As one of the most well-known technological concepts in the world, the metaverse has gathered trillion discussions and led to many conversations, especially in the technology world. Technology tycoons such as Meta(Facebook), Microsoft, Apple, Tencent, and Bytedance have raised a Metaverse competition worldwide. Also, contributing to the intrinsic connections between Metaverse and the real world, some brands such as Chipotle Mexican Grill and Hello Kitty have occupied a share of Metaverse.

After knowing about the popularity of Metaverse, it seems like we have not defined the term “Metaverse” yet. The metaverse is hard to describe in detail as it doesn’t necessarily exist. It is “partly a dream for the future of the internet and partly a neat way to encapsulate some current trends in online infrastructure, including the growth of real-time 3D worlds.” If we insist on defining the metaverse, it should be a virtual world where you can live a synchronous life through your avatar. Thinking about the movie Ready Player One, where characters stay in a virtual reality space, OASIS avoids the real world. Though the movie is a typical sci-fi movie with fantastical elements, it contains many basic concepts of the metaverse.

A Brief History of the Metaverse

When talking about the development history of the metaverse, we need to discuss both the rise of VR/AR/XR technologies, the gaming industry, Blockchain, and NFT and how these different items combine with each other. The word “Metaverse” was created in 1992 by writer Neal Stephenson In his novel Snow Crash after the appearance of VR and 3D technologies. Stevenson’s metaverse was a virtual Utopia where characters could go to escape a dreary totalitarian reality. In the 1990s, VR technology and console games experienced a proliferation which prepared a perfect environment for the growth of the metaverse. What brought metaverse to the public was the rebranding initiative of Facebook last year. Facebook stepped into the metaverse in 2014 after acquiring the VR company Oculus. During the following years, Facebook has kept observing and developing its metaverse world and finally changed its name to Meta one year ago. This initiative has been recognized as a signal of the start of the metaverse era.

To date, the metaverse is still a vague concept for people outside the technology industry. The ideas toward metaverse are polarized as well. The supporter states that the metaverse will soon replace the internet, while the counterpart believes the metaverse has no difference from a fancier role-playing game.

Roblox – A metaverse Prototype

So what should a typical metaverse look like? As mentioned before, there is no established metaverse in the world. Still, there are some generally defined essential metaverse elements: Interaction, currency, 3D art style, and connections with virtual reality. Some internet products may give us a chance to take a glance at the future.

Roblox, a free online multiplayer game development and playing platform, has long been described as the first share of the metaverse. Roblox’s chief business officer Craig Donato claims that the Roblox team is one hundred percent devoted to the metaverse. They have been “around for about 15 years” The original idea of Roblox is to create a “human co-experience” in which “people doing things together in synchronous 3D spaces.”

Roblox looks no different from traditional, well-known sandbox games such as Minecraft at first glance. However, Roblox provides a built-in game development tool kit that is extremely easy to use, and even a 12-year-old kid can produce a complicated game using the tool. After finishing developing the game, users can then publish their games on the platform and start interacting with users. The platform decentralized the traditional gaming industry structure and grants individual developers the ability to create and access to the market. In addition, Roblox has its own currency called Robux, which is “ an in-game currency that allows players access to certain levels, skins, and items.” Roblox has also tried to connect with virtual reality technologies. According to its official website, Roblox supports Oculus Rift and HTC Vive on Windows PCs, which means users with equipment can have a virtual reality experience on the platform. multi-player, interactive, 3D, decentralized, digital currency system, virtual reality … It seems like Roblox has combined all necessary metaverse elements together and became a prototype.

So how does this metaverse 1.0 product interact with the natural world? Lizzo, an American singer, rapper, and songwriter will be delivering a performance at the second annual Song Breaker Awards, which will be the first awards show on Roblox. Another world-famous virtual character, Hello Kitty, also decided to debut on Roblox. On April 26, 2022, Sanrio, the company behind Hello Kitty, announced its plan to launch its first Hello Kitty Cafe game, based on the actual cafes that have opened in places like Las Vegas, Irvine, California, and cities in Asia. Except for these cultural and arts IPs that are intrinsically connected to the metaverse, some traditional industry members also decided to be a part of the metaverse. Chipotle Mexican Grill announced on Tuesday its entry into the metaverse with a new limited-time game on Roblox that will let customers use their virtual burrito-building skills to earn coupons for free Chipotle food in real life. Undoubtedly, business entities are eager to step into this brand new field to explore more possibilities. We can take a glance at the future of metaverse and how metaverse builds up connections with the natural world by observing the development of Roblox.

