The Rise of MMO-VR-RPG (Part I): Golem and the Crypto-Sorcerers

The Rise of MMO-VR-RPG (Part I): Golem and the Crypto-Sorcerers

Popularized in such books as Ernest Cline's Ready Player One and Tad William's Otherland series, the idea of an immersive Massively Multiplayer Online Virtual Reality Role-Playing Game (hereafter MMO-VR-RPG) currently appears a distant dream. But how far away is it really?

For those of you have read Cline's and Williams' books, no further explanation is needed. These models are the goal of MMO-VR-RPG futurists. For those who haven't read them, they are the absolute gold standards of virtual reality futurism and should be considered must-reads.

Williams' Otherland series was published from 1996 to 2001; Cline's stand alone novel Ready Player One was published in 2011. In many respects, Cline's novel can be considered to build on many of the premises of Otherland. In the Otherland series, the goal of the VR architects was to establish a transhumanist platform for uploading human consciousness to survive physical death. In Ready Player One the VR environment has essentially consumed and replaced all digital infrastructure globally and become the nervous system of the world economy.

The VR environment of Ready Player One is called OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation). OASIS is an open source platform that is both a virtual reflection of society and a MMO-VR-RPG at the same time. People log into OASIS to attend school, to work at their office jobs, to go shopping, to see a movie with friends, visit a theme park or play a VR game. Imagine being able to log in to a completely immersive VR Second Life shopping center as an avatar of yourself, go through a door and be in a VR version of World of Warcraft, TItanfall or Monkey Island replete with heroic abilities and equipment sets and you are almost there.

There appear to be four primary hurdles to realizing what will ultimately become the gold standard of future MMO-VR-RPGs: (1) The necessary processing power to adequately execute a MMO-VR-RPG, (2) The necessary storage for hosting the program, (3) the virtual environment program itself, and (4) the requisite hardware interface for enabling a seamlessly immersive MMO-VR-RPG experience.

"Rise, Golem!"

"The soul is not a single unity; that is what it is destined to become, and that is what we call 'immortality'. Your soul is still composed of many 'selves', just as a colony of ants is composed of many single ants. You bear within you the spiritual remains of many thousand ancestors, the heads of your line."
-Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

The Golem project, as revealed by the quotes in the white paper, is named for the golems of the old pen-and-paper role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons (which I grew up playing!), though the idea of a golem is thousands of years old. Golems are magical anthropomorphic constructs that have been brought to life to serve and protect a sorcerer. This is an appropriate moniker given the scope of the Golem project and, charmingly, very much in keeping with the atmosphere of Cline's novel Ready Player One.

The processing power necessary to render and execute a fully immersive MMO-VR-RPG on the scale and level of sophistication postulated in Ready Player One or Otherland is, by all reckoning, many orders of magnitude above the capacity of even the largest and most advanced supercomputer in operation today - especially if it were hosted and run out of a centralized data center.

There does appear to be a solution to the issue of processing power already being developed that can scale to the demands of a future MMO-VR-RPG environment. It can be found in the young blockchain company Golem. Golem is aiming big, billing itself as "the first truly decentralized supercomputer, creating a global market for computing power."

Golem is also adding "dedicated software integrations...any interested party is free to create and deploy software to the Golem network...developers can also extend and customize the payment mechanism resulting in unique mechanisms for monetizing software." This will be accomplished within an Ethereum-based transaction system. That definitely sounds like an auspicious ecosystem for ambitious software developers to deploy a macro-scale VR environment.

Currently, Golem appears to be focusing on becoming "a platform for microservices, allowing users to run both small (e.g. a note-taking app) and large (e.g. a streaming service) applications in a completely decentralized way." The crypto-sorcerers of Golem foresee four levels of development, aptly defined (for old-school role-players) as Brass Golem, Clay Golem, Stone Golem and Iron Golem.

The Brass Golem is designed to facilitate CGI rendering. The Clay Golem will enable developer integration. The Stone Golem will enable certification and financialization. The Iron Golem is the cumulative culmination of the above golems and is described as "robust, highly resistant to attacks, stable and scalable." This final stage will be provided within a Golem Standard Library that is intended to make application creation "far easier for developers."

Projecting the ramifications of the project goals further into the future, I think Golem has much more potential than is explicitly mentioned in the white paper. It may well be the first platform capable of serving as the nervous system of a large-scale, decentralized, open-source, immersive and interactive VR environment, much like that conceived of in Ready Player One or the Otherland series.

As of this writing (May 31, 2017), Golem's Network Token (GNT) is trading at $0.439988.

Rise, Crypto-Golem, rise!

• Cupid Zero

In future installments of my speculative futurist MMO-VR-RPG infrastructure series, I will address the issue of digital homesteading and available/upcoming storage solutions for an immersive future (the memory of the crypto-golem) and expand on the potential for a customizable open source VR environment. I will also investigate various interface possibilities.

All quotes unless otherwise noted taken from: https://golem.network/doc/Golemwhitepaper.pdf

Tags: crypto golem technology blockchain virtualreality MMORPG MMO-VR-RPG