Wagner James Au / New World Notes

I started reading this recent New York Times feature on the Metaverse with a rising sense of "Looks like we finally made the mainstream!" triumph… which rapidly decayed into frustration. Because the overall editorial tone struck me as: "We're not quite sure what the Metaverse is but some people sure are talking about it a lot, so I guess that's something?" For instance:

In fiction, a utopian metaverse may be portrayed as a new frontier where social norms and value systems can be written anew, freed from cultural and economic sclerosis. But more often metaverses are a bit dystopian — virtual refuges from a fallen world. As a buzzword, the metaverse refers to a variety of virtual experiences, environments and assets that gained momentum during the online-everything shift of the pandemic. Together, these new technologies hint at what the internet will become next.

While there is a lot of corporate interest in the metaverse, skeptics abound.

Strauss Zelnick, the chief executive of the game publisher Take-Two, said in a May earnings call that he was “allergic to buzzwords,” and suggested the metaverse could be all hype. “If you take metaverse, SPAC and cryptocurrency, in five years, will any of this matter? I’m not sure it will,” he said. Then there are those who wonder whether interest from the tech sector is simply opportunistic, or missing the point entirely.

Unsurprisingly, no one in the Metaverse business interviewed for the Times article is able to cleanly articulate a concept of the Metaverse that explains what it's for, and why it's better than the platforms we already have now. 

Having pitched the concept of the Metaverse in various contexts to many different kinds of people, I understand the suspicion that it's only a buzzword, liable to crash and burn when a skeptic's follow-up question is, "OK, but why should I care?"

In fact, I've learned over many years to only mention the word "Metaverse" to people (almost entirely in the tech industry) who are likely to know and love Snow Crash or Ready Player One. I had hoped the recent Spielberg adaptation of the latter novel would help mainstream the concept, but it was a modest hit at best. And in either novels' case, the concept still only makes sense and seems compelling within their dystopian context: The real world is so horrible in the future, most everyone spends life in the Metaverse.

Or to put it in contemporary terms: The Metaverse as an escape from the real world seemed pretty compelling during a global pandemic, but now as Summer vacation trips are overbooked (my home town in Hawaii is currently teeming with ransacking tourists), the power of that use case rapidly erodes.

My own solution to the elevator pitch problem? I'd rather be non-utopian about it and reference something that is working now. For instance:

The Metaverse is a bit like a Steam — except an immersive social space with much better creation and monetization tools for everyone.

That pitch, at least, tends to interest anyone in the game industry, seeing as Steam has 100 million+ active users. Then again, I'm not convinced The Metaverse will extend beyond gamers who know and love immersive 3D spaces — and that's only some 1 billion of the nearly 5 billion people on the Internet. (Speaking for myself, I'd count myself the king of infinite space, if I helped build a Metaverse as large as Steam.)

That Discord is a lot bigger than the individual games is an important thing to ponder in this discussion. https://t.co/kF5DsYpuJl

— Philip Rosedale (@philiprosedale) July 10, 2021

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

And then yet again — as Philip Rosedale recently noted, commenting on this Times story — even gamers spend as much time on Discord (very much not any kind of Metaverse-type experience) as they do in any immersive world, if not moreso.

As it happens, I recently asked Philip for his definition of the Metaverse, expecting a pithy reply. Sine Wave CPO Adam Frisby called it a "shared canvas". But Philip, who's spent more time thinking and creating the Metaverse on a high level more than just about anyone in the world, turned very thoughtful, and said this:

I've been using that word for a long time, and I'm probably responsible for using it in ways that I would now be less confident in talking about.

In short, I think that the older I get and the wiser I get, and the more I contemplate virtual worlds in my work and the work of others over a lot of time now, the less I am sure what everyone means by the Metaverse I don't think we have a solid idea of what it means.

In my own thinking I would say that the Metaverse is… the digital space between us. And what we're really trying to get to with the Metaverse as Adam says is a creative space that consists of our shared agreement on the space in between us.

Which is a great place to start! But when talking to anyone outside our relatively small community of Metaverse evangelists, we're still in for a very long elevator ride.