New gaming frontiers

This evolution has already begun. Roblox—the gaming company that went public on March 10, 2021 and closed its first day on the stock market with a $38 billion valuation—is one company setting the foundation. “The real long-term goal for Roblox,” CNBC reported, “is to build a metaverse where millions (or billions!) can gather to take part in games, meetings, collaborative work and even Roblox’s own virtual economy fueled by its currency called Robux.”

It’s clear: gaming is no longer just for gameplay. Recent activations are pushing the boundaries of traditional gaming, transforming it into a cultural nexus where people can convene for community, entertainment and business.

South by Southwest (SXSW) is gamifying its 2021 online festival. In lieu of an in-person event, SXSW will host attendees in an extended reality (XR) recreation of downtown Austin. Festival goers can visit virtual versions of popular landmarks and attend sessions in iconic venues, such as the Paramount Theatre, the Contemporary Austin, Mohawk, Empire Control Room & Garage, and Cedar Street Courtyard.

One of the SXSW events is a virtual interactive play and “exploration into the future of live performance.” Dream, put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company in collaboration with Manchester International Festival, Marshmallow Laser Feast and Philharmonia Orchestra, will be performed by actors in motion capture suits and animated in real-time, appearing to the audience as digital avatars in a virtual world.

The virtual set was designed using Unreal Engine, the 3D production platform that Epic Games used to create Fortnite. “If you look at ‘Minecraft,’ if you look at those gaming worlds, there is a social-ness and a convening there amongst people enjoying an experience,” Sarah Ellis, director of digital development at Royal Shakespeare Company, told the Los Angeles Times. “I think that relates to theater. We are using the technology of gaming, and we are in the spirit of live performance, and we are trying to establish a connection point.” Justin Bolognino, CEO and founder of experience product company Meta, predicts a “massive explosion of XR/VP (Extended Reality, Virtual Production),” he tells Wunderman Thompson Intelligence. “In the space of a small soundstage we can now create massive real-time broadcast effects that will defy what we thought was possible for live broadcast.”

Game payments firm Xsolla thinks the future of conferences and corporate events lies in gaming. In October 2020, it launched Unconventional, a platform for holding virtual events with 3D avatars inside virtual worlds. The company explains the pivot into events as a logical next step for the industry and says the project is aimed at relieving Zoom fatigue.

Topia—one of the apps behind virtual Burning Man—is also reinventing online socializing. When Burning Man pivoted with a fully digital experience in September 2020, Topia allowed festival goers to create virtual versions of their campsites, navigate a vast map of other user-generated campsites and chat with other avatars. The platform takes a page from gaming to offer a more organic formula for socializing. As Quartz reported, it “allows users to recreate many of the social conventions that usually get lost on video calls: instead of having one person talk while everyone else listens, people can splinter off into smaller groups, pull a friend aside to catch up one-on-one, or mill about until they find someone to talk to.”