The methods we interact with one another digitally have grown by leaps and bounds, to be sure. We’ve moved from AOL IMs to social media pages to dedicated chat platforms like Discord. There’s one platform, however, that Improbable CEO Herman Narula thinks is being overlooked: multiplayer online games. In fact, according to him, online gaming could easily overshadow the likes of Facebook in terms of being an important social space.
An interview with Narula elaborates more on this line of thinking and made the argument for how massively multiplayer games could change the world. “The next social platforms will be really interactive. It will no longer be about building a global museum of social experiences, but about actually doing things together. It’s the internet of experiences,” touted Narula. He further went on to claim that bonds are formed as players create teams together and inequality dissolves as personal merit is based on success instead of nationality or race. He even believes that shared play can further build empathy and engender lessons about human society much like the Christmas truce of World War I.
Of course, this ties to Improbable’s SpatialOS, the platform built for creating large-scale online worlds. “Our technologies enable worlds to become gigantic in scale and scope,” says Narula. “We’re the power company.”
