters an assessment that it is creepy because passers-by can’t find that it’s being filmed, before being praised for its technical achievements.

Although a lesson from Google glass, released in 2011, has been confirmed that consideration of social norms is essential before implementing technology, such as banning wearers from entering cafes and prohibiting drivers while wearing, why is this case again? What is the metaverse that tech companies envision, and what are they missing in the process? We find its clue here in one gaming community.

Photo by etherealSTEVE on Reddit

The name of this figure is ‘Let Me Solo Her.’ To be more precise, it is the user name in the game of one of the 1.4 million users of the Reddit community for the new game ‘Elden Ring,’ which was released in February this year and sold over 12 million copies worldwide in three weeks.

He has sacrificed himself to voluntarily fight the boss, notorious for the extreme difficulty, more than 1,000 times for other users through the Co-op function in the game. This dedicated heroic tale widely spread in the community through users who had felt limited in dozens of attempts and soon began to spread as a phenomenon of idolizing him. The fandom has become another new meme, ranging from fan art, figures, animations, reaction videos, interview articles, and eventually, the form of the rap song.

Of course, it has often been seen that such a fandom is created within the gaming community. However, what’s interesting about the Let Me Solo Her phenomenon is that people’s attention is not on the characters in the game but on a user.

AAA game development companies have been planning stories, world views, and relationships between characters based on the destined main character born with unique ability when designing games, for a long time. Users have essentially played a limited role in which they have to immerse themselves in growing along a well-made and scheduled path. Therefore, the character was always the hero when accessing the game, and the process of the character’s growth was all that could be expected soon. However, Elden Ring has a very different starting point in that it aims to develop users or people, not the character.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Elden Ring’s game director Hidetake Miyazaki, who majored in social science, explained that it started in a dangerously designed world where users could easily die at any time. He added that “You Died” often seen by users, is an intended message to reveal the user’s role as an interdependent core feature that maintains the game world.

Messages from unknown users make people interact with others consistently in one world.

He says he expected users to experience technical and empirical growth through multiple death, and he didn’t include the option of changing the difficulty, despite requests by threatening for refunds from numerous gamers over a decade to ensure that all users experience it equally.

In general, games consist of fictional challenges. Therefore, we feel that those are cliche or far away from our everyday life. But because the Elden Ring’s world is rooted in the human experience, from shame, failure to death, and focused on growing the user itself, making the experience within the game closer to that of life.

In the real world, the meaning of ‘heroic life’ is derived from the opposite way of life, ‘ordinary life,’ conceived in terms of the interdependent struggles between people. (What Makes a Hero?, Featherstone, 1992:162) The act of firefighters jumping into a burning house can be understood only on the premise of social conditions that emphasize the narrative of heroism, such as the role of firefighters, the general human reaction to the fire scene, and the social recognition of the occupational group. (Heroism and the Changing Character of War, Scheipers, 2014: 5)

In other words, it is worth noting that the heroic actions in the world of the Elden Ring shown by Let Me Solo Her are rooted in the right mind, motives, and circumstances and are also premised on the characteristics of the human organization demonstrated by sociologists in various subject areas.

In that the triggers of courage and self-sacrifice are found not inside, but outside the individual, physical and practical praises implemented by numerous users in real-world toward one user in the digital world can thus be a clue to ‘establishing meaningful relationships with users’ through technology that Meta has not yet overcome with Rayban and Oculus.

When drawing a world that is permeated with technology or when creating a digital product, we suggest considering firstly the ecology of how users and others can interact with each other based on social conditions even though clients think it would be limited. As a result, it can be helpful to achieve a more realistic performance and reduce the cost of building a brand community.

Despite the splendid technological achievements that are entirely different from the reality achieved by Virtual Streamer CodeMiko, she got a Twitch ban because the eyes of subscribers looking at her D-pic system put their roots in the real world.

On the other hand, Google’s Translation Service Glasses, which was newly introduced in April, is identified to gain a silent compliment with a smooth response from the public, which is quite different from the past in that it aims to solve the communication issues of various types of social relations.

Where do your projects and product expectations for metaverse begin? Is technology the main character in your business world? Do you imagine the user’s face? Or how about thinking about the ecology first?

Ryan Son is the partner at Reason of creativity.