Digiverse is an experimental project into the nature of online socialization and emergent virtual spaces of immersion and embodiment therein, engendered as an online multiplayer augmented reality server. This world and its content is curated according to our opinionated view on the aforementioned, which we thoroughly present, tending to freeform and unrestricted gameplay through exploration, socially and spontaneously realized acts of beauty and aesthetics, and cohesion through progressive challenges in a microcosm of discovered information and experience. Both manual and algorithmic methods are used for Digiverse, the process and usage of which, culminating into its first playable island, we express from start to finish.
Unfinished text.
WARNING: The following information was written before the launch of the Digiverse Server. It contains planning and speculation which may be much different than its realization and progression into the server at the time of reading.
Ever since the modern conception of immersive experiences detached from physical reality within an interactive mode of operation, the preeminent hopes and desires of humanity have always directed towards the total fulfilment of said immersion: an experience not only functionally indistinguishable from reality, but far more vivid and eclectic; an experience which in the creative and technological sphere of the 80s and 90s would be addressed as ‘virtual reality,’ ‘cyberspace’ and later on – taking after Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash – the metaverse.
The advent of video games themselves stems from a playful willingness to display one’s coding skill for creative output which pushes & showcases the boundary of the machine it is produced on, with precedence. Before the gross commodification of the internet – before even the internet itself – the computer was the playground of the perspicacious hacker, the coderotaku and anyone who could appreciate their efforts. Take for example, the so called ‘demoscene’ which flourished in the beforetimes, which expressed amicable competition to display one’s creative and technical output in the form of shared files and programs called demos. This scene developed as a social circle of locales, both within online spheres and as reallife meetups, and had no clear wall between friendships of the real and the online. An example of a contemporaneous demo can be seen in Fig. 1
Looking further downstream, video games have always had a high degree of sociality when they were able to make players interact with each other in real time, which could initially, in an online environment, be found within both textbased and graphical roleplaying games through MUDs 3, engendering imaginative thought akin to the conceits and systems of Dungeons & Dragons; and ever since the release of Doom, a direct online socialization experience in the form of highly competitive play, immersion within a 3D world that draws in every participant and transmogrifies them into their virtual persona, in this case a playername associated with a perception that ranges from Nemesis to Noob.
The excitement for gamelike virtual worlds continued into the early MMORPGs 4, such as Ultima Online, Everquest and Phantasy Star Online, which were popular, seminal titles at the cusp of the 21st century that combined individual focus and progression with an encompassing community effort within an immersive, persistent fantasy world, and the inherent layer of socialization therein.
This social foundation proved to be so influential that it soon developed into spheres that were less games than they were materialistic appropriation, stylistic assessment and socialite cloutgathering within a cohesive virtual reality, a social facsimile and simulation, a true stretch of what the term Massively Multiplayer Online could actually entail; notable examples of which are Second Life, IMVU, Habbo Hotel, and especially as precursor to widesense brand appropriation and advertisement, Minecraft.
In recent times, consumer availability of capable – for current graphical standards – virtualreality headsets and controllers have lurched virtual worlds towards a breakthrough in immersion due to the heightened mode of audiovisual and proprioceptive engagement they offer. Many games have thus included VRsupported modes, and VR social hangout spheres such as VRChat enjoy a great deal of popularity.
However,social virtual worlds and their development are perpetually limited by rate of engagement or arousal and the current technological paradigm: not only must the content offered by the virtual world be enthralling to a degree that allows the developers to carve out a niche in the Net, garnering a sustainable userbase, this userbase then too is indicative of the future of the virtual world as social platform through the culture that forms inside and surrounding it, wrought from the userbase’s outwardly portrayed interests and sensibilities.
Failure to establish such an userbase spells imminent death for the virtual world, which is why often gamelike elements are introduced to provide users with a solitary experience that is obviously enhanced when engaging with others, see also Fig. 3, charting user sentiment towards social drives in Ever Quest 6, plotting guild size over the player base of World of Warcraft as a gauge for ingroup communities 7 .
These worlds often play into users’ sense of materialistic style, by allowing them to customize their virtual persona to great lengths; this can also be seen in the creation of personal spaces with custom landscaping, architectural and interior design; both of these elements can be compounded with free or curated community additions, enclosed within the virtual world’s overarching structure of monetization for upkeep and development, which enables currency substantiated value of ownership as an important side effect that must not be overlooked.
A video game was once seen as a finite fixture, an experience with a concrete beginning, middle, and end. As bandwidth capabilities improved in society, the gaming industry has shifted towards making videogames a never ending experience, often utilizing multiplayer and various addiction mechanics to keep players gaming and spending indefinitely. To understand Digiverse, one must understand the current states of videogames: videogames themselves were defined by their limitations.
Before open worlds became commonplace and even trite mechanically, the sublime gaming experience was built around pushing the boundaries of worlds when they were still very apparent. As human beings have an innate spiritual urge to push the boundaries of their physical reality and discover new mechanics for their own existence, a wellmade video game is on that allows you to explore another world, experience a story, feel a climb of power, satisfy the sense of accruing wealth, and foster a social presence to other players.
Every child from the 2000s era of video games can recall at least one experience of repetitively ‘scratching the walls’ of a video game in search of something unique or unexpected. Whether this could be a deliberate ‘easter egg’ or an undiscovered glitch, the process of playing a game to discover exploits and secrets was a natural and expected part of the experience.
This mimicks the prop nature of games children play in real life– it’s an expected saccharine lesson that children do not need toys to have fun, they merely need props to use their imagination, however, the more sophisticated the prop, the more fun an imaginative and creative child has the potential to have. Digiverse, in our opinion,can be seen as the greatest prop for imagination ever created because its nature allows for a truly infinite ways of play beyond trivial technicalities.
This experimental curiosity is what pushed ships across oceans, fueled the tinkering of countless inventors, and expanded nearly every facet of our 20 culture into abstract new thinking. This energy too is poured into video games, which themselves are cleverly designed to target the preoccupations which reward us with sensations of accomplishment.
In these respects, of meaningful, unique experiences, Digiverse is the first truly open world game. Infinity is at the heart of the Digiverse experience. The game is nigh infinitely large and nearly every element of it is modifiable.
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