https://nitter.net/DiscussingFilm/status/1742925729355251953

I actually dont know if this is a torment nexus situation i havent read the book or seen the movie lol. But people are making that joke!

  • davel [he/him]
    hexbear
    48
    5 months ago

    Explore my favorite Intellectual Property” is normal human phraseology uttered by us meatbeings in our meatspace.

    • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]
      hexbear
      33
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      My favorite part about intellectual properties is how they aren't the property of the intellects that created them. That shit is owned by CEOs that barely understand what the artists they employed made.

      I long for the day art belongs to everyone, including the artist.

      • Chapo_is_Red [he/him]
        hexbear
        13
        5 months ago

        That shit is owned by CEOs that barely understand what the artists they employed made.

        Not even, nearly all of these IPs are owned by things that are literally not human.

  • FourteenEyes [he/him]
    hexbear
    27
    5 months ago

    I'm sure all six Meta employees who make up the entire userbase are excited

  • Leon_Grotsky [comrade/them]
    hexbear
    27
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    I never read the books but in the movie average people are depicted as living in literal heaps of storage containers and campers/caravans.

    That's okay though, because they spend an exorbitant amount of money on PC peripherals to escape their existence by hanging out in virtual G*mer disney world and chilling with all of their cool videogame friends like master chief and link and pikachu.

    This is them just doing the thing.

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
      hexbear
      7
      5 months ago

      "what if we could escape to a world where I get paid in gold coins for knowing trivia about the Iron Giant"

  • Magician [he/him, they/them]
    hexbear
    24
    5 months ago

    A case study of why media literacy, and literature in general, isn't a waste of time in academia.

  • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]
    hexbear
    22
    5 months ago

    It's just another grift like the metaverse was. You shouldn't worry about it, at worst it will just be another VR chat.

    • HiImThomasPynchon [des/pair, it/its]
      hexbear
      26
      5 months ago

      Even lamer, it'll be a VR pop culture museum. "Exploring your favorite intellectual properties" will turn out to mean "experience a VR walkthrough where you can only go where we've scripted events to happen and at least half of our 'deep dive' information was cooked up by 4 or 5 writers who don't actually care for the source material." At best it will be a mid-tier theme park with no good rides.

  • Huldra [they/them, it/its]
    hexbear
    18
    5 months ago

    Its just dumb regardless of torment nexus status, people explore their favorite stories by consuming those stories in their intended form, and if they "explore their favorite IPs" then they are a hog, but hog status aside they usually also consume it in the form of actual media or physical spaces like a theme park or whatever.

    Physicality matters! People don't generally actually like things that attempt to reproduce the experience and limitations of physical space without being actually physical, if it's not real then it should just be a website.

    • Huldra [they/them, it/its]
      hexbear
      20
      5 months ago

      But on the topic of the torment nexus, if someone tells you ready player one was a cautionary tale or whatever they are dumb or lying, that shit worships IP masturbation so incredibly hard, the whole plot is about making the metaverse cool and awesome by taking it away from centralized corporations(in a dumb crypto guy way.)

      • BeamBrain [he/him]
        hexbear
        18
        5 months ago

        that shit worships IP masturbation so incredibly hard

        I made a big entrance when I arrived in my flying DeLorean, which I’d obtained by completing a Back to the Future quest on the planet Zemeckis. The DeLorean came outfitted with a (nonfunctioning) flux capacitor, but I’d made several additions to its equipment and appearance. First, I’d installed an artificially intelligent onboard computer named KITT (purchased in an online auction) into the dashboard, along with a matching red Knight Rider scanner just above the DeLorean’s grill. Then I’d outfitted the car with an oscillation overthruster, a device that allowed it to travel through solid matter. Finally, to complete my ’80s super-vehicle theme, I’d slapped a Ghostbusters logo on each of the DeLorean’s gull-wing doors, then added personalized plates that read ECTO-88.

        • Awoo [she/her]
          hexbear
          13
          edit-2
          5 months ago

          by completing a Back to the Future quest on the planet Zemeckis.

          The thing about "quests" in a world like this is that every single company would want the quests for their IPs to be easy as shit so as many people as possible have their IP to spread advertising around.

          There would be zero challenge involved in this shit. They would all be instantly meaningless because nobody would make anything that makes owning any of it feel rewarding.

          LTV applies to digital rewards. There is no "reward value" if there is no labour to achieve it.

          • barrbaric [he/him]
            hexbear
            10
            5 months ago

            Look the author isn't the sharpest tool in the shed. We're supposed to believe that for more than a decade, nobody, including multiple corporate peons for whom it is literally a full-time job, ever realized that a "riddle" containing the phrase "in a tomb filled with horrors" was pointing towards The Tomb of Horrors. You know, just probably the most famous D&D module there is? The first thing that I thought of the moment I read it?

        • RNAi [he/him]
          hexbear
          10
          edit-2
          5 months ago

          Why the 88? Ghostbusters released in :19::84:, Back To The Future in 1985,

          HHHHMMMMMMM

        • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
          hexbear
          6
          5 months ago

          This book captured the spirit of creating the worst, most gaudy stuff to show off in an MMO but acts like it's some deep spiritual fulfillment.