The Metaverse and Arts

Just as in the gaming industry, arts is the cornerstone of the metaverse. In a digital space, arts is the most fundamental component as it contributes to every object in the metaverse world. The relationship between arts and the metaverse is inherent and non-detachable. The 3D technologies, VR/AR/XR technologies, and blockchain construct the original metaverse, and arts will lead the development of the metaverse and make the metaverse an intelligent place. Also, without arts, the metaverse could only be a digital version real world instead of an imaginary space. The metaverse also creates a playground for gamification, VR technologies, blockchain, and NFT. It builds up connections between these cutting-edge technologies.

The Metaverse and Visual Arts

While discussing why metaverse matters for visual arts, we need first to understand how NFT and VR changed the traditional structure of the visual arts market. NFT has improved the “liquidity” of visual arts productions. A digital image could be sold and resold hundreds of times in several seconds on the OpenSea. It also gives individual artists the chance to publish their artwork and monetize their creativity. Furthermore, the NFT revolutionized the way artists and collectors think about digital media. It brings digital arts to the main stage and is accepted by the mainstream arts enterprises such as auction houses, museums, and galleries. The metaverse, alongside the VR technology, will bring digital arts to a new stage. As stated before, digital arts is the cornerstone of the metaverse, which means it’s an essential element for constructing a metaverse space. While the metaverse keeps developing, digital arts will continue to evolve and may become something beyond our imagination in the future.

To follow the trend, visual arts enterprises have endeavored to develop their own metaverse space. During the Covid-19 pandemic, many world-renowned galleries also scrambled to offer Drake-like virtual tours of their hallowed halls, which had been emptied due to worldwide lockdowns. Top-tier auction house Sotheby constructed its first metaverse website years ago. Sotheby has also launched its first-ever virtual gallery in the browser-based platform Decentraland. Many successful individual artists also take the initiative to transfer their physical artworks to the digital space. Gal Yosef, a digital artist who specializes in reimagined designs of well-loved cartoon characters, is making a new transition – from art galleries to the metaverse. Web3 has allowed Yosef to go beyond his historical works and offered chances to him to build his own world. “Meta Eagle Club” is his first installment of a series of his own unique collections – making up a digital art world called Galyverse. In the commercial area, a metaverse version of fashion week occurs within the virtual destination space, Decentraland. The world’s biggest, entirely-digital fashion week commenced with events such as Dragon City’s Fashion Design Exhibition, followed into the evening by catwalk showcases. Though this first metaverse fashion week didn’t arouse many concerns around the world, it gave us an imaginary space for the future of metaverse. The publishing and monetization process will be more straightforward and easy to access for many individual artists with VR technology. These metaverse activities will benefit the art world by facilitating more creativity.

The Metaverse and Performing Arts

Compared with the visual arts, performing arts seem more challenging to transfer to the metaverse. However, one of the most famous and most prominent music festivals, Coachella, brought the live experience to the metaverse. The hosts created a metaverse space, the Absolut.Land, is an area where festival-goers on the ground and fans from all across the country can meet and bond over their shared love of festival culture through virtual drinks, experiences, and more. Absolut will even have a physical tent designed to perfectly match the one you’ll find in Absolut.Land. In the post-Covid era, physical experiences are facing unprecedented challenges. Metaverse may provide an alternative choice for audiences—the Absolut.Land comprises nine parts: The Anti-Gravity Dance Floor, The Absolut Bar, The Citron Media Room, The Garden, The Museum Gallery, The Selfie Room, The PRIDE Tunnel, The Rainbow Rave, and the Outlook. All these different parts combined together created perfect audience experiences.

