This long inZOI playthrough by Rudi Rennkamel (watch above) is from a few months ago, but it's the most thorough I've seen so far. The avatar creation and 3D building system is quite impressive, with some caveats. Unless I missed it, sadly no mention of inZOI's cat god though.
Brendan "PLAYERUNKNOWN" Greene is making a metaverse platform (something he hinted with a Steam demo last December), and now Edwin Evans-Thirlwell of Rock Paper Shotgun has an in-depth look at his plans.
Such as:
There is certainly a grand design here, but it's more about the role Go Wayback will play in the aforesaid "3D internet" stuff, which I find pretty draining to describe. To recap, Go Wayback is the first of three games that are sort of one big rolling exercise in cultivating the technology for a bunch of "interoperable" gameworlds. As Brendan Greene explained to me after my hands-on, it paves the way for Artemis, which will run on the studio's own Melba engine, with the promise of much larger generated maps and "millions" of players per session. As for the eventual "Game Three" – this, seemingly, will be the capstone for an open-ended network of holodecky fantasies in which people can generate, modify, share and monetise worlds or bits of worlds via means yet to be fully described.
I can't believe people are still saying "3D internet" which is a term from when Nirvana was still touring. But then again, I can't believe people are still talking about web3, which Greene does. Still, the breadth of ambition is impressive.
Finally, there's Philip Rosedale's latest think piece, which also reads like a design document to a new social app (that he's maybe building?):
Two people meeting for the first time will likely share many group affiliations, if these groups were made digital, nestable, and democratic-where-appropriate, as described. Imagine how enjoyable it could be to make these connections as a part of meeting a new person. As a security sidenote, remember that people do not need to disclose groups to each other of which they are not both members. This type of system can be built with complete privacy – you cannot know someone else is in a group unless either they choose to show you, or you yourself are in that same group.
Group memberships can also be used to allow safe access to events or locations. For example, I could have a political town hall event where a large number of local groups were allowed to attend, provided that they agreed to manage the behavior of their member attendees. This would protect privacy (proving that you are a member of a group does not disclose your actual identity), and would also curtail extreme behavior (your group will sanction you if you are observed by other group members to have violated the standards of behavior agreed to by the group for the event)…
With today’s tech and the pervasiveness of smartphones, it is very possible to build an app that lets you instantly find friends and groups in common with other people, without any risk of privacy breach or surveillance. Combining this with location services would make it easy to find people you can trust, wherever you may go. This seems like a sensible thing to build that would be of service to us all.
I'd try that app! Anyway, read it all here.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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