Interoperability continues to be a grail quest for many metaverse evangelists, partly spurred by the flawed assumption that the Internet should become the Metaverse. The World Wide Web is interoperable, the argument roughly goes, enabling us to leap from one website to another; so too must the Metaverse.
In my chat with with Neal Stephenson, the web metaphor seems exactly what the Metaverse should not be:
“[Immersive experiences] should be linked in a kind of spatial arrangement,” as he put it. “It’s what is lacking in the World Wide Web — you've got this web of hyperlinks all over the place that jump you from one site to another, and there's not really a kind of spatial organization that ties it all together.”
The Metaverse was never envisioned as the totality of the Internet. At its heart, it is a virtual world: dynamic, real time, immersive, with a base consensual reality shared by a community of active users within it. Analogizing this to the web — flat, relatively static and asynchronous — misses this essence.
This web analogy is among the many factors that caused Second Life to lose its growth momentum; updating its user interface to resemble a 2D medium grafted onto an immersive real time experience only contributed to new user confusion, and an open mutiny by veteran users. You can click from one web page to another; you cannot click a mountain and then expect to somehow end up in an underwater cave.
The web experience is more or less the same between different web browsers, because they stream the same underlying content. The user interface of a virtual world, however, is part of that world, and cannot be altered substantially from one user to the next.
While many advocates will strenuously disagree, metaverse interoperability for the most part seems like a solution in search of a genuine problem. I would put this problem in the form of a question:
“Is your vision of the Metaverse really just Steam with a few less steps?”
Because the interoperable vision, usually described as a network or federation of many virtual worlds that users can teleport to, is really not too different from what consumers already have with Steam (or Xbox Live, or the PlayStation Store, etc.) Experientially, we already travel from one virtual world to another on these platforms after several clicks and minutes of loading time. Beware a vision for the Metaverse which offers to replace this with something only slightly better.
Veteran MMO game designer Damion Schubert likens the interoperability vision to an ambitious but naive startup attempting to create virtual cars which somehow work in wildly different online racing games such as Forza, Wipeout, Need for Speed, and Mario Kart. Each of these game experiences imbue the virtual cars within them with unique physics, game mechanics, and interactivity that simply does not translate.
What is also forgotten by interoperability advocates is that it’s been tried before.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 