I play Fortnite, so I'm familiar with emotes, on that and other games. It's an interesting thing that's emerged.
If you're not familiar with emotes, they usually take two to five seconds, depending upon which game you're playing. However, they're not usually germane to the game. They're part of an expression component, which people use to play online among themselves, often in standby rooms or in waiting period times before the game; or, it's activity to express yourself during the gameplay. It's not only Fortnite there are hundreds of games that have emotes.
The question that I have is, where is the line drawn for any of these things? They are purchasable, but often it's game credits. With some of those game credits—and we ran into a problem to some degree and it was cleaned up by Battlefront—it almost became like a lottery. It was criticized for loot boxes, and other things like that, when you purchase upgrades for weaponry, for costumes, for emotes.
Some of the emotes are dance moves, and others are expressions or talking. There are phrases that are very common in pop culture, whether they be from movies or other types of things that have become generally acceptable in terms of use.
Do you have any idea as to where the line would be drawn on that and how the compensation would take place? Again, you don't have to spend money to get emotes. You can play the game and you get online credit currencies for that.
How would you compensate for that? If it is a three- to five-second thing that's also done in the social context of using the game—not the gameplay itself—how do you restrict that? In a virtual world, in these rooms and elements where the emotes are used most prolifically, it's the same as if we were in the room here and you did a thumbs-up.
There are everything from dance moves that go back to cultural expressions, whether it be Slavic or Russian and other types of eastern European kicking out your feet type of things, to skateboarding things that came about in the heyday of Tony Hawk and the types of moves they did with regard to the emergence of that culture.
How do you quantify these, and would you distinguish the difference between using them, again in a virtual setting, before the game, which is when you're communicating and you're part of that culture where you know that all your expressions are monitored and shared? That would be no different from the real world.