"None shall oppose my >Insert megalomaniacal plan here<!"
A very important distinction that we must make some point in our lives. Else we'll forever be the clueless rube wondering about with the world burning around us pondering "Did I do that"? And you might think it simple, a straight forward case of checking your 'to-do' list and seeing if 'rule like a tyrannical despot' is listed on there but oh boy would you be wrong in that lofty assumption! Take for instance, one man who believes himself to be a visionary industrialist poised to revolutionise not just entertainment, but the individual-machine relationship forever more. This man's name is Shane Isaac, and to get an idea of who this fella is, let me just list his Linkedin self descriptors: 'Futurist, creator, gamer, technophile and believer in diversifying the global distribution of wealth'. Firstly, you know there's a problem when the tag 'gamer' isn't the cringiest thing you can describe yourself as. Secondly, doesn't that last bit rub you the wrong way like it does me? I mean I know I get flowery here and there, chuck in an extra adjective or two, but it's done consciously, I have intent when I get verbose. The use of 'diversifying' just teeters a bit too much into redundancy, it's big for the sake of being big; there's no intent to it. And believe it or not, those two observations sum up our man pretty well.
Shane is known for his newest project, his only project of note, Earth 2. That's right, those who have heard of it, and welcome, those lucky enough to avoid but not lucky enough to also avoid this blog. Earth 2, the totally ground-breaking and unique project to- drumroll please... create the Metaverse! (Wait, why are you all booing?) Yes, one would have to embody every characteristic of the egotistic to declare themselves the leading mind behind the metaverse; although we've discussed before how misleading the narrative of the title 'the metaverse' can be, so I'm assuming Shane knows better and is just using that label for marketing purposes. What is he actually making? What is Earth 2? Well, it's kind of like NFTs without the blockchain stuff. You know all that Landrush garbage I bemoan everytime we're talking about an NFT project? The thing where people buy virtual plots of land in hopes of flipping them for a profit when the full game launches? (And it never does.) Earth 2 might not be the origin of that idea, per se; but they've certainly gone a long way to popularise the idea in this current NFT wave.
As one might imagine, Earth 2 is pawning off pictures of our glorious earth as NFTs without the Non-Fungible part. But don't worry; the blockchain stuff will come later, he promises, as soon as they're done with the game. Oh but there's a game too! Of course, and its... well, to be honest I don't know what this game is. Nobody does. Because Shane doesn't want to tell us. We know that it'll contain the detail of Red Dead Redemption 2, (already a bit of a dated claim. Might want to update that to 'Horizon: Forbidden West', young Chris-Roberts-in-training.) a vastly bigger worldspace than any traditional game can handle and... I dunno, I guess the game has mineable minerals? We know there'll be minerals. So I guess this is a start-from-nothing MMO? Like Dreamworld? Whatever happened to Dreamworld again... Oh yeah, that's right! It launched to a horrendously terrible asset-flip nightmare the likes of which I could even outperform. And then Youtuber Callum Upton took a provocation to create his own parody game called NightmareWorld in order to mock the piss-poor efforts of the cash-grabbing 'dev team'. If you can even call a group that put something like that together a 'dev team'. (Hmm, I went into a lot of detail on that seemingly unimportant diatribe. I wonder if it will come back into play later?)
The special thing about Earth 2, and the reason why I think it's succeeded in grabbing so many hearts and minds; is that the creator absolutely refuses to share a single real detail about the game, so the heart can come up with it's own, perfect, game. Everyone can look into the colourless, shapeless, putty that is this concept and just reach in and morph their ideal life sim, or RPG, or adventure game. With a title like Earth 2, and the way in which Shane has framed the thing on certain occasions when he's let the yawn-inducing technobabble mask slip for a little bit, leads me to believe he sees a vision of some sort of social hub similar to Second Life. Only his idea is grander and further reaching, because of course. He wants to encompass the whole world in a digital landscape of virtual ownership and play-to-earn finance. He wants to be the architect behind our very own Matrix experience. If only the naysayers would put behind all logic and deductive reasoning so they would blindly believe and follow him! Then he'd already be halfway there!