          No I'm just riding around in my Gokumobile smoking a giant spliff that shoots rainbows. Also I'm Gonzo from the muppets. This is what life is truly about.

  • @oktherebuddy
    hexbear
    14
    5 months ago

    What is it about the word "metaverse" that makes corpos think the product doesn't have to be a good fuckin game, worthwhile place to spend time, etc. Like making any piece of media worth spending time with is really fucking hard! But no, we're gonna do an Intellectual Property Museum again.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      hexbear
      11
      5 months ago

      Its funny, because Ready Player One is a hagiography to the '00s-era MMOs (that largely sucked, were impossible to maintain, and have completely fallen out of fashion in the last ten years). And now we've got these companies coming in and saying "What if literally everything was an MMO? Like, every waking hour you were in this mediocre open game world powered by NEETs and digital gold farmers?"

      Like making any piece of media worth spending time with is really fucking hard! But no, we're gonna do an Intellectual Property Museum again.

      I think we did crest a point at which there was simply too much content, and now we're seeing a downsizing of sorts. But the old IP is too valuable to just throw away, and nobody knows how to do the old Disney "put this shit in the vault for five or ten years to let it recapitalize via nostalgia" trick anymore.

      So the new solution is to create "All The Things World", maintain the superabundance of old properties, and just pack them into a Content As Service model where you can sample it a la carte in the most generic manner possible.

      • Rom [he/him]
        hexbear
        6
        5 months ago

        "What if literally everything was an MMO? Like, every waking hour you were in this mediocre open game world powered by NEETs and digital gold farmers?"

        This is just capitalism again

        • @CrushKillDestroySwag
          hexbear
          6
          5 months ago

          Every MMO that tries to do a "player driven economy" essentially learns the hard way that libertarian economics don't work, it's hilarious.

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
      hexbear
      6
      5 months ago

      I think corporations are desperately trying to capture a prior form of the internet where there was a lot of creativity bouncing around because people were making stuff for fun rather than money or notoriety. They're trying to reinvent second life, but make it private.

      They all believe they can create a second layer to the internet, a sub internet. It reminds me of how public spaces don't exist anymore in real life, but every now and then a private company will set up a little park or shops somewhere. But it's not really real. You get kicked out after 10pm, or it's just for residents, or it'll have its own private security. They want a metaverse that's like a mandatory private enclosed internet.

    • @CrushKillDestroySwag
      hexbear
      6
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      Frankly the peak Metaverse product has already been invented - VRChat. Just like RP1 everyone uses avatars that are based on some IP, there's potential for boundless creativity which means there's a few really cool things and a lot of crap, you can even code minigames in it like the server I used to frequent which had jets you could flight sim around in.

      Every corpo that wants their own meta project is starting well behind the power curve of "look how you want, be in any world you can imagine", and is doomed to failure unless they get serious AAA money behind themselves and develop something compelling on its own - but you can't do that without the promise of a return on investment, which there won't be until the metaverse gets big, which won't happen until there's AAA developers working in it, and on and on.

  • WhatDoYouMeanPodcast [comrade/them]
    hexbear
    10
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    God I should have finished my VRMMO novel to coincide with the release of this.

    Politically agnostic great grandson of a communist explores VRMMO in a balkanized US 100 years in the future. Apocalypse has been averted by virtue of a heroic communist China, only 15 entities still call themselves states. One of the last hold outs of imperial capitalism, the Eastern US, seeks to take a share of the considerable economic fortune of the worldwide MMO, but they get cyberbillied to oblivion by the MC. When their attempts to call him out on social media fail, they propel him into stardom while the list of volunteers to continue to spawn camp them has no end in sight.

  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
    hexbear
    7
    5 months ago

    As a consumer I love exploring my favorite intellectual property.

    I hate how everything is corpo speak

  • @CrushKillDestroySwag
    hexbear
    7
    5 months ago

    The book is actually pro Torment Nexus. That's part of what makes it so depressing - the author creates a really nasty dystopia where everyone escapes reality on the computer, and then says "this is fine actually."

    The movie is anti Torment Nexus, but only a squishy moderate way. The ending of the film is Stephen Spielberg looking straight into the camera and telling you to get off your cell phone, but also ends without anyone addressing the fact that the Earth's entire population apparently lives in piles of garbage as established by the movie's opening.

    • VILenin [he/him]
      hexbear
      4
      5 months ago

      Setting things up without wrapping them up is a pillar of Hollywood slop

  • sloth [none/use name]
    hexbear
    6
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    ""Definitive destination ... to explore favorite stories and IP." Minus Disney.

    Can't wait to be Batman and punch Elmer Fudd. Oh wait, we already have this, it is called VR Chat and it is free. You can even play without a VR rig. More avatars than you can think of, or upload your own.

    Good luck Warner Bros.!

    • autismdragon [he/him, comrade/them]
      hexagon
      hexbear
      5
      5 months ago

      Can't wait to be Batman and punch Elmer Fudd

      Also Multiversus seems like a better way to accomplish that anyway lol.