I Doodle
Since I was a kid in school, I’ve doodled. I would make small drawings in the margins of my notebooks during class, superhero battle scenes and dinosaurs fighting cavemen, endless depictions of small stories I envisioned. I found it helpful during testing, as I could remember the doodle on the page of my notes that also contained the answer to each question, to bring into my mind’s eye each solution. Some teachers were frustrated with what appeared to be idle graffiti, but they could not argue with my test scores.
Generating content has always been just something I did, from grade school to college and during my military service. In each of these phases, I found great friends who did similarly. (People are surprised to find out that in the service there are so many talented artists, musicians and writers. I think the recruitment ads play to that crowd with a sense of adventure.) I was fortunate enough to find a career in a creative field, working as a game artist and animator at the start. But so many people that I knew to be creative were not so lucky to find a way to make their creativity be their career. I think of all the potential not unleashed and I am saddened.
Where creative careers have evaded people, creative hobbies have exploded with the expansion of the internet over these past 30 years. Video editing (YouTube), publishing music (Spotify/iTunes), creating blogs (WordPress) and sites like Art Station for artists have provided massive outlets for creativity to spring out and be seen by millions. What is next? It is our belief at YOM that 3D user generated content (UGC) is ready to burst online, forever revolutionising how people use the internet. The technology that prevents its feasibility and affordability is within our reach. And once user generated content is as available as streamed video, everything changes.
Back to Me
Hold on that thought for a moment and let’s get back to my story. I think it shapes why this thesis is core at YOM, and why I am so excited to have the role that I do.
I had the great fortune to grow up the son of a carpenter-father and an art teacher-mother. However, where teaching art was her career, carpentry was just his hobby, which I expected frustrated him during his hours at his day job. Regardless, I learned much about creativity from these two, mostly passively.
As an adult, I went out to search for the best definition of Creativity, and found this Venn diagram to be the best explanation. Creativity is the intersection of three traits, Expertise, Motivation, and Creative Thinking Skills. Expertise is that ability to use the tools well, knowing which fingers should hit which keys on a piano, for instance. Motivation is that drive to work on things to completion. And Creative Thinking Skills are the skills like accepting failure as growth, being able to process feedback constructively, working through dry spells, and the like. This formula appears to work no matter the creative outlet, as each of these three rings have to join to unlock creativity.
My First UGC
Before landing my first game studio job, I worked as a 3D model maker for aircraft repair publications. At that time, PC games were my passion, and I found Re-Volt to be especially fun. Re-Volt is a racing game done in miniature, racing RC vehicles around various oversized environments. What was especially interesting is that they allow 3D modelers like myself to create vehicle models of our own, edit a text file for data like top speed, handling, weight, and centre of mass, and upload them into the game. And they had a marketplace to make these user generated vehicles available to other players. With some effort, I was able to create Sebulba’s podracer from The Phantom Menace and make it float off the ground in Re-Volt. For a time, it was the number one download off the marketplace. (My follow on effort, the Oscar Meyer Weiner Mobile, was less successful.)
The experience was foundational to my understanding of how great community effort can enhance an experience, all well before the creation of outlets like YouTube and social media. The concept of opening up the gameplay to allow the community to add content, making controls like the stat sheet easy to update, having a leaderboard to create a level of achievement and competition, all these things were important pieces of the puzzle. I continue to tip my hat to Re-Volt for showing me how to do it.
Me and You(Tube)
Fast forwarding to 2005, the maturity of the internet from a read-only web to a user content hosting service got a huge boost with the introduction of YouTube. Suddenly, users had the ability to create and broadcast video content of their own creation around the world. This disintermediation of ideas went on for some time, and created a space where content creation for YouTube became the #1 career choice for students in the US.
For my part, I have launched a number of different YouTube channels, each with a different focus and scope, all lasting various timespans. It’s likely my efforts in the space were not aggressive enough, and certainly they lacked traction in any meaningful way. But the exercise of putting content onto the platform teaches quite a bit about what level of ease we are looking for when we talk about the coming 3D Internet. It costs nothing to post content, monetization is available to those channels that are successful, and it is available on all devices, desktop to mobile to living room. Content varies wildly, from ‘how-to’ videos to personal journeys to pure entertainment, creating a vibrant ecosystem. And, as with all social media, it is a valuable outlet for any new business or brand to deploy to engage with their customers. We firmly believe that gaming and immersive experiences hosted online will have that same level of wide-spread use once the technology makes it available with equal ease, access, and cost.
