The Format #002

Happy Friday 🌞, in the UK we’ve been enjoying some actual sunshine and watching the world of technology whizz by. This week it feels like the (video) gaming industry is on a quest to become the metaverse that we always wanted… and it might just do it… Or Apple (June 5th)…

Our quick round up of some of the more interesting things that we’ve found:

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Tiny Apps & Open Code - Small is Beautiful

A post that explores how small or tiny apps can work together in constellations introducing the idea of disposability and tokens/badges that hold these constellations together. HQ Trivia is used to great effect as an example.

They Plugged GPT-4 Into Minecraft—and Unearthed New Potential for AI

Minecraft, the original Metaverse 😉… Nvidia have been playing with a Minecraft bot (based on GPT-4) that solves in-game problems and even writes code that it needs to solve these problems. The bot, Voyager, generates code to add behaviours to itself; Even if initially it doesn’t run perfectly, Voyager will try to refine the code using error messages and feedback from the game.The idea of disposable code from AI is very interesting and opens up a whole new potential world of accountability and record keeping via a blockchain.

What Fortnite Creative Mode’s payout model means for music

Water and Music is a great resource for people interested in the future of music and in this post Matt discusses Fortnite’s news sandbox mode which allows anybody to make their own Fortnight based games which are already wonderfully diverse (losing two hours to a team based zombie survival sandbox was critical research). The key thing here is how Epic are sharing 40% of net revenue from in-game Fortnite purchases with creators….

Epic Games Unveils 20 Epic NFT Titles for Web3

Epic announced 20 new NFT game titles for its game store… This is big news, building on its existing NFT properties with Blankos Block Party the first release, bringing UGC including user created “tiny apps” that they can share with friends. It still feels like a learning experience for Epic, with various angles and brands. Time will tell if this is a good strategy for them… Roll on Fortnite NFT’s…

OPENFORMAT News

We’ve got some things going on… 🙏🏽

IRL: Hack Night for Tiny Apps

The first hacknight from OPENFORMAT was a low key informal affair which saw hackers in 3 hours build a ticketing system, a fan reward system, an artist tipping system, and decentralised quizzes.

Next IRL Hack: Let's Make Tiny Music Apps

So, we're back with another small hack event on Tuesday 27th of June, the format will be the same, with our focus on the music industry. What tiny apps can we build that work together to create an experience greater than the sum of its parts? For example, one team builds a streaming player that costs tokens to play, and another team allows fans to earn rewards that they can spend on streaming, another team builds an (NFT) music marketplace, etc

See you in a fortnight,

The OPENFORMAT team

Prompt (Generated by AI): ‘Create a bustling city of the future, Minecraft-style. Picture glowing neon signs, futuristic pixelated vehicles, and skyscrapers reaching up to the clouds, all made of textured blocks. A high quality setting will best capture the rich texture details characteristic of Minecraft. --q 2 --seed 350 --chaos 0.3 --s 750’

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