Indeed, Shane here seems far more interested in the machinations of nay-sayers who look at the size of his project, assess his relative skill and lack of progress, compound the potential for squeezing money out of people and thus scrutinize this project. These people incense him, they upset him, and none more so than the Youtubers with reach who natter on about his project in a couple of videos every few months or so. He has called them every name he can get away with on a monitored social platform, calling them hacks, uniformed, and members of a secretive shadow cabal hired by owners of an Earth 2 competitor that didn't even exist when Earth 2 was announced, and dedicated to trying to destroy his project with weaponised doubt and fear. I'm not kidding about that last one, Shane has real 'main character' syndrome bubbling under the surface, it would seem.
And all this came to a head when, after a rare showcase of actual in-engine footage of what this Earth 2 thing is supposed to be, one Youtuber chose to ridicule the supposed technical prowess of what was being shown. This Youtuber commented that they themselves could do a better job, and that was just one step too far for Shane. Mr Issac flew into a rage, shook about crying for 5 hours, and after he managed to calm himself down; took to challenging this Youtuber online to put their money where their mouth was. He challenged them to make a product with some very specific specifications, most of which hadn't even been criticised by this Youtuber, in a week with a hefty cash incentive if this Youtuber delivered. Yes, because like an actual super villain, Shane wrote fail conditions for himself into the challenge that he issued, rather than just say something benign like "Well you make the whole game then!" (This guy thinks he's The Riddler, I swear.) And this Youtuber he challenged? The rube he would embarrass for their lack of ability to deliver once they shied away from the task? It was Callum Upton. One of the only Youtubers shown to have the talent and gumption to actually put his money where his mouth is with Nightmare World. Yeah... I don't know if Shane thought this through...
You know, maybe he did. He was just so sure that his various offhanded parameters for the challenge would never be met by the- huh, Callum did them? All of them? Huh. Well at least Shane wasn't a total crybaby about this and, upon seeing the update posts that Callum was putting out as he worked, changed the goal posts. (Oh wait he did. Shane did do that!) Now put yourself in the shoes of an average observer, as if you aren't already. So this egoist CEO of a unrealistically ambitious company issues a challenge to a lowly independent to match his talents, only to balk when this indie dev does exactly that and then tries to change the win conditions so that he doesn't have to part with the reward money. I'm sorry; that's just makes this CEO a plainly written YA adventure novel villain. And don't take my word for it, dabber Youtuber JoshStrifeHayes coined that very label himself. And more to the point, doesn't this whole situation just make one wonder what exactly a financial ride with Shane Issacs entails? Because that's what this is all about at the end of the day, you read the part of Issac's manifesto about 'diversifying financial freedom' or whatever; the guy is trying to make his early buyers rich. But when he demonstrates himself to be this petty, picking fights with people who criticize his work from an observer's perch, one might wonder if this is the brain they really want in charge of making them money.
At the end of the day, this is just a microcosm of the whole speculative investment metaversal trend we're seeing touch our industry. Ill planned and shaky, prone to emotional outbursts to cover up the lack of professionalism, and slathered with an unremovable, permanent layer of egg-on-the-face. Whether Earth 2 is a scam or just a guy who really overestimates his own abilities going to bat for himself, the project is a rudderless ship, kicked off from Southampton with the promise of transatlantic opulence, and steered directly into iceberg waters by a truly clueless captain. As with any project like this (>cough< Star Citizen >cough<) the involved are far too invested to critically assess themselves and when it all falls apart around them and they're left penniless and gameless, they'll point the fingers at everyone around them and cry "Why would FUD pushers do this?" And perhaps some, the truly enlightened out there, will be struck with the diamond insight to look objectively and ask; "Wait, was I the idiot?"
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