The Interoperability Paradox

With Great Success Comes Not So Great Interoperability

What Interoperability “is”

Like True Ownership (™), interoperability is another misunderstood (or more accurately viciously mangled) concept that cryptophile Web3 founders and consultants have retreated to justifying investment into their amazing flying machines which after almost four years of hype, billions sunk and thousands of products launched are still firmly planted on the ground or in most cases under it. As with “true ownership”, nailing down a definition is harder than it should be due to wide, overlapping use and misuse.

Interoperability is the old but newly re-energized idea that virtual items, assets and currencies should and could be shared across multiple games, IPs, virtual worlds, metaverses and platforms. “Could” as we will see is a problem which is mostly ignored by both delusionally optimistic proponents who declare it “inevitable” and game developers who reject it out of hand as “impossible” on technical terms.

The technical arguments against interoperability are well worn by this point. Supporting multiple art styles and multiple uses across different genres from different developers seems close to insurmountable. But assuming the technical problems of lacking overlapping functionality and item logic across different games could somehow be supplanted? 

Real World vs Games 

Maybe one of the most widespread and most troublesome to debunk claims from Web3 interoperability proponents about the supposed inevitability of inter-game interoperability is that large parts of the real world are interoperable by design. 

As with any idea this intuitive, straightforward and generic it has been “invented” and implemented many times over even in the game industry let alone in the world at large. Interoperability in itself is not impossible nor bad or automatically a poor business decision. Standardized screw heads, the European Union, passport visas, DVDs are all examples of interoperability. 

But where this falls down is that almost every example of intentional large-scale real life interoperability came about through a single method: overwhelming centralized bargaining power of one or more companies or governments. This is universal across any form of economic interoperability known to man. The bargaining power can belong to one monopolistic company wielding patents as with the Phillips screwdriver. Or to a government regulator breaking up monopolies by instituting forced interoperability like the UK’s 1989 Beer Orders or the US’s 1948 end to the Film Studio System.

Even state-monopolist partnerships working together to produce and enforce interoperability standards like the advent of shipping containers, which were originally designed and implemented with the help of the US government which wanted to help US railroad companies recover from the 1929 Wall Street crash.

The modern day equivalent is the US government choosing the carrot over the stick by paying Tesla $7.5B in subsidies to open up their proprietary Supercharger network. But make no mistake this is still only happening because of government intervention and because the stick exists as an alternative.

The World Wide Web, maybe the best known example of interoperability, is only currently somewhat open because it was developed by a government employee for a government agency with buy-in from government funded academia. The employee was then in a position to lobby their employer to release it license and royalty-free. This was still not enough. Tim Berners Lee’s browser also needed to be miles ahead of any competition - luckily it was. There is no way to overestimate the sheer luck needed for this confluence of events to happen, as well as the absolute absence if not the complete opposite of profit motive. Suffice to say this is not today’s Web and definitely not today’s Web3.

Hopefully that’s enough examples to make a point without going into a full history of general purpose interoperability miles beyond the scope of this piece. But even this leaves us far from the current Web3 wisdom of just building random interoperable infrastructure and hoping that hitching as many random things as possible to it will eventually make it happen because “it’s already happened in the real world”.

Specifically in the Web3 space there have been initiatives like the Metaverse Standards Forum or the Open Metaverse Alliance from Web3 mainstays like The Sandbox, Animoca Brands and Decentraland. As we will see, the creation of standards is not really a problem. Seeing how no Web3 initiative whatsoever no matter how well funded is even close to releasing any successful interoperable games, the issue with getting this vision off the ground lies elsewhere.

Interoperability Isn’t

From the above we can discern the following: interoperability exists on a spectrum and there are certain factors which have historically led to interoperable technology adoption.

We can immediately scrap Public Open interoperability. No part of the video game industry is about to become a country soon or gain the explicit and concrete backing of any national government in imposing an interoperable game item infrastructure as far as I’m aware. There are no indications any free government-funded and backed superior Web3 game infrastructure is being developed either. Definitely not the open, decentralized one Web3 proponents argue for.