Do you feel lonely? How not to drive a small pixel avatar around in a place where you are not explicitly allowed to speak to anyone with the sound "Bad, perhaps, that does not stop the Japanese government from making it."

As discovered (and translated) by Automaton West, the already ill-fated project takes place under the name "Platt-verse" and is designed to reinforce "measures against loneliness and isolation" according to its website. The author and sociologist Noritoshi Furuichi took it for a spin and tore it up in a tweet (the quote below is machine translated).

"As soon as you log in, an avatar called 'security' approaches and tells you to turn on silent mode," Furuichi wrote. They are watching users not to talk to each other."

This has been confirmed on the website instructing users to turn off your microphone and camera (or get you talking), not to use names that identify you in the real world, and to make sure you are set to "do not disturb" in the game. Off to an already raging start.

"OK" Reason Furuichi"So, if users can not communicate with each other, what can they do? Like the game, they can not do anything. At best, they can jump to government websites (which are not part of the metaverse). There really is nothing we can do. I don't think there is such a lonely metaverse anywhere in the world."

You may be wondering, "If what you're talking about is off the table, why do you have to mute it?""This is because it looks like this whole project is using Gather.GATHER is a virtual RPG-STYLE program THAT IS usually inclined towards a corporate environment. Zoom, but please Zelda — there were worse ideas, such as releasing a metaverse without legs.

When you use it specifically for this, it feels like a swing and a miss. For the credit of Platt-verse, we are trying to contact users with regional organizations taking measures to combat loneliness, chatbots that can help find support, consultation services that do not require reservations (although it is a fairly limited time period, but still), and training courses for those who want to help.

But this may have been a web page and, well, you need to deliberately isolate yourself from the people running around you, as Mr. Furuichi points out:

"It's only open from 5am to 10am to 6pm on May. I think that's probably because "security" is the people who do the job. I think there are a lot of people who are running it all the time. They are advertising and probably spend unnecessarily a lot of taxes."

Anyway — I don't want to overly dunk on the actual services offered here, but I agree that this whole exercise seems like a total waste of energy for everyone involved. If I was feeling lonely and anxious about it, I probably don't want a security officer to breathe down my neck — I just want VRChat or something