Critics of the Metaverse

Some people state that metaverse is no different from a fancy, 3d role-playing game in virtual reality. Some technology professionals also keep a conservative idea toward the metaverse. Shuntaro Furukawa, Nintendo’s president, told the media that “there is no easy way to define specifically what kinds of surprises and enjoyment the metaverse can deliver to our consumers.” When other game companies insanely invest in the metaverse, Nintendo’s perspective may help us calm down and seriously think about the significance of the metaverse.

Meanwhile, the decentralized nature of the metaverse has raised unexpected riots and violence, and there are no specific policies or regulations to eliminate these negative behaviors. On April 1st, 2022, digital police arrested dozens of avatars who rampaged at a party in the metaverse, causing damage to NFT objects worth billions of dollars. As a blue ocean in the market, there will be increasing numbers of business entities trying to enter the metaverse, but how to regulate the metaverse market is still a critical problem for governments and every individual in the industry.

Gamification, in the most well-known and basic definition, is “the process of adding games or game-like elements to something (such as a task) so as to encourage participation” The definition of gamification may vary between people and situations, but the core is to utilize concepts from game development to solve problems in other fields. 

Though The term gamification was created by Nick Pelling, a British computer programmer and inventor, in 2003, people started exploiting the concept of gamification during the 19th century. A grocery company called the Sperry and Hutchinson Co. motivates its customers to consume by substituting money with the S&H Green Stamps. This case is the ever first gamification approach in the world. One hundred years later, key opinions leaders such as Jesse Schell and Jane McGonigal brought gamification to the public. From then on, people started thinking about “ the potential of gamification and its use in several aspects of our life” 

Nowadays, gamification is widely used in different industries such as catering, education, e-commerce, and of course, Arts by adding minor interactive gameplay on the website or application. Organizations, no matter for-profit or non-profits, are all persistently searching best way of optimization and believe that gamification may be applicable at some aspects of their businesses.

Why is gamification such a hit in the art world?

Art professionals and organizations have always held a strong interest in gamification even before the born of the word “gamification.” Besides, compared with other industries such as healthcare, the art world seems to have a special obsession with gamification. So why does this happen? 

The first thing is that arts and games are intrinsically related and undividable. Though whether the game itself is a kind of art is a question with polarized answers, the relationship between arts and games is undoubtedly close. Some of us may hear about the classic Role Play Game Assasin’s Creed by Ubisoft was chosen as a resource to help restore the burned Notre Dame de Paris. An artist from the Ubisoft game told the media that the game development team “has spent years literally fussing over the details of the building. She pored over photos to get the architecture just right and worked with texture artists to make sure that each brick was as it should be”.

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Alongside transferring art concepts to the game, arts organizations also appreciate games. The Victoria & Albert Museum collected the pixel-style casual game “Flappy Bird” and curated an exhibition. The process of art creation is actually a process of creating Intellectual Property, and IP is a just need in the gaming industry. On the other hand, the art world is always seeking a more inclusive, interactive exhibition mediation to broaden the boundaries of artistic creation. Game, which has an infinite capacity of presenting creativities, is an ideal vehicle for arts.

Source: https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/articles/01EkIOfisgxkfodZ4JmTIXa-1..v1569489280.jpg

Furthermore, Arts managers have always been looking for a better way to engage their audiences positively, and interaction is the core driver of engagements. Non-profits are willing to influence the public to do one of the two things:  to participate in a new activity that the audience would have avoided or not known about in the past; or to make changes to daily behaviors over a long period of time. In the first scenario, gamify cryptic art pieces makes art more understandable and less static. Meanwhile, as games are convenient to spread in the digital world and popular among people from many demographics, the target audiences could be more diverse. For the second scenario, games’ additional educational features could help. Unlike traditional arts education approaches, gamification makes arts education more effective than ever. In conventional art education practices, educators are used to presenting an art piece or concept as a whole to the students, which can result in misunderstandings and boards. However, while gamifying arts, we need to break down the original art production into artistic elements and then re-assemble them, and then players will accept the information step-by-step when playing the game. This is absolutely a rather exciting process. 

