October 07, 2024
Ah, the Oasis. It sounds amazing the way Cline describes it in Ready Player One. But from the implementation perspective, it is perhaps one of the most stupidly ambitious ideas ever proposed. Emphasis on the stupid.
When you strip away all the flowery language that it's presented with and just look at the core functionality, you realize that Oasis is essentially little more than a game engine that's become so ubiquitous it's turned into an industry-wide standard.
That, in and of itself, isn't entirely unreasonable. There are really only a handful of game engines in use today, and the number of options is getting smaller all the time. From the perspective of a game developer, it makes far more sense to license the latest version of Unreal and build an engine that suits your project by swapping code libraries in and out like Legos than it does to spend five years designing a bespoke system from scratch before development on the actual game bit can even start.
Where the Oasis concept starts getting deeply silly is the fact that it's not swapping stuff in and out. Indeed, it can't. The whole point of the thing is universal interoperability, allowing you to bring any asset from any game into any other game and have it work seamlessly in that environment.
This is, from a technical perspective, dumb. Computational resources for a game are always going to be a scarce commodity, at least if you're doing it right. And having the engine driving your sword and sorcery adventure game spending time and electricity on everything it needs to simultaneously be a top-notch flight simulator, drag racing game, space exploration sandbox, and a productivity suite for businesses wastes those resources and leaves you with very little left for your core gameplay. What's more, it would lock everyone into using whatever mechanics the makers of Oasis decided they wanted to use, because designing your own rulesets would break the interoperability. So you couldn't have creative approaches to combat like bullet time from Max Payne or dragon shouts from Skyrim, making every game more or less identical apart from the art style.
This is a problem that a lot of sci-fi tech eventually runs into when trying to make the jump from the page to the real world. Fictional tech is appealing largely because it never has to compromise to achieve its design objectives. But the moment engineers start sketching out an actual prototype, you suddenly end up with nothing but tradeoffs and hard limits which end up killing off most of the enthusiasm for the idea.
We all want the VR haptic suit that we can put on as easily as our everyday clothes and feels like we're wearing nothing at all. We're not so bullish about the ones that you have to squeeze into with talcum powder and fill with sweat as you play.
