Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Pictured: 1867 Historical Role Play, a simulation of 19th century Luxembourg built in ROBLOX

Longtime readers may find this hilarious (or hilariously tedious), but you know the long-running debate about whether Second Life is a game or a virtual world platform with games in it? A variation of that debate is now taking place in a court of law, in the epic Epic vs. Apple lawsuit. At issue is whether Epic's Fortnite is a game and not an open platform metaverse, as Epic would prefer it defined — even though, as Verge reports, Apple previously defined ROBLOX as not a game:

The Epic v. Apple antitrust trial has produced a weeks-long, frequently hilarious debate over the definition of a video game. Epic wants to prove that its shooter Fortnite is a “metaverse” rather than a game, pushing the trial’s scope to cover Apple’s entire App Store instead of just games. Apple wants to prove that Epic is an almost purely game-related company and that the App Store maintains consistent, user-friendly policies distinguishing “apps” from “games.” It also wants to defend a ban on “stores within a store” on iOS.

Roblox blurs the line between a large social game and a game engine or sales platform. Users don’t enter a single virtual world like Second Life; they launch individual experiences created by users. Developers can sell items within those experiences, and there are full-fledged game studios that build with Roblox instead of, say, the Unity or Unreal engines. But all of this activity happens within a single Roblox app, instead of as a series of separately packaged games.

So basically it's like that famous scene from The Office except it's not Jim and Dwight arguing about whether a virtual world is a game, but top-notch lawyers from two of the largest tech companies, with billions of dollars and the fate of an entire industry at stake. (The distinction of Second Life being a single virtual world has become fairly academic, by the way, since owners of individual sims now have considerable control over the user experience.)

Anyway, as Ars Technica observes: "Those kinds of distinctions are key to Apple's arguments regarding the fees it charges for in-app purchases made on the iOS version of Fortnite and the control it exerts over Epic's game. It also plays into Epic's argument that the company should be allowed to run its own competing game store on iOS."

And now, by total coincidence (except probably not), ROBLOX has replaced any mention of "game" on its website with "experience".

It's nigh impossible for any virtual world platform to thrive without being on Apple's App Store, so how the judge decides on these academic distinctions could alter the future of the metaverse.

As for the question itself, I'm not sure either Apple or Epic would want me as an expert on the case, because I'd tell the judge something like this:

Pretending that 3D graphics are a “world” and that fellow system users are fantastic “Avatars” within it is in itself a game.

On this view, the statistically varied challenges [that define a game] are baked into the entire Second Life experience. The first core statistically varied challenge is to accept 3D graphics as a “world” in some meaningful way, and to figure out how to navigate successfully within it. The second is to impose that challenge on your avatar (customizing, enhancing, and ultimately mastering it), and then on the avatars of others, pretending that they embody the fantastic, flying, god-like 3D representations they present to you. From that view, you could say that the game of Second Life is competing with others to accept Second Life as a second life — and to demonstrate one’s mastery within it. Indeed, with no traditional MMORPG-type mechanics, Second Life users implicitly compete with each other by showing how well they’re able to use the UI and understand the system.

I'd say the same logic applies to ROBLOX even more cleanly, because ROBLOX has user-to-user ratings, awards, traffic counters, and other game mechanics.

Anyway, will be fascinating to see how the court lands on this question. It will certainly impact whether we ever see Second Life itself in Apple's App Store.