@MetaverseCares

I’m forever planning and starting new side projects. I try not to beat myself up too much about not finishing or releasing them because they’re mostly a bit of fun or intended as a learning exercise.

But there’s always some cognitive overhead to having code half finished, incomplete drafts and lots of open tabs. So in 2022 I’m going to deliberately let go of some projects.

In a few cases, like the one I’m about to describe, I’m going to write down some notes so I’ve at least captured the thought process behind them. It helps lay them to rest.

Anyway this post is about a Twitter account I had started work on called @MetaverseCares.

It was prompted by two things. The first being this absolutely fantastic tweet from the @BungieHelp account:

For a very specific group of people this probably means a great deal. But I frankly haven’t a clue what a Thermoclastic Blooming Artifact might be. It sounds expensive. Or possibly something you should treat liberally with ointment.

There are lots of examples of weird and funny patch notes from games.

I thought generating a bunch of similar nonsensical tweets using a Tracery grammar and hosted on CheapBotsDoneQuick might be a fun thing to do.

Games and game mechanics are everywhere, and particularly in various visions of the “Metaverse”. Facebook’s future is a tacky mashup of game worlds and a rather terrible looking corporate meeting and collaboration space.

So I started to wonder what kind of patch notes we might get from the Metaverse?

People using speed run tactics to glitch out of their corporate meetings. Either manually like in Half-Life Alyx or tool-assisted like in Super Mario 64.

Autoclickers and Key Pressers to help get through meetings. Corporate Wellbeing Loot Crates. Actual boss battles.

What kind of terrible bugs might can we expect in the rush to make new content or capitalise on old IPs?

Maybe throw in a mix of publishers announcing new game modes that rip off ideas from other developers? Not to mention a range of exciting new ways to exploit creators.

Cringe-inducing corporate events. Exciting new frontiers in Gold Farming, IP infringement, corporate sponsorships and DRM.

No Nike sneakers in the Pepsi Lounge.

So I’d set up a twitter account to act as a fake corporate support account for the Metaverse we can expect. Modelled on @BungieHelp and @SpotifyCares.

The content would be a mix of auto-generated tweets plus a hand-rolled weekly thread that told a hopefully funny little story, informed by current events.

Would it have actually been funny? Probably not. I’d gotten as far as setting up the account, had sketched out some of the initial themes and started in on drafting some content in a spreadsheet.

But over the Christmas break I had a rethink.

It would be fun to write something like this, and I have another account in the works that may end up taking a similar approach of mixing procedural and hand-crafted content.

But I realised that I’d have to actually spend more time reading and thinking about Web3, the Metaverse and whatever. And I’m done with all that. I’ve decided I’m better off spending my time on other things.

Today’s @MadMenQts tweet sums it up.