Wagner James Au / New World Notes

In the future, everyone will make a Metaverse for 15 minutes. Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene is making one (or the starting layer of it, at least), and now it sure seems like longtime MMO designer Raph Koster is making one too — as he hints in a blog post last week on Playable Worlds, his new startup:

[D]espite what many may think, “metaverse” is not just a buzzword. It is different from an online world. But metaverses presume multiverses, and multiverses are built from online worlds. They are all in the same family.

What does this have to do with Playable Worlds? Well, the answer is pretty simple, given what I’ve said, and you’ve probably connected the dots already…even so, I think I’ll answer it next week.

I messaged Raph to ask when his post about making a Metaverse is coming out, and he only mentioned that his company posts usually run on Tuesday and Thursday. So let's check there tomorrow.

As for his own definition of the metaverse (versus a multiverses or an online world), that's worth reading now:

A metaverse is a multiverse which interoperates more with the real world. In most conceptions, it includes significant elements of augmented reality – such as walking around a real city and seeing virtual things. It includes shopping at actual stores via VR interfaces. If you attend classes, it might be a class that has mixed attendance between virtual attendees and physical ones. You might perform a job solely in virtual space, and get paid real money. It blends the real and the virtual.

…  a lot of those things that people dream of happening in the metaverse have happened in online worlds, because online world technology is the backbone of a metaverse.

I think "more" is really the operative part of Raph's definition. In other words, a metaverse will do the kind of real/virtual  interoperability we've seen for years across many online worlds — but do so for more people, across more devices, and with vastly more integrations with the real world.

As for his own approach to that path, check back tomorrow.