Another critical point is that game development, especially casual game development, is financially affordable for nonprofit arts organizations. Several accessible game engines such as Unity and Unreal eliminate the technical barriers, and the raising promotion channels like Google Ads and Facebook Ads make the publishing process straightforward. And even Unity itself is a popular ads channel in the game world. Take mobile casual games as an example. Usually, a hyper-casual game development team only requires 1-2 game developers and one graphic designer and may cost about $20,000. The core of game development is no fancy technology. It is more about creativity. Overall, for medium- and large arts organizations, building a game development team or hiring a gamification agency is an affordable way.

On the other hand, gamification might help nonprofits explore a new way of monetization. The gaming industry has always been lucrative with minimal entry barriers. According to mobile data and analytics provider App Annie, mobile games are on track to surpass $120 billion in spending in 2021, growing 20% over $100 billion in 2020. By gamify art collections, arts organizations may have a chance to generate revenue from the game and sustain a mission for social good. The gaming industry needs creativity, and the art world always seeks living resources. It seems like they are the best fit.

Last but not least, the unavoidable Covid-19. Pandemic restricts physical experience, but raising technologies such as Metaverse, VR/AR/XR makes the digital experience more genuine and even beyond reality. Gamification is an excellent way to present arts on digital equipment. I will further discuss this in the last part of the article.  

Gamification in Digital Arts Programming: Production-based and Organization-based

When implementing gamification in the real world, arts enterprises usually have two choices. The first choice is to gamify art collections. The Palace Museum in China has made several temptations on this. In 2018, The Palace Museum collaborated with NetEase, a top-tier technology company famous for game development and publishing, published a traditional Chinese art style Puzzle Role Play Game “Ink · Mountains and Mystery”. The game is inspired by one of the ten most precious Chinese traditional paintings, the “Thousands of miles of mountains and rivers”, which is The Palace Museum’s collection. The painting is a blue-green landscape silk painting finished in the Ming dynasty and has been appreciated for its vivid, imaginary color usage. Fortunately, the game flawlessly rebuilt the magnificent images utilizing 3D engines and gave a beautiful story to the original painting. At the end of 2018, the game had acquired more than 120 thousand downloads and effectively promoted traditional Chinese painting to younger generations. From then on, the traditional Chinese art style and elements have become a new trend in Chinese society, especially on social media. From this case, we can see that gamification can make arts more interactive, more authentic, and even rejuvenate a traditional art piece.

Another surprising thing is that via this gamified digital program, both the “Thousands of miles of mountains and rivers” and the Palace Museum obtained fans from younger generations: the game has more than 1.2 million followers on TapTap, a game channel for GenZers and Millenials in China. I believe this is not the end of this story. Imagine how many kids, teenagers, and young adults would be interested in traditional Chinese art and may become a member of the art community. An excellent gamification digital arts program could do more than improve audience engagement, and it can help a niche arts genre maintain sustainable development.

Another choice would be organization-based programming. In this field, the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in the U.S. and the Center Pompidou in French would be the two best examples. In 2012, only one year after the world’s first gamification summit closed in San Francisco, The Met published a game called “Murder at the Met: An American Art Mystery” which is a “web-based application (app) that guides users of smartphones and tablets through the galleries of American paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art to solve a murder mystery.”

The game is still accessible on the website today. From a 2022 point of view, this game is not visually appealing or attractive in gameplay design, but the concept it used was Avant-guard at that point. The Met’s foresight of the gamification trend is so precise that it keeps inspiring other organizations today. Going back to the game, we could quickly tell the difference between the Murder at the Met and the Mountains and Mystery: the prior one represents the organization while the latter focuses on the art piece. To better understand the outcome differences of these two different kinds of gamification digital arts programs, we can just take a look at another game produced by the Centre Pompidou, the Prisme 7. 

The Prisme 7 is “designed in collaboration with digital artists Bright and Game in Society, and with the support of the Ministry of National Education”, in the game, the players can “discover seven levels of play and interact with 40 major works from the biggest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe. It also offers a unique sound immersion designed especially for the game by Ircam Amplify. ” Unlike the Murder at The Met, Prisme 7 doesn’t have a clear storyline, which more aligns with most casual and hyper-casual games. I attribute this to the different types of the two organizations. As the most famous visual arts organization with a heavy focus on art history, The Met would like to utilize a gamified digital program to do art history education. By contrast, the Center Pompidou is more contemporary, which means their collections and exhibitions are not that easy to interpret for the public, so they tend to use the interactive and attractive nature of the casual game to present their collections vividly and generate more audience engagement. 

