The metaverse is a dystopian nightmare – let’s build a better reality

Surely if any metaverse is to truly compete with reality, we’ll need to build it on a federated fabric. Sometimes I wonder if people would invent the internet of today by modeling a company after Cloudflare. The success and resiliency of the Internet comes not from the strength of a single company, but from its focus on federation and interoperability.

No single company could build the Internet and be successful, and the same is true for the metaverse. The focus should be on developers, shared spaces and protocols. How can I connect my server running a game on Unity engine to your server running a Godot engine? Can I walk between them, transport my avatar between worlds? Can I run copies of myself in multiple realms? Can I play Factorio inside the game room of my Minecraft megabase?

I’d like to see more crazy ideas and wild hacks focusing along these lines. In fact I’m surprised there aren’t more “metaverse for crypto” initiatives. I guess we’re probably still 10-15 years away from the first successful application of these concepts.

Trying to trick people into desired behaviour through escapism rather than creating a shared culture of stewardship, responsibility and self-control is exactly what a dystopian nightmare looks like.

I think you should look at the roots of theatre. The principal function of theatre wasn't escapism but Catharsis, the cleansing of one's emotional state to be able to re-engage with the world and to renew and restore oneself.

Good fiction engages a person with the world and prepares them to improve their society and culture. It doesn't produce a bunch of obese Wall-E people who live on canned beans binging Netflix all day.

The reality of the "metaverse" as far as I'm seeing it, is literally just MMORPGs without a story/purpose, where you hang out with friends, chat, do shared activities, etc etc. Second Life done better, with the world size/style of WoW/Fortnite/Minecraft/Rust/etc (choose your graphics and fantasy genre). Plenty of people already join custom Minecraft servers just to hang out and voice-chat while messing around doing stupid stuff... it's just that taken to a new level.

Everything else is just hype by massive advertising companies to try sell you on THEIR version of that, and make it seem like a universe-changing step in humanity that will raise you to the next level in evolution, so that they can fill it with ads (direct and indirect/subliminal) to make more money.

I don’t know about “bad”, but any fictional or surrogate reality certainly seems to me like a vice. Whether or not it’s bad depends on if you abuse it too much.

The metaverse has a consistent definition - at least, if you read Snow Crash. It's just not what any company would actually want to bring to the market.

3D game worlds have value, open systems have value, but in completely opposite and contradictory ways. The value is in the entertainment of playing a well-built one, which means there has to be monetization and centralization. In other words, they have "production value". Open systems are outright allergic to that: while you can monetize, say, a webpage; there's no central WWW server, so there's no technical protection (DRM) against you just reuploading someone else's webpages. This doesn't matter so much for the web, because the cost to produce is low and the web has something the game worlds don't: "interconnection value".

A decade and change ago we had Second Life, a 3D game world built like an open system. This meant that instead of just giving you a bunch of levels with characters and game mechanics, they gave you a sandbox and told you to build whatever. They even released the Viewer source under GPL and at one point even promised to do the same with the Simulator server (which never panned out, although they were trialling grid interconnection with IBM at one point). You could build your own entirely independent Grid via OpenSim. At the same time, the game also had a centralized in-game economy based around selling content to build with. Linden Labs' embrace of openness, as incomplete as it was, wound up totally pissing off a lot of long-time users whose content could now be trivially copied, reuploaded, and resold using Free tools. They also had to deal with malicious Viewer forks, which ultimately wound up with them having an approval process for third-party Viewers, walking back some of that openness promise.

(I'm, of course, skipping over all of the other systems that have cropped up before and since - ActiveWorlds, VRChat, and so on. AFAIK none of them had metaverse pretensions to the same level as Second Life did.)

I've heard people claim Roblox is "the metaverse", and they might be close. However, it's far more of a closed system than even SL's open-viewer, closed-grid approach. They wouldn't for a second tolerate, say, someone writing a custom Roblox client or server. They do have an element of the metaverse that nobody likes to talk about, however: copyright infringement. Roblox has plenty of unlicensed fangames and other content that you wouldn't dream of being able to legally ship in a game world normally. This, to me, is one of the core properties of "metaverse-ness"; the ability for content to just exist in the game world without an associated license.

(Epic, you can use the term "metaverse" when I can design my own Fortnite skins and levels. Just being able to play on my PS4 with Xbox players is only a small part of it.)

Someone might bring up Minecraft at this point. This also has some of the aspects of a metaverse - notably, the block-building lets you go crazy with custom content, and it also allows custom skins. Well... mostly. Custom skins are only present in some versions of the game - notably, all Java versions, as well as Windows, iOS, and Android Bedrock. Other versions replace your skin with the default. There's also some licensed skins that are locked to specific versions of the game, that get replaced with the default skin as well. Cross-play lets you join other player's game sessions, but if you want levels to actually move between devices, you need to have a