Fortnite is the social network and metaverse of the future: the controversy that catches the user’s attention becomes more complex – Época Negócios

NS It is an electronic game It is the most popular online game in the world, with around 350 million users
Mostly men (72.4%) aged 18-24 years (62.7%). With multiple ‘play modes’ and up to 100 players in the same battle – ‘Save the World’, Battle Royale, Creative, and Festa Royale – every player has their ‘look’ (avatar). Due to the variety of possibilities for interaction, including communication between players by voice and message, the platform is in fact a social network.

In the covid-19 epidemic, it was Epic . Games, creator It is an electronic game, has expanded the aspect of its “social network”. In September 2020, for example, he opened a series of virtual concerts recorded live in a studio in Los Angeles (“mode” Party Royale), opened by American rapper and multi-instrumentalist Dominic Fike (rapper Travis Scott did not perform live). (10 years old) and Rebeca (8 years old) explain the initiative: “Kids without friends love to meet people in games, but since Fortnite only fought battles, it didn’t offer that possibility, so they created spaces for socializing.”

Interaction between players generates a huge amount of data (in 2019, the total amounted to two petabytes per month). Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms seek insights into data to make games more fun, increase user engagement, and attract new users; Artificial intelligence algorithms allow you to select the most popular battles and innovate in the game “modes”. However, it is worth considering that the assumed knowledge of its users is relative, which is a function of the limitations of the AI ​​technology (in addition to the fact that this technology, like any statistical probabilistic model, intrinsically contains the uncertainty variable).

Fortnite, it seems, is the platform closest to the concept of “metaverse,” a term coined by Neal Stevenson, in a science fiction novel. snow crash (1992), to depict a 21st century futuristic reality inhabited by an avatar for its users; The term has several interpretations, simply put, it is a digital environment that connects the virtual world with the “real world” and offers immersive experiences. There is no fictional movie depicting the metaverse environment – in the movie matrix (1999), for example, the character Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, must choose between virtual reality and physical reality, and there is no overlap between the two spaces.

no fuss Facebook social networking siteFortnite is building its own “metaverse”, including thinking about innovative partnerships with other brands (diversification of revenue sources). Celia Hudent, Former User Experience Manager (User Experience) from Epic Games from 2013 to 2017, in two articles And in the book The Gamer’s Brain: How Neuroscience and UX (2017), provides evidence of the platform’s creation logic, fully developed by in-house teams, thus ensuring control over users’ aesthetics and experiences.

According to Hudent, the term “user experience”, which is currently widely adopted, has its origins in the 1990s, and was coined by Don Norman, a former Apple vice president and author of the book. Everyday design (2013). In online games, this experience is based on two pillars: ‘usability’ (make sure the game is intuitive and easy to use) and ‘engagement skill’ (attractive gameplay, ’emotional design’). Relationships with other players are a critical component of engagement (“multiplayer”), i.e. social communication of both competition and cooperation; This social connection permeates even the “sense of the game” (emotion).

The first challenge is to figure out how the human brain, especially the main brain, works
The characteristic that is neuroplasticity, that is, the ability of the brain to change, adapt and shape itself at the structural and functional level when exposed to new experiences from the internal and external environment (the exorbitant complexity of replication in the apparatus). “The amount of attention people give when processing information is critical to the quality of learning or retention of that information. The more attention you pay, the better you will be able to process and retain what is happening around you.

Each of these mental processes—perception, memory, and attention—were built into the development of Fortnite, and were previously tested in prototypes with guest players (perception testing),” says Hodent. In Fortnite, the player is always progressing toward specific goals; in Battle Royale, on the For example, players compete against each other, but those who lose can quickly start over (and improve in the next round).

As a social network, the It is an electronic game compete with Facebook social networking siteAnd Instagram NS Youtube Directly, but given the competition for user interest, Fortnite is competing with a much larger group of entertainment offerings, such as streaming platforms Netflix (213.6 million subscribers in 2021), Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Disney+, Telecine Play. For example, the Tik Tok phenomenon affects not only the expansion of Fortnite, but also the frequency and intensity of user interaction (another negative impact was Apple’s removal of the game Fortnite in August 2020, which eliminated access to the fence game. 73 million players). What is “at stake” is attention.

The controversy over people’s attention is a topic that has been approached by many authors from different perspectives, one of them being Tim Wu (Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble To Get To Our Heads, 2016). Wu realizes that the attention industry is not new, it established itself as a business model (shifting attention to revenue) in the early twentieth century with the advent of advertising. Digital technologies, especially mobile devices, have given another nature to the industry, offering unprecedented conveniences and/or experiences, and progressively evolving strategies to gain attention (and thus, increase vulnerabilities, and moral hazards).

It is not easy to keep up with today’s fast-paced environment. To proceed to a minimum, access to information is not enough, it is critical to research new models, avoiding the trap
Looking better at the ‘old world’, and thus denouncing new patterns of social communication – according to WHO/WHO, only 1% of players They are addicted, which is a relatively lower proportion than other addictions historically found in society, such as alcohol, and is responsible for 5.9% of all deaths (3.3 million people annually in the world, according to the World Health Organization).

* Dora Kaufman Professor at TIDD PUC – SP, Postdoctoral Fellow at COPPE-UFRJ and TIDD PUC-SP, Physician at ECA-USP with a tenure at Paris-Sorbonne IV. author of books Gulliver’s Awakening: Corporate Challenges in Digital Networks, NS “Will artificial intelligence replace human intelligence? “. Visiting Professor at Fundação Dom Cabral