# The Problems with Metaverses today and how to solve them

There are many definitions of metaverses, mostly configured to match whatever the defining party is selling.


But if we go back to the origin of the word in Neal Stephenson's [Snow Crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash), we can rather safely extrapolate that a metaverse should be:

> A **community-modifiable** virtual environment in which a reasonably unique and **digitally scarce** representation of a real human can **easily interact** with other such representations, and **permanently own the experience** of those interactions.

Let's extract and discuss the most important parts:

- community modifiable
- digitally scarce
- easily interact
- permanently own the experience

Let's look at each separately, and discuss solutions to each at the end of the article.

## Community Modifiable

If you need to know 3D modeling, game asset development, game customization, engine familiarity, be an economy PhD to develop a game economy, and be a social media and community building master to get a community around your creation, you will never get off the ground.


There is a reason why there is something like a total of four hours of content across all metaverses combined and it's all platformers. There is a reason why [Sandbox and Decentraland have a 1000 daily users combined](https://twitter.com/w0000CE0/status/1537401568328404993?s=20&t=KzMsdqwT6kflnCJ4-cYF0Q).

No one is building because it is hard. It is hard because no one is building. And no one is playing because no one is building.

This [catch-22](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22) is not sustainable, especially in a world where each new game experience by definition cannibalizes all others for those same 1000 players.

The community must be able to:

- fork existing experiences.
- easily create new experiences without having to go through a chain of single-points-of-failure like game development teams and gatekeepers.
- easily monetize those experiences to get some incentive and entice new builders to come in.
- easily keep those experiences safe for their users, in terms of both content and code-safety.
- grow together.

## Digitally Scarce

Most NFT projects today are only mock-scarce. Sure, there is a limited supply of them, but the utility of these NFTs (if any) is uncapped.

As an example, you can log into 500 different instances of a metaverse with the same wallet using the same NFT, "appearing" in different locations with the same avatar at the same time.


You can equip the same hat onto 500 different in-game avatars at the same time, because its visual representation is just a client-side thing. The platforms and projects are not at all Sybil-resistant, and the NFTs not scarce.

If your character, avatar, or asset can _cheat-spawn_ across the map and cannot be made digitally scarce without running an always-on server in the background checking for these conditions, it is not a metaverse. It is a badly made online game.

## Easily Interact

----

This permanence aspect is what's most important. Without permanence applied to ownership of experience, you do not have a metaverse. You have a **multiplayer game** which replaced usernames and passwords with reading an NFT balance, and which will make all the time you spent investing into this ecosystem completely evaporate when the servers shut down.

And they will shut down - because these "metaverses" are inherently competing with one another for the same small player base, once the players leave and stop feeding money into the machine, the servers will inevitably become too expensive to maintain.

One year from now, 99% of the "metaverse" projects announced today will not exist.

So, today's metaverses are just multiplayer games, permissioned, centralized, run by teams which are single points of failure on servers that are single points of failure.

"But surely", you may be thinking, "the games using NFTs make them more metaverse than simple multiplayer games?"

In theory, sure. But in practice, here is what happens when a metaverse "uses" an NFT today.

Let's assume you have a Bored Ape NFT. Now let’s assume there is a 3D voxel based metaverse (voxels are big 3d pixels, large blocks from which you make other structures), we can call it mudbox.

A bored ape is a 2D illustration of an APE, so obviously using it as an avatar in that metaverse directly cannot work.

So the mudbox devs have to do the following: they have to make a 3D model of your ape using voxels, add it to their game, and then tell the game engine - the software running that game - in some centralized database - that this particular 3D model is representative of this particular NFT.

When you log into mudbox with your web3 address, the mudbox software first checks if you have a certain APE, then checks if it has a 3D version of this ape built-in, and only if both conditions are true, it will let you take this ape for a spin in the game.

What a mess just to get an avatar in, right? And what happens if mudbox shuts down? Whoops, no more 3D model.

It gets worse.

Say there is a banana NFT. The same process applies - getting that banana into the game requires the team to make a 3D model of it (centralized) store it into the DB and game client (centralized) and read your balance of bananas when logging in.

Now let’s say the ape can interact with the banana in-game, and if it eats it, its “Bananas_eaten” score goes up by 1. Now it is a contest between the apes of who can eat more bananas. Fun, right?

What happens if this game shuts down? All 3D models, lost. But more importantly, all the scores are lost too because they were not logged to the ape itself. They were logged to a centralized database which references the APE, and is now gone.

There is no permanence.

**You do not own your experience.**

It is as if you had never eaten a single banana. 😢

So what can we do? What is the solution?

Well, some projects can mint “bananas eaten” rewards as separate NFTs or chips that you keep, but these are detached from the experience, cost a ton of transaction fees, and end up being wallet spam, not to mention the problem with portability of this experience - moving your score to another game would require moving a ton of tokens which maybe should not be transferable at all, because they are scores!

Luckily, there are other ways. New NFT standards now exist - ones that solve all the various metaverse problems, ushering in a truly decentralized and scalable future.

NFTs, when using the new [RMRK Standards](https://docs.rmrk.app) as drop-in replacements for ERC721 and ERC1155 while maintaining bakcwards compatibility can now:

- have multiple resources (outputs) which makes the 3D version of the ape a PART of the NFT itself, along with the 2D illustration, keeping all assets a game needs in one NFT, without needing to talk to the game devs at all.
- have NFTs owning other NFTs, meaning your NFT ape in the game can literally collect bananas, but it can also own experience by means of [soulbound 2.0 NFTs](https://docs.rmrk.app/nontransferable), where experience points, skills, even personalities and pathfinding algorithms can be non-transferable NFTs _inside_ another NFT which itself _is_ transferable.
- evolve by using the aforementioned experience points, burning them at a certain point, and getting a new resource (output) representing a new level, thereby keeping the entire game state, player experience, and character progression on chain in the NFT itself. No longer do you need to bridge your experience into another game token by token - just bridge your avatar, and the avatar contains the full progress, its level, skills, everything it gained, all your invested time. When Mudbox is down, your avatar is not - it contains everything.

Or, here is a more concrete example. Let's assume we are building a game like Civilization on-chain. Traditionally, you would need servers to host games, monitor for cheaters, and save game state, or at least translate it into downloadable files so people can manually resume games.

With advanced NFTs, however:

- game units are NFTs
- land plots are NFTs
- game units cannot be in land plots without literally being in the land plots (land owns the unit), and so cheat resistance is built-in on the chain level
- all units know where they are and what they can do at all times due to their soulbound 2.0 NFT attributes and positions in lands
- your entire game state is on-chain and anyone can build an alternative UI for it
- when it comes time to do the NPC moves calculation (non player character turn), this calculation can be offloaded to a decentralized computer like [Phala](https://phala.network), and return the info to the NFT which is the "world state"

We have a fully decentralized downtime-resistant turn-based strategy game that lets you own your experience once the game is over! Experience you can take into another world, and get other advantages, perks, and abilities based on what you have already done!

This is what the metaverse is all about, and how we get to OWN and SHARE our experience.

If you would like to explore similar concepts now possible with these advanced NFT standards, please see [here](https://docs.rmrk.app) or [get in touch!](https://twitter.com/bitfalls)