The Metaverse Can Not Happen

Fortunately, the Metaverse boom seems to have mostly blown over by now, entirely enclipsed by the AI one. However, in the last five years, metaverse seemed to ride the hype cycle with cryptocurrencies, VR, NFTs, and Fornite and Roblox. The latter were definitely the technology triggers for the hype, the building blocks for the promised evolution of virtual worlds.

For a good look of the peak of inflated expectations, Matthew Ball’s metaverse (2020) posts are good place to start. For a good look at the trough of disillusionment, Dan Olson of the “Line Goes Up” fame also did a video essay on metaverses in “The Future is a Dead Mall” (2023) that is worth a watch.

Metaverse was a trending topic because of games[1] such as Roblox and Fortnite[2] – these massive sprawling virtual worlds that apparently everyone was playing and where interesting things were happening. Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney was and probably still is a big believer in a Metaverse – and with the success of Fortnite, this gives weight to his vision of the future.

I’m very late to the topic[3], but anyway, in this post, I will attempt to go through a brief history and possible future of the Metaverse. In my opinion, the technology was never the point nor was the user experience. In my opinion, Metaverse was and continues to be an attempt to create a “fork” of the internet that is less open, an attempt to have monopoly over a platform from the get-go, and to rule over it in the way Google and Facebook only dream they could rule over the web.

The only reasons games are even mentioned when it comes to the Metaverse are because Ready Player One and because they are the most common 3D virtual worlds around and because of MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. However, I argue focusing on the 3D totally misses the part of the evolutionary tree that shows that our current very 2D doom[4]-scrolling social media sites are from this same lineage, and have been very successful as virtual spaces even without that “gamified” 3D world part.

What is a Metaverse?

Let’s start with some definitions: to differentiate the Metaverse from something that already clearly exists, I argue the two main features of it are

It’s an immersive virtual world, and

It’s an attempt at replicating the “real world”.

Othwerise, Metaverse would not be unlike the Internet and the World Wide Web – but instead of their inherently 2D nature, the Metaverse needs to be in 3D like the real world.

It’s important to note a traditional distinction between virtual worlds, MMOs and the Metaverse. Strong focus on socializing (like chatting) has traditionally made virtual worlds and Metaverse different from MMOs, combat RPGs, or games in general. This is a very arbitrary definition, for example Tim Sweeney has said that Epic discovered that many players in their very much an action shooter game, Fortnite, spend a lot of time just voice-chatting in the lobby with their friends. For similar reasons, The Verge has called Fortnite the most important social network of 2018. In any case, many of the early attempts at metaverses were just fancy graphical chat applications, even though the history of multi-user dungeons (MUDs) goes back to the 60s.

MUDs were very much before my time and I’m not going to cover them too much here, so here’s an excellent post on their history, ROBLOX is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds & MMORPGs. It’s really nicely written history of virtual worlds, MUDs all the way to Minecraft and Roblox.

Short history of the Metaverse

Metaverse is very much a Generation X thing, it’s a vision of the future from the past. So, let’s go back to the future of the 1990s. Regardless how many definitions of Metaverse exist, they all seem to start with Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash form 1992[5]. It is a visionary novel, and has inspired many projects, most notably Google Earth (2001) and Second Life (2003). I did like the book, it’s way shorter than most Stephenson’s novels and it also has a clear ending, also unlike most Stephenson’s work.

It’s worth remembering that Snow Crash predates the web as most people know it. The Web wouldn’t be easily accessible by most people until few years later. However, first virtual worlds, as mentioned, are from the 60s - so there was already a long history of virtual worlds - and Metaverse itself was already a 30-year-old concept when the hype hit.

In comparison, Cyberspace, or what today is the Internet and the World Wide Web, is often attributed to William Gibson’s and his 80’s novels like Neuromancer (1984). For cyberspace, I’ll use the definition that it just means our interconnected digital technology, our smartphones, laptops, routers… all that allows me today to write this blog post on the information superhighway.

Cyberspace is today so well spread around us that we don’t even think about it. We talk about “online” and “real world”, but in reality, the online world is woven into our real world and it does not define two different realities.

I think it’s worth pointing out that one thing that none of the sci-fi works expected was the smartphone. This device and its persistent connection to the internet augments our experience through services like Google Maps[6]. The history of the smart phone can be said to have been inspired by Captain Kirk’s communicator on Stark Trek, but it endeed up much more advanced than what Kirk could ever have dreamt about[7]. It’s also a great example of the idea that we need positive sci-fi visions of the future to encourage people to make some of it real instead of the countless sci-fi dystopias which seem to just encourage people to actually create the Torment Nexus.

