The Metaverse — The Future Is From The Past
In the past few months, there has been a recent increase in certain business areas and general talk around the concept of a “metaverse”. Some of it is due to the release of Space Jam 2, Fortnite’s ever growing popularity and transformation, as well as the growing attention towards Roblox. While the term might be new to some, the idea is very close to something that others have already experienced over the past 30 years. Then the question becomes “Why are people saying this is the future when we’ve already had this for years?” and the answer is normalized online connectivity and VR.
The Metaverse as defined by Metaverse Roadmap is “The convergence of 1) virtually enhanced physical reality and 2) physically persistent virtual space. It is a fusion of both, while allowing users to experience it as either”. To break this down into a more easily understood manner, a metaverse is an online space a user can interact with through VR technology, or general input methods (i.e. Keyboard and Mouse, Gamepad). This sounds akin to just playing a video game to some and that’s because a majority of online gamers have played a game that functioned as this. VRchat, Playstation Home, IMVU, Club Penguin, Toontown, and Second Life would all count as a metaverse in some capacity. Their purpose is to function as a second reality to persist in. However, the distinction that separates it from a traditional MMO (WoW, Guild Wars, FFXIV) is something that becomes easier to talk about after discussing one of the earliest pioneers of this space: GeoCities.
GeoCities was a web hosting service during the early life of Web 2.0 (1994). The site allowed users to select a “city”, based off of real city names, that usually were themed around specific interests and then host hyperlinks to different webpages (assigned a street address) that users could jump to for whatever they were seeking. Tokyo was the “city” for everything related to anime and other Asian tastes, Area 51 was for Science Fiction and fantasy, Silicon Valley was for hardware, software, and programming and the list went on and on with different districts of the specific city. There wasn’t much in the way of interacting on these web pages but users would update them, upload images, rumors, viable information, anime episode breakdowns, and anything that had their interest. The pages themselves would even have hyperlinks to the user’s friend’s pages as well.
VRchat functions in a fairly similar way to this. Users log in, they can assign a specific world to be their “home” to start and then search for different worlds to hop to. Once the user enters that world, they can interact with other users who have a virtual avatar and are also in their same space. Various security and safety settings can be set so the user doesn’t need to interact with others who might try to harass them or intentionally try to cause their client to crash. There are literal portals that users can use to go from world to world and some are shared amongst certain circles of creators. Each world usually has some specific function as well. Some places are just lounges for people to watch anime together, movie theatres for films, interactive games, places to study historical facts, art galleries, fitness worlds for people to exercise in, and even recreated worlds from various games, shows, and anime for users to interact in.
A very close contemporary to this was Playstation Home which launched on the PS3 back in late 2008. Playstation Home was a digital space that Playstation 3 users could log into and create a custom avatar, own an apartment, interact with other users, go through portals to enter worlds that were themed around specific games, or more general places like a movie theatre or arcade to play games in with other players. A key feature to Playstation Home was the shopping mall. A place where users could go to buy clothes for their avatars and furnishings for their apartments as well. One note that was also stressed from Playstation was that Home existed for both consumers and developers. Developers were encouraged to make content that could later be bought by users. Which includes those digital shirts, premium apartments, furniture, and other objects as well.
All three of these functioned similarly but would now retroactively be categorized as metaverses, with Playstation Home being the approximate ideal that companies are now pining for. A virtual space that’s free to get into but includes a number of micro and macro transactions that are mostly cosmetic. Much akin to what Fortnite and Roblox have turned into: Virtual spaces where players can play games together, socialize, and spend time together. These are becoming access points to entire other worlds from the comfort of our own homes and our phones.
There’s a similar concept that gamers and anime fans actually have a term for and have been exposed to for years: FullDive. FullDive gear is a fictional rendition of VR technology that was created in the popular light novel Sword Art Online written by Reki Kawahara and originally published in 2002. The technology allowed the user to upload part of their consciousness into a video game and have full control over their virtual avatar within this space. Not only that but you’d be able to feel, taste, smell, and fully experience the previously only virtual. Another novel that had a similar piece of technology is Ready Player One by Ernest Cline in 2011. Ready Player One’s Oasis is a fully functional Metaverse where students attend school, people work, others compete in various events, and others just lounge around in. It’s a fully functional secondary world that the users live in while reaping all the currently same benefits of the modern internet. To the point that metaverse stars and celebrities exist.
Wreck-It Ralph, Ralph Breaks The Internet, The Emoji Movie, Ready Player One, The Lego Movie, and Space Jam 2 (A New Legacy), all are visual representations of a metaverse that have come out within just the last few years. This recent boom of movies with similar semi-nostalgic pop cultural consumption ideas through the persistence of these metaverses is not a coincidence. It’s something that is actively being sought out. It might be hyperbolic but the existence of these movies is likely something to get people more in touch with the idea of apps and websites as “spaces”. Let’s take a small step back so that an example can be made. When people used to say “Let’s hop onto Call of Duty”, that usually meant that you and those friends would play Call of Duty until you all got tired, bored, or wanted to switch games. However, when people say “Let’s hop onto Fortnite”, what does that mean? You could play the co-op mode Save the World. You could play the Battle Royale. You could go into creative mode and build stuff. You could also be going there to watch a movie. Or to attend a concert. Or to take part in a currently ongoing event. VRchat is similar. There are conventions that are held, dance parties with actual DJs, and all sorts of different clubs and activities to attend. These are more than just games.
One of the biggest examples of “more than just a game” that also encapsulates a lot of the issues with this oncoming race for these metaverses is Star Citizen. Star Citizen is much too large of a story to tell in just this one article but it was expertly marketed as a game for fans of old space flight sims, when the actual dream being crafted is a self-contained metaverse with space travel, no VR functionality, and its primary means of monetization being expensive space ships. While Playstation Home, IMVU, and other platforms have proved that you can monetize shirts, apartments, and other items, Star Citizen has proved that there is a completely open market for virtual vehicles as well. Not only will people pay a premium for virtual vehicles to drive, but they are also willing to put as much money into them as they would a real life car as well. Many backers of Star Citizen admit they are funding it and buying ships to fulfill a specific dream but few could really find the right terms to describe that dream at the time.
It was slightly mentioned before but an aspect that plays a factor in this “Metaverse Race” is nostalgia. The idea itself calls back to Tron for some, a lot of the movies previously mentioned calls back to mid to late 90’s pop culture, and a major appeal for these verses being the chance to inhabit a world that is directly inspired by or is directly from a well loved property. Meaning it’s possible for companies to make a theoretical theme park-esq Metaverse to advertise their own properties by allowing the users to inhabit that space and surround themselves by something they already love. Completely saturating a “public space” with advertisements that they choose for their own products while in a setting based off of one of those very same products.
What exactly these Metaverses will truly look like will take time to tell. All that can be told from right now is that it’s going to be pushed within the next few years as VR becomes more widely available, people spend more time inside, and a plethora of other factors. It’s unpredictable but that is also what makes it exciting to think about. The concept of a virtual space for you to drown your senses in while also being able to “meet up” with friends regardless of distance, immerse yourselves completely in video games before going to catch a movie in the snap of a finger, or being able to throw a house party before being able to log out and go to bed without worrying about cleaning up. A Metaverse is an extremely fascinating concept but it also carries many moral and ethical dilemmas that may only multiply as time marches on. It’s undoubtedly a future that many have a vested interest in seeing realized. So maybe this look at the past can help better prepare us for what to expect down the line.
