(2021-08-01) Epic Bored Apes And The Story Of The Metaverse

Epic Games, Bored Apes, and the Story of the Metaverse. This week, a 'superstar' will hold an event in Fortnite as part of the Rift Tour. It's rumoured that Ariana Grande will 'perform'

the event has the potential scale of the Travis Scott concert

The Rift Tour might not reach the same scale. But let's say it does. It promises: A musical journey into magical new realities where Fortnite and a record-breaking superstar collide.

While Fortnite itself will NOT become the Metaverse on its own, it IS laying down some of the tracks to a time when all of our virtual worlds and galaxies are interconnected.

They're creating a mythology, a story, a game mechanic and a publishing schedule in support of their stated desire to make the Metaverse happen.

Travis Scott shattered many of the conventions of what a virtual performance can be. Think of it like some wild, slightly hallucinogenic Disney ride and you'll get the idea. It's all groundwork to answering a more important question than whether the Metaverse will be browser-based or viewed in VR: why will people show up? How do you make online spatial experiences entertaining and fun?

this narrative, in my view, doesn't just support playing the game, it's actually an uber-narrative about what the Metaverse is, translated in a language digestible to the 18-24 year olds who play.

the Fortnite narrative is complicated. It somehow manages to reconcile Batman (and manage a limited edition comic as a spin-off in the process) and Deadpool

At first glance, it mostly seems like a convoluted excuse to change the Island up every now and then, to launch new skins and cosmetic enhancements (their main source of revenue outside of sponsorship), to justify new enemy characters and weapons, and to create partnerships with Ferrari or Marvel.

The narrative mainly seems to server a larger purpose: it explains why, in spite (or because of) all these secret agents and heroes and mysterious portals, a lot of content can come IN but we can never really leave. Until, maybe, the day that you can.

creative officer Donald Mustard

Mustard says that it’s also a critical part of the storyline, nodding to something he and others at Epic have eagerly talked about creating — the Metaverse, comprised of characters and storylines from countless films, shows, and games all in one place.

profound shifts in the grammar of storytelling occur when we shift media.

This shift builds off of the profound advancements in game-based storytelling and other immersive arts. And it translates it through the lens of highly concurrent experiences.

But what happens when one company is the company that builds the cameras and tells the stories and has the capacity to distribute them? You now have the perfect virtuous circle.

Epic has a great deal of control over its product road map.

Fortnite is creating a mythology of a future Metaverse. Fortnite uses all of the technology that Epic creates. Fortnite therefore can 'attach' its storylines to that road map.

Maybe you'd leave Fortnite Island alone and preserve the cartoon-ish gameplay. But maybe you'd create a storyline about how certain 'rifts' actually lead to highly realistic worlds.

My nephew really doesn't care about the finer points of "what is the Metaverse".

imagine a 12 year old today spending time in Fortnite.

They'll probably remember that they went to their first concert in Fortnite or Roblox the same way I remember seeing Supertramp.

Imagine jumping through a rift in Fortnite and landing in a "Thor World" spin-off: a highly detailed and rendered version of Asgard.

They were participating in a story about the how and why worlds existed and how they became interconnected.

The only thing missing are the Bored Apes.

There's another storyline. And it has nothing to do with Disney/Epic cross-licensing, Sony Music or using Unreal to recreate Mandalorian in your living room. And it starts with the Bored Ape Yacht club:

Instead of Marvel characters and Kratos it has...well, it has bored apes:

Much like the narrative in Fortnite, they don't seem like much more than an excuse for something else: to sell art work or t-shirts or craft beer.

But there has been almost $100 million in trading value for those images.

And the Bored Apes don't really exist anywhere in particular. You can't wear them like a skin in a virtual world. You pretty much just throw one up as your Twitter profile photo.

The creators of the Bored Apes had identified an opportunity: instead of simply creating limited series artworks and selling them “We were seeing the opportunities to make something with a larger story arc”.

The combination of sophisticated visuals, subcultural fashion accessories (shades of Hot Topic), and literary pretension made the Bored Ape universe catnip to a certain crypto-bro demographic

And that crypto-bro demographic is important because the Bored Ape images are NFTs

Your ownership of one of the 10,000 apes is memorialized on the blockchain. There is one token per ape, and therefore only one person can "own" it at a time.

by owning one, you can commercialize the asset: (Bored Apes) was also one of the first clubs to offer individual buyers the commercial rights to the apes they own: each member is allowed to brand his own projects or products and sell them independently

The only thing that was created were a bunch of primitives. How people assemble these primitives is an exercise in community building, commerce, collaboration and imagination.

This idea: that NFTs represent creative primitives, is comparable to the 'prims' of Second Life:

The genius of the prim, however, lay in what Philip points out above: the permission system and the "For Sale" field. Because once you've used your prims to create a dress, you can now sell it. And the next person has permissions for whether they can copy, modify or transfer that dress, and more importantly, they can include it in their own personal story. They wear the dress to a wedding

The images at the heart of Bored Apes are just little granular pieces of content. They're not unlike prims. They contain smart contracts for how they can be used. Their elements can be remixed, combined, and repurposed.

just like Epic has a road map for its technology, there's a presumed/collective road map for the Bored Apes (and similar ventures).

Namely, that eventually, we'll move beyond remixing GIFs and JPEGs and start remixing larger and larger chunks of story.

The owners of all of those Bored Apes and digital paintings and creative prims are going to demand a home. And the creators are going to demand better and more distributed tools to remix their primitives.

we all want a voice in our shared future

I personally believe Tim when he says that we all benefit from a Metaverse that is open (which has has said many times). That it can't be owned by any one person

Sketchfab represents something more than just a marketplace for 3D content.

The photogrammetry that it hosts, for example, is another form of storytelling primitive. They are digital Polaroids

I actually believe that the narrative for Sketchfab and the narrative for Fortnite will converge: at some point, Epic will open everything up, and you'll be able to spin up your own island, or collect your own Sketchfab photo album, and you won't be locked into a proprietary "Unreal/Epic" model.