Compared to cyberspace, the Metaverse is a separate virtual space, often unconnected to our real world, yet an imitation of it.

History of the virtual worlds, a Schism

Richard Bartle, best known for his work on MUDs and his research on player types[8], noted in his book MMOs from the inside out (2016) on the history of virtual worlds that Social worlds went one way; game worlds went another. This was the great schism that rent the concept of virtual worlds in two, and — sadly in my view — persists to this day.

The schism Bartle talks about happened around late 80s - so before Snow Crash but after Neuromancer where MUDs divided into MMORPGs that ultimately lead to games like World of Warcraft and “social worlds” like Second Life. In my opinion, - and what I guess is my central idea in this post is - we’re now at the confluence of this schism. The gaming worlds of Fortnite and WoW are used for hanging out while pure social worlds never really seemed to get far beyond being essentially graphical chat clients (cf. WhatsApp). However, neither of these are nowhere near what the Metaverse is supposed to be.

An often given early example of social worlds is LucasArt’s Habitat (1986)[9]. Some sources claim it’s the first graphical large-scale virtual world. Recently, it has been recreated to run on modern computers, in a version called Neohabitat.

Post-Snow Crash and during early internet, there was Active Worlds (1995), a precursor to Second Life (2003) and There (2003). It was one of the first 3D virtual worlds. In the screenshot, note the action “Macarena”: for those spared of this early viral meme, it was the 1995’s equivalent of dabbing and flossing.

Note the action “MACARENA” in the toolbar, third from the right

A curious sidenote here is Microsoft Comic Chat (1996) [10]. It was a research project by Microsoft Research into virtual worlds and ended up being bundled with Internet Explorer and so eventualy with each copy of Windows. Comic Chat was a visual IRC client, IRC having been introduced less than 10 years prior in 1988. Twitter would go to borrow IRC’s hash/pound symbol for topics as the now ubiquitous “hashtag”. For those who didn’t have a chance to use mIRC growing up, Discord is very much a modern iteration of IRC.

Metaverse as a platform for commerce

The Metaverse is a platform, just like the Internet is a platform for all kinds of services and applications like this web server that sent this page over to your device.

Early attempts at Metaverse based their monetization on selling virtual real estate and issuing virtual currency[11]. You were then free to do almost whatever on your land. This makes sense if Metaverse is to be considered as a successor to the Web, where domain names like kalifi.org are a form of virtual property[12].

Platforms are different from services in that platforms take a cut of all the business (like Apple’s App Store or PlaysStation Store) and there are multiple sellers (like Ubisoft on the Xbox or the App Store), whereas in a service business there is only one provider (like Netflix or Spotify). Notably, games like Roblox and Fornite are platforms (GaaP). Call of Duty, on the other hand, is a still very much just a service (GaaS), because only Activision sells you anything there.

Metaverse as the successor to the Internet and the Web

So, once you take that platform thinking and consider the amount of money that for example one the world’s most valuable companies, Apple, makes - or at least used to make - from their 30% cut on the App Store and think how much money you could make if you could do that on the scale of the whole Internet you start to understand why the Metaverse sounded like an attractive thing to invest into.

However, in my opinion, for the Metaverse to be a true successor, it would need to be an open like the Web. Granted, the early internet was based on somewhat anarchistic and utopian ideal of freedom and liberty. If the Metaverse is not open, as an example, was the reality or the Metaverse in Ready Player One a utopia or a dystopia? Although the virtual world, OASIS, was impressive, it only offered escapism from the bleak reality. Even in OASIS, people’s escapism is limited by the hardware they use and their virtual wealth[13].

Therefore, any privately owned platform, be it Second Life, Fortnite or Roblox will never be (or should not ever be) a true Metaverse. Any privately owned platform will just be a capitalistic dystopia where your self-expression is limited by the size of your wallet and the legislation of the country wherever the operating company happens to reside. The above applies to many virtual and social worlds on the web, not just games. A good example is Facebook and its purely American attitudes towards nudity that are very conservative from a more European standpoint[14].

However, none of this won’t stop anyone from trying to get a monopoly on the Metaverse, any less than it stops Facebook or Google from attempting to conquer the web because as mentioned, consider the amount of money that goes through the digital economy every day, every hour, every second. Many companies would like to be gatekeepers, if not like Apple and Google and taking 30%, but at least like Visa and Mastercard and taking 1-2% percent of each and every transaction. This is how Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and PayPal cofounder Elon Musk can afford their own space programs.