My Confidence Well
It is a fair question to ask, what makes YOM so confident that the coming revolution of the internet will be immersive, 3D experiences? My conviction springs from this mini-me who occupies a bedroom not far from where I am constructing this essay. He been crafting and living in 3D worlds since he got his PC, and he’s just getting started. He and his peers already use games to socialise, spend fiat into virtual items the way I would have spent it on comic books, and have built their own experiences and stories using tools like Roblox and Minecraft.
The marketplace of experiences that is so successful in Roblox is destined to escape the confines of a single platform. The tool suite provided by Epic for their Unreal engine, along with the marketplace for assets and functionality, are just more steps being taken to usher in this new edition of online experiences. So the tools are one piece of the puzzle that is falling in place to bring about this change.
The technology that supports low latency play and near-zero hosting cost is the next challenge, and the one that YOM has in our sights. It will be a DePIN network that solves those challenges, this much is absolutely clear. A successful version has the proper vision in place to both see that end goal and know what steps have to be taken to move there at the right pace.
This Essay is ‘Me’ focused
I Doodle, Back to Me, My First UGC, it’s no wonder I’m labelled narcissistic. So let’s spend this section looking at something I am not yet deep into, something less narcissistic, TikTok.
I was only recently made aware of one aspect of TikTok that sets it apart from other social media platforms. That is that the ratio of users of their platform who create content as opposed to just lurking is far higher than the others. With TikTok and their younger demographic, 83% of users upload content, as opposed to the 90% lurkers on other platforms. And with this empowerment of users creating content, they are looking for ways to monetize their time and energy.
Because web3 ecosystems of the type YOM is empowering use blockchain for payment systems, current monetization models that extract large fees (30% in the case of Apple) can be disintermediated. User generated content in this new wave can include programmable royalties in the attached content, creators can establish ownership of their work and be properly compensated. So content that generates the most attention rewards the content creator directly.
Not Without Challenges
This new explosion of content will certainly come with challenges. There is certain to be content that will break boundaries, but also content that will break laws. Copyright concerns will keep lawyers active, and a rating/moderation system will certainly be enacted to be sure to police the content. The reward for good content, however, will provide the carrot certainly to make the stick less necessary. Community norms, as happens in all the various online spaces, will become apparent and we would expect would enforce their boundaries from within their community. In other words, these challenges have been faced before and will be overcome again in this 3D internet world.
The User Generated Content Explosion
I doodled because I consumed comic books. The association is easy to see. The YouTube content explosion came largely from the generation who grew up watching TV and movies, consuming video content. The coming generations have been immersed in 3D worlds and games. What does that logically mean?
The time is coming where the creative energy stored up in the minds of the generation that has lived and played in the various 3D worlds as children explodes out. As that generation is given the tools to create 3D worlds of their own and a way to host it on any website or streaming service, the change will be revolutionary. That generation will merge storytelling and gameplay into a new form of media. They will create social media in 3D and it will become a communication channel they will rely on. They will conduct commerce based on virtual content, and it will bridge the gap between virtual and IRL sales. And all of this will be on the back of the DePIN network YOM is constructing to drop the costs to the floor and provide the speed, quality, and accessibility that is currently enjoyed by streaming video. I for one am excited to see what content these empowered users create.
The Ecosystem Director
About YOM:
YOM is the 1st cloud gaming DePIN powering white label metaverses, immersive experiences, and games at near-zero prices and at global low-latency coverage to any device and channel. YOM is providing studios with the tools, grants and an accelerator program they need to easily craft and deploy their own Unreal Engine 5 experiences built for their brand, clients, product, or interest. YOM’s pixel-streaming infrastructure is optimised for quality, performance, and flexibility. The project is backed by a network of top-tier advisors that will be revealed over the coming weeks.
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