Study on the use of social networks for the creation of gaming experiences

Imagine if you were in a world where you could sit on the same couch with a friendwho lives miles and miles away, or set up a virtual version of your workplace whilelaying on the beach. The metaverse origins are a stuff of science-fiction: the termwas coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash”, in which people usevirtual reality headsets to interact inside a virtual world. Nowadays itbecame again famous thanks to the movie “Ready Player One”, directed by StevenSpielberg. During the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown, many people started tosuffer the forced isolation into their homes. Furthermore, the necessary long lastingvideo calls for school lessons or for work meetings were digitally exhausting and itdid not recreate the same feelings of real life interactions. So, different companiesstarted to exploit the idea of the metaverse to create digital worlds that evoked thosesensations. But this kind of applications is not new. Many video games based onthat concept already existed before and were strongly populated by the youngestgenerations. These games let players also create new worlds and experiences to sharewith their friends. But during the lockdown something interesting happens. Peoplebegan to use it, not anymore only for gaming and networking, but also for co-working.A few years later this idea continues to move forward. Big social-platform companiesas Facebook saw its potential too. Indeed, Facebook plans to mix it with theirproprietary Oculus VR headsets.Coming back to this work, it investigates the research and the subsequent creationof an MMORPG game prototype that has the purpose to replicate the most famoussocial media platforms but converted in a 3D and playful counterpart. Players willbe able to connect each other, play and socialize into a semi-procedural world. Theywill impersonate themselves with an avatar and have a house that represents theirsocial profile. Both avatars and houses can be customized. The prototype developedfor this work saw on Facebook the best candidate to test as a social platform.Unfortunately, working with social companies has its limits. The advantages anddisadvantages of working with external APIs, especially with social APIs, where infopermissions may change rapidly, are fundamental to understand how important it isfor companies to sign contracts to keep access to information since it is a core feature of this application.