Try as I might to avoid it, the metaverse has been on my mind a lot lately. Though it’s little more than a vague mishmash of already-common online concepts theoretically unified by virtual and augmented reality in some way, it’s getting the hard sell from marketers, PR reps, and tech bros.
It’s also a part of Facebook’s cynical rebranding, but my focus has been drawn more to the non-Meta parts of the metaverse, particularly as I’ve been playing Elden Ring.
With Elden Ring and Dark Souls, From Software may have unintentionally designed the ideal AR implementation of the metaverse. I’m not trolling, or making a wry joke about the games’ difficulty and violence. I’m talking about the low-key genius of From Software developing an asynchronous communications system in its games, which I think could be revolutionary outside of games.
From Software’s Multiplayer Pillars
Elden Ring doesn’t have simple one-to-one cooperative or competitive modes. You can jump into other players’ games and they can jump into yours to fight or help with bosses, but only under very specific conditions. You also can’t directly talk to other players at any point. Despite these limitations, Elden Ring is absolutely saturated in communication between players, filtered and organized in brilliant ways.
Elden Ring has three core multiplayer features: messages, ghosts, and summons. They each work differently and none have a significant effect on your gameplay, but together they make the game feel alive and populated, and let people help each other.
Messages are written by using the Tarnished’s Wizened Finger, an item you get at the very beginning of the game (and which you should assign to a quick pouch slot so you can easily use it). When you do, you can write a message that appears as a glowing sign on the ground, and any player can read if they’re nearby.
You can’t write just anything to other players, though. You have to choose from a collection of templates and a limited glossary, combining something like “**** ahead!” with “Trap” to leave the message “Trap ahead!” This means messages can’t be personal or directly toxic or threatening; they can only be helpful or playful. You can also pair the message with a gesture, which makes a ghost of your character perform a simple action in front of whoever reads the message.
The second multiplayer feature is ghosts. As you play, you’ll sometimes see white ghosts of other players also currently playing the game. The actions of these ghosts will be visible, but no context for those actions will be given; you won’t be able to see the enemy a player is fighting, only that they’re fighting something. These ghosts appear randomly, but you can also trigger a different kind of ghost that’s much more useful. Bloodstains will appear on the ground where players died, and you can interact with them to make a ghost appear showing that player’s last few moments. The enemies still won’t be visible, but you’ll be able to identify where an ambush might come from, where a trap might be, or simply if a fall is too high from watching that ghost.
The third multiplayer feature is summons. Effigies are placed around the game that indicate where you can help other players or request help from them. The Small Golden Effigy item lets you place a golden summon sign on the ground at that location, while the Furlcalling Finger Remedy lets you invite other players through their summon signs. When you’re summoned by another player, you’re transported to the area they’re in with the objective to help them beat the nearby boss. You can only communicate with that player through gestures, not words, and you share a common goal to work toward. Those limitations keep toxicity and trolling to a minimum and encourage cooperation.
(There are also competitive invasions where you can transport to another player’s world as a “Bloody Finger” with the mission to kill them, but those invasions only occur if you’ve already summoned another player to help you, unless you use a specific item to let other players freely invade you. This means you won’t be caught off-guard by griefers when you’re adventuring alone, a problem the Dark Souls games had in the past.)
All of these features are sorted and filtered to an extent. The most popular messages will tend to appear to more people, and the number of bloodstains that appear in a given place will be limited so every boss arena doesn’t look like a level of Super Meat Boy. And, of course, you can directly interact with other players through summons as much or as little as you want.
So What About the Metaverse?
The metaverse is still an amorphous concept, and it seems to be congealing around a bunch of one-to-one, simultaneous virtual reality experiences people can share together, like a bunch of people attending a virtual concert. It’s a fine idea, and a fun one outside of virtual reality (I regularly watch Mystery Science Theater 3000 with my friends using manual synchronization of videos online), but it’s also clunky and overbearing to implement, requiring everyone to be on the same page at the same time. It’s also an idea we’ve seen, in virtual reality and outside of it, for years. You can already watch things with friends, and you don’t need the metaverse to do it.
But what if we took the asynchronous multiplayer features of Elden Ring, and put it in the real world using augmented reality on your phone (or one day a headset that isn’t expensive and ridiculous)? Now we have a framework that lets people communicate and assist friends and strangers at their own pace, and doesn’t require everyone to be around and online in the same virtual place at the same time to work.
Turn the Tarnished’s Wizened Finger into an app. When you find something interesting and want other people to be aware of it, tap and put down a message. Arrange some keywords and maybe show a virtual gesture, and your message will appear as a glowing sign on the ground to other people. These don’t need to be full reviews of restaurants or anything; maybe quick phrases like “Cool store here!” pointing at a tiny shop you might miss, or “Look up!” under some interesting architecture or art installation. In return, other people’s messages will appear for you when you’re near them, limited to cleverly arranged preset words and phrases, and filtered so you don’t see hundreds of them around an active location. Other people don’t need to be where you are right now, and you don’t need to stick around for your tips to be seen by others.
Yes, it’s a bit like Yelp mixed with Pokémon Go, but keeping messages simple and focusing on the augmented reality aspect of it ensures that communication is both quick and useful.
How about ghosts? Well, hopefully there aren’t enough random deaths at a given place to make augmented reality recreations of them useful, and people in the same place at the same time don’t need holograms to be visible by each other. There are still some ways to make the idea helpful in the real world.
Place motion-captured ghosts of people at important locations. Stores could show someone waving customers inside, or a work crew could drop a caution figure pointing at a hard hat (in both cases, signs should still physically be there, of course). Add a sense of livelihood and physical context to whatever a sign is trying to say, conveying not vital information or replacing actual markers, but providing additional information to users who want to use the metaverse and are equipped to do it.
A phone camera and a good video filter that can edit surroundings out from around a person could let everyday users contribute their ghosts, too. Combine the games’ ghost and message gesture concepts to drop little floating clips of people pointing out something worthwhile.
There are two ways summons could be helpful in the metaverse, too. On the simplest level, let people set beacons at locations if they want information directly from another person. If other people have set their phone or headset to keep an eye out for those beacons, they can come up and give directions to a train station or suggestions for where to get the best ramen nearby.
Commercially, “summoned” staffers could provide guidance at multiple locations at once, either virtually or physically. An off-site docent could walk a small group through a museum using someone’s phone camera or headset, explaining the exhibits without needing to be there. Or a shopper could signal a store clerk directly to their location to find a specific product, even if staff is nowhere to be seen.
Seek a Better Multiverse
These concepts are already present in some apps and social networks to some extent, but implementing the limited structure and adding the augmented reality aspects of Elden Ring would make those ideas much more engaging while keeping interactions quick, immersive, and only when desired.
Yes, a big part of these ideas working involves augmented reality becoming much more advanced and affordable, letting people easily see “holograms” around them, or relegating everything to smartphones. But you know what? That’s still less intrusive and frustrating than requiring simultaneous virtual reality headset use to do things that are already easier and more fun to do outside of VR, and that seems to be a big part of what the metaverse is trying to be.
Forget about virtual event spaces and meetings, and especially forget about NFTs. The metaverse should be a world of glowing messages, virtual ghosts, and cleverly curated interactions. From Software is onto something that Facebook isn’t.