Earning money from rents exploiting a monopoly is neither innovative nor adds value to the society, but it can be very, very lucrative. But who wouldn’t want to be the next Google?

Where is the demand for the Metaverse

The business interest in Metaverse is clear and large enough to be visible from the space. However, do we as consumers want a Metaverse? Do we want to socialize in 3D spaces? Second Life and others like it had a massive hype, but then mobile phones happened, and VR… didn’t.

I would argue that the resurgence of interest in Metaverse was partially because of continuing social distancing during a global pandemic, and because of the success of games like Fortnite and Roblox, and because of Fortnite’s in-game events like music festivals and movie trailer reveals. As a reminder, Epic themselves saw Fortnite more as a place for hanging around. Zero-interest policy was definitely one factor, as well.

However, I suspect Fortnite as a social media has more to do with urban planning and the commercialization and diminishing public places for young people to hang at than anything in the game itself. Teenagers need to get out the home because of their natural development needs, it’s part of growing up and so on. It’s not because they are “digital natives” that naturally enjoy virtual worlds.

Especially during the pandemic, these virtual spaces were new “third places”, the places that are neither home nor school/workplace[15].

To drive home the point about “greatness” of virtual worlds: do we tolerate Teams meetings, or do we see them as an actual improvement over real-life meetings in actual meeting rooms? When you chat with someone on Teams, would you prefer a photorealistic 3D model fake of the other, or telepresence through video? Or is text just fine?[16]

This is fine.

Technical obstacles for the Metaverse

Although modern game engines and graphics cards enable more immersive virtual worlds visually, there are many other technical and social problems that have not advanced as much.

It’s difficult to predict the social problems in a Metaverse. We are just beginning to understand[17] the problems social media can have on our society, like disinformation. If nothing else, social media has proved the concept of marketplace of ideas to be dead wrong.

However, the technical obstacles to get a Metaverse up and running are much clearer.

Concurrency

Yes, Travis Scott’s concert in Fortnite had 12 million players, but not at the same time, and not sharing the same virtual world. They were split into 50-100 player instances – and they were not in sync. EVE Online is a rare exception of not having a concept of different servers, but any massive battle in EVE slows down the game considerably (time dilation) where the action is. Cloud technologies can bring improvements to concurrency, but we are far from multiple orders of magnitude larger concurrent, immersive worlds.

Adoption of VR

How immersive can virtual worlds be if we remain on interacting them through two-dimensional screens? VR was making a comeback, and it’s worth remembering that all major tech companies were betting on it from Facebook’s Oculus to Sony and Microsoft, and even Apple. It still seems that everyone getting a VR headset sounds only fantastical. So did the idea of computers at home or everyone owning a mobile phone. Fax machines and pagers, on the other hand, were less successful in this regard.

Avatars, or you in the Metaverse

Social media today exists on the Web, Metaverse would itself be a social media. However, how would you be represented in the Metaverse?

We have some experience and knowledge here with games. World of Warcraft is 21 years old, EVE Online is 22. In other words, some people have over two-decade old avatars. The role of avatars and how people relate to them is fascinating but very much outside the scope of this post. On the other hand, in the social media world, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg famously assume everyone has only one identity, but this is clearly wrong.

Would you be represented in the Metaverse by just one avatar or many (as you are represented today on the web)? If you are like me, your avatar and persona is different on LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, Destiny 2, or any game…

So, Metaverse… when?

It’s important to understand that Metaverse is sold as a new, or a possible “next”, Internet. It’s not going to happen anytime soon. We might have a virtual world (Fortnite? Roblox? Minecraft?) with the reach of Facebook, but we are very far from anything “Meta”, a universe “beyond” virtual worlds. Few would call World of Warcraft, Google, or Facebook ”the internet” despite the latter two’s best efforts.

To give an idea of timeline, we are now in the midst[18] of Streaming Wars yet streaming video has been possible for decades. Someone might remember RealNetworks and RealPlayer of the 90s. These things take decades. We’ve built virtual worlds for about 60 years now and we are very much just beginning.

We have many of the prerequisites or “technical triggers”, but we are far from having even an idea of the infrastructure a Metaverse would need. Our current internet is not designed for real-time telepresence, The Metaverse would need to support that kind of presence from the ground up.

