"human co-experience"
Late last year, Roblox — which makes a Minecraft-like game-creation platform mostly used by kids — filed for an IPO. Here's how the company describes its product in the S.E.C. filing:
An average of 36.2 million people from around the world come to Roblox every day to connect with friends. Together they play, learn, communicate, explore, and expand their friendships, all in 3D digital worlds that are entirely user-generated, built by our community of nearly 7 million active developers. We call this emerging category “human co-experience,” which we consider to be the new form of social interaction we envisioned back in 2004.
I've never seen Roblox, yet somehow I feel that I know what "human co-experience" is like. One might even argue that this category "emerged" at the dawn of human existence, and is now generally grasped by the term "hanging out." But presumably the point Roblox wants to stress is that the hanging out occurs in co-constructed "digital worlds" from which the platform provider profits. Further, it suggests that all "human co-experience" should be captured for private gain.
In some ways, Roblox is a lot like a conventional social media platform, and it stokes the same sort of entrepreneurial aspirations to build out one's human capital, as Alexi Alario wrote about for Real Life in 2019: "Roblox seems to encourage creativity only when it has the potential to make money: through development, or through buying and selling in-game merchandise." As on TikTok, users can chase the dream of making something that becomes popular and lucrative, as if the platform were a level playing field for "creators"; at the same time, though, users have avatars that they must stylize to communicate their social position — an indication that the same sorts of real-life advantages can quickly be transferred to the Roblox world. In short, Roblox offers another example of the potential influencerization of everything through platforms, which subsume any sort of activity and direct it toward securing monetizable "engagement," the platforms' ultimate purpose.
But another way of describing platforms is as game engines: They establish the rules by which people encounter one another, the objectives it will make sense for them to pursue, and the means of representation for their various intentions. They render the space of interaction and inaugurate the laws that condition behavior there. Roblox makes this most explicit, because it is a platform that's focused on game development — it is literally a social network plopped into a game engine. But it's not hard to see how Twitter too is a game engine, establishing how its players can appear and interact, producing their behavior in specific forms, and indicating how they can "win." Spending a lot of time in these game engines may reshape our subjectivity to receive them anywhere.
One can see the imposition of game engines on the physical world in apps like Pokémon Go but also in the sorts of image processing that makes various augmented-reality applications possible — "rendering" the physical world captured in images as a 3-D map into which virtual objects can be inserted and dictating the rules by which we can interact with those objects, which also changes how we experience and use the physical space. Physical space is re-rendered to be subject to the rules of a particular game engine.
That is not to say that the world was once really real and is only now being "threatened" with digital augmentation. That would be as misleading as thinking that we had to wait for Roblox in order to have human co-experience. Reality is always already augmented by all the media and forms of representation all around us. And the terms by which we socialize are not given and fixed, but made and remade. In narrowing what is possible down to what they can render and contain, platforms make this more explicit. In the same way, how current digital game engines work and are being used may give a sense of what the near future portends for how we understand one another.