Compared with the Mountains and Mystery, these two games create more brand exposure for the arts organizations and are more severe in terms of arts. The Met basically presented the whole story behind that piece, and Prisme 7 tries to convey contemporary art concepts as much as possible by utilizing the play-reward mechanism in games. Also, both of them have a solid organizational identity. The Met uses one of its most identical masterpieces, Portrait of Madame X and Prisme 7 restored the special building of Center Pompidou in the digital space. However, the Mountains and Mystery only picked some elements from the original painting and tried to modify the art further to make it easier to spread. Users can not find many clues about the original art piece or the organization behind it. What they know is only the beautiful, fictional story that happened in the blue-green landscape. The differences are mainly from distinct business collaboration models. The Murder in The Met and Prisme 7 is developed and published by the organizations, so the two games are just like two digital gamification programs conducted by the organizations. They should make the programs align with the organization’s mission and focus on the academic and educational features. But the Palace Museum cooperated with NetEase, which was entirely in charge of the game development and publishing. So, It’s easy to find the commercial elements in the Mountain and Mystery.

I would not judge which kind is right and which is wrong. I would rather say that there are always pros and cons. The Met and Center Pompidou definitely took a giant step in informative and interesting arts education, but their productions are still targeting arts fans, which constrained the scope of the impact. The Palace Museum approached audiences from the outside art world, but they sacrificed a lot on artistry. If the organization doesn’t have a strong voice, the art may be threatened by over-entertained. 

A glimpse of future: Gamification, XR technology and Arts

For decades, VR/AR/XR technology has been a viral topic. Most arts organizations have also paid attention to this trend for a long time. However, we still have less idea about what’s next to XR technology and how we can use it more creatively, or at least make it beyond a digital venue. However, with the raising gamification concept, we may garner a chance to look at the future.

In the field of arts education, there are some research and experiments on the effectiveness of VR-based gamified art history education. A research team in the Department of Systems Engineering, Universidad Nacional de San Agustin de Arequipa in Peru has tried to achieve the “implementation of a virtual reality game using gamification by elements of video games to improve the teaching of Art History“ To do so, they ”simulate a virtual museum, with predefined stages that expose works from different artistic currents with their respective representations all owing interact with the characters, objects, animations and sounds presented in the application.” The result shows that navigation activities, tasks, and movements are statistically correlated in the VR environment and significantly influence the outcome of learning. And, compared with implementing VR or gamification separately,  the combination of VR and Gamification has higher efficiency in arts education. 

Another possible development direction is the Metaverse. In general, Metaverse is “an immersive virtual world that people “enter” through the use of technologies like AR and VR” 

In terms of the art world, leading arts organizations such as Sotheby have just announced the launch of Sotheby’s Metaverse, the auction house’s new platform designed specifically for digital collectors.  Another well-accepted opinion is that humans need to interact with Metaverse via gamification. The most significant supporter of this idea is Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft and the key character behind that shocking acquisition between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard. He told the media that “Metaverse is essentially about creating games,” and “It is about being able to put people, places, things [in] a physics engine and then having all the people, places, things in the physics engine relate to each other.” As I stated before, the game is closely related to the arts, just as it’s related to Metaverse and XR technologies. Metaverse somehow creates a platform for arts, technologies, and gamification, but right now, we cannot predict what will happen.

Conclusion

Through previous analysis, we can conclude that gamification is and will always be a key concept for every entity in the art world. Arts enterprises recognize it as a management tool,  artists use it as a vehicle of artistic creation, and audiences enjoy spending time with it. Overall, gamification significantly helps the short-term growth and the sustainable development of art. In addition, new technologies and technological concepts give gamification more possibilities. We can tell that gamification will combine with different emerging elements and build connections between arts and the future.