Composable

All complex systems that work, evolved from smaller systems that worked.

This is stated in Gall’s Law as a rule of thumb for designing complex systems that work.

Composability is one of the essential ingredients of an open metaverse, requiring strong foundational technical standards to be built. Innovation happens through inventing new or re-packaging existing underlying primitives of software systems. The <img/> and <a> tag primitives allow building rich websites. JSON, mostly unchanged since its inception in 1999, is the backbone of the JPEG for the metaverse.

A character in GTA is constructed way different than the one in Fortnite, but ultimately they are collections of vertices making up triangles, skinning data, UVs, different textures and atlases, and materials rendered with engine-specific shaders stored in different formats. Similarly, an image is a collection of pixels rendered through the engine (browser) whether it is JPEG or WebP. Albeit, far less complex.

The real value of buying a new Lego isn’t in the new set. It’s in all the new things you can build having more parts available.