So, to summarize, it would take a long time but if the Metaverse happens it will be at least as transformative as the Internet has been. Few can imagine the life without smartphones and Google Maps and Wikipedia. It’s easy to dismiss, I never thought I needed a cell phone because I had phone at home if I needed to call someone. But it was never about calling, I rarely call anyone today either. Like VR, we just haven’t come up with the killer app.

From where we are now, it looks more likely that instead of social media becoming virtual game worlds, games will just incorporate social media features.

Should the Metaverse exist?

We kind of have already been here, the early internet was a playground where everyone could build on it. This website is testament to that. Then things got commercialized and walled gardens started to pop up everywhere. Metaverse would be speedrun of that on crack, and Metaverse built and owned by world’s largest corporations is not a playground.

There is nothing inevitable in Metaverse. It doesn’t need to happen. It might never happen.

This iteration of Metaverse is most likely done and replaced by the AI hype[19]. However, the hype cycle has a path upwards from the trough of disillusionment. No doubt, we will see a second coming - maybe with a new definition and with or without AI.

Never forget

However, it would be great if it didn’t happen by advertising firms, and let’s not forget for a second that Facebook and Google make their money through advertising. Total surveillance becomes so much easier when the whole world is built by those who want to follow you.

And let’s not forget, it was always about megacorporations in cyberpunk. They were depictions of dystopias.

Coda: The inevitable cryptocurrency angle

The last iteration of Metaverse seemed to be very connected to various cryptocurrency schemes, and it’s easy to see why. As mentioned before, it seemed like a natural inflection point to get rid of traditional payment processors who still managed payments on the current digital economy. Besides, everything in the Metaverse is digital so why not its currency, as well?[20]. And after payments, what better reason for NFTs to exist than to be the way for digital ownership. And because the line must go up, cyrptocurrencies and NFTs needed the Metaverse to grow in valuation.

This angle was pretty well covered by Folding Ideas in “The Future is a Dead Mall”, so I’m not going to go much into details here. I’ll just wrap up noting how most Metaverses ended up being dead malls - if anything ever came out of them - most NFTs ended up being virtual currencies without a game. The best example of this was Loot, which was virtual adventurer gear for no particular game. Games built around NFTs ended up not being terribly good games and there was very little demand for NFT features in actual games. We can see the legacy of audience’s disapproval of forced NFT features in how they are responding to Generative AI features in games - not terribly well.

Or more accurately, the revenue of these games ↩︎

Previously, these two games were the poster boys for being just Games as a Platform ↩︎

Kids happened. This post was also originally a presentation given sometime during COVID, which is evident in the way I will address the reader in the post as if they were an audience. ↩︎

Not related to Doom, which very definitely is 3D and not a sidescroller. ↩︎

If you were playing the Metaverse drinking game, it’s time for a shot. ↩︎

A long time ago, I called this the Human-World Interface ↩︎

On a class visit to then Digital Chocolate CEO Trip Hawkins noted how Kirk could through his device only communicate with other people, who then had to go to interface with a computer to get the information Kirk needed and relay it back to him. ↩︎

As a sidenote, please do not use Bartle’s player types today, they are very simplistic and not based on any science. There are a better motivation models based on actual psychology like the Big Five, or OCEAN, model. See also Quantic Foundry’s motivation model. ↩︎

Time for your next shot. I’m not trying to get you drunk, promise. ↩︎

This was also one of the first applications to use MS Comic Sans. ↩︎

If you immediately started to think about cryptocurrencies and NFTs, congratulations, you realized where this is going. ↩︎

However, I do not exactly “own” the domain in the traditional sense, I just rent it. ↩︎

The quality of avatars in Snow Crash were also linked to the user’s status and wealth. ↩︎

As an example, Facebook’s independent Oversight Board’s first cases involved defining its breast squeezing policy (in the context of breast cancer awareness). ↩︎

As popularized by books like The Good Great Place and Bowling Alone. ↩︎

The last point, I believe, might be very much generational. I, an early millennial, am happy with my text chat, but the Gen Z seems to be much more active on social networks based around video like TikTok and Snapchat. ↩︎

Or, we are in the “find out” phase of FAFO. ↩︎

Although, it seems we might be entering some state of “cold war”. ↩︎

The final nail in the coffin will be if Facebook renames itself again, from Meta to something AI related. ↩︎

Let’s not go into how everyday currencies are for most part very digital anyway. However, even so the traditional currencies feel the pressure from private digital currencies and extra-territorial payment processors. ↩︎