The future of work for creatives in the Metaverse

“Games are going to inform the entire future of the Metaverse”, says Jon Radoff when he speaks about hybrid creative jobs in web 3.0.

Jon is an American entrepreneur, author and game designer. As a game tech expert he is taking his company Beamable straight into the metaverse. He is among Top 30 Most Influential People in the Metaverse via ReadWrite.com and one of the most active contributors to delivering knowledge on this topic via multiple channels like Medium or Linkedin.

I had the pleasure of conversing with Jon last year, as part of my personal research on the topic of the future of work for Future Jobs Design. I learned a lot from this interview, starting with the ecosystem of the Metaverse to the future of gaming and rising innovative roles for hybrid creatives.

Roblox

What is your take on the future of work for creatives in the Metaverse?

J.R. — I guess we could begin with what I think the Metaverse is: the Metaverse is the next generation of the internet, it is the broadest way to think of it and what will define this next generation is the type of experiences we’ll have are going to be much more real time interactive. Most of what’s on the internet today is transactions: you buy stuff, you look at a web page, you get information; of course those things aren’t going away and they are going to grow anyway, but much more of what we call the Metaverse will be defined by activities like what we’re doing right now is a real time activity. That’s the Metaverse. Or playing a game: that’s the Metaverse!

The last 18 months have accelerated this transition. So more and more people are getting accustomed to the idea that the Internet is a place they go to participate in activities of all kinds, whether it is a game, a collaboration, or an immersive social experience.

J.R. — What goes hand in hand with that is a significant increase in creativity because people will want to make stuff for this environment. If you think back to the web originally or the internet in general, it took a long time before the tools became available to just be able to make your website or make your shop, with tools like Shopify for example. It took time for these apps to develop but those are tools geared towards a more transactional phase of the internet, where we’re going is activity based — more and more tools and technology to support the creator economy emerging around us.

You can look at companies like Unreal and Unity for example providing a 3d technology that makes it possible to deliver games and experiences to someone over the internet by crafting it in a studio environment — in the past that was something hard to do because of the complexity of the technology behind it. So that’s the front end. But there’s a lot more like building a lot of the technology that allows the live games, the multiplayer aspects, the real time aspects to be added to these experiences over the internet.

And then, there are the people building other aspects of the Metaverse like the design tools: whether it is no code, low code or AI; to really allow creators to do what I think of as a direct from the imagination to the screen economy!

Where are we now?

J.R — The Metaverse already exists.

Right now, we are just going to add on it, to revise it and have different ways of experiencing it by developing more devices that bring it closer to the body, creating more events in VR, eventually smart glasses — there is a whole infrastructure and human interface and space computing, but with respect to the creator economy I think it’s less about being a technologist and more about being a storyteller or an artist.

You’re going to really create the experiences for people more so that you’ll have to program it because programming and the technology side of things is really a bottle neck, it doesn’t make you faster, that’s the role of software and infrastructure companies to make available, and ultimately empower you as a creator through the apps and tools they deliver.

J.R. — For people who are interested in technology, there surely is a huge growing number of companies — my own, Unity, Unreal — I recently created this mind map of the Metaverse with 160 companies on it. Almost every company there has a technology function. There are 7 layers — one is the experience layer which I think will need less and less technology over time, and then there are 6 others where the technology is going to be. People could take a look at that market map and if what they really want to do is focus on creating the technology, the work flows, the hardware, the software, they should focus on those 6 layers that I spilled out in the value chain of the industry.

For people that see themselves as inherently creative — they are storytellers, they are artists, they want to design things that people experience, that’s more about the experience layer where the most important thing you should do is familiarise yourself with those tools and platforms that exist in other layers so that you can use them to build.

Or if you don’s wanna build these things yourself, but you want to populate worlds with these assets, companies like Unity have an asset market place where you can gain access to the models that others created.

J.R. — What 3D engines do is they provide that world environment that you can populate with 3D virtual objects and models and animate them, bringing life to the environment. To take it to the next level and make that a multi user social world, where other people can participate in the same space that you created, is where things get complicated at the moment. That’s where my company exists to do, for example, to make this easy. That’s what Roblox does! It is an interesting company to look at to get a sense of where the future is.

The way I think the future will look is: more and more capability will exist to build those “robloxie” experiences but you will have the freedom to build them wherever you want. More open source and decentralisation will be available so you will not have to build in a wild garden anymore, with the community standards set by that particular provider.

What are the profiles of creative workers developing this extended reality?

J.R. — You got artists, you got designers and you got people who think about the story.

• environment artists
• character artists
• set-up designers of the things that exist in the environment like ships and buildings
• level designers (world builders)
• game designers, thinking about what’s fun and engaging and how a player can progress, level up their character etc.

What is the fuel that drives innovation in the Metaverse?

The fuel is “what is it that makes things fun”. I think the most important thing for people to understand is what’s fun and to really embrace that!

J.R. — That’s what makes games work, that’s what makes travel work — why do people do anything other than working and making a living is driven by experience, by storytelling, by personal transformation, by human connection with other individuals. Of course, underneath that, from the side of technology, there is: digital identity, big data, cloud computing, infrastructure and semiconductors, an enormous ecosystem of tech that enables all of it. But if you want to play a role in this world you have to understand what people wanna do in their free time.

What is your advice for a creative pivoting their career towards a more digital role?

J.R. — I would play a lot of games. Games are going to inform the entire future of the Metaverse. This is a 2 hundred billion dollar industry, and people have already been working on this aspect of bringing to life fun experiences whether is from the stand point of individuals coming together to win a goal or compete with each other for a goal, or for the experience.

Games are going to inform the entire future of the Metaverse.

Whether you want to make games or not, I think understanding what makes games work is really important. Games are about progression and understanding an aspiration, you got to understand what does that player want to become and how is going to be transformed by the experience. The term “gamification” became very popular at some point, but it altered the meaning of games in a way that what it meant was to take components of games and throw them into something else, which in the end did not motivate people to move through the process.

What about more traditional roles?

The Metaverse is going to touch all aspects of our lives. But not everything in the Metaverse is about exploring a world. Already doctors are in the Metavrese by simply performing remote medicine and using teladoc or using video conferencing to comunicate with a pacient. It’s real time and they get to put their skills there in a way that it dematerialises physical space. Also, there are a lot of apps talking about mental health and bringing people into experiences that are helpful there. I am not smart enough to think about applications for every single professional that exists, but the Metaverse is going to occupy all aspects of our lives. If you ask me what will a doctor do in Roblox or RecRoom, I have no idea! But I know that they are going to play a role in delivering services to people through the Metaverse.

One of the basic characteristics of the Metaverse is dematerialising physical space so that distance is not going to matter as much in the future.

*Thank you, @JonRadoff! It has been a great honour to speak with you and learn from your experience and expertise.

*This interview was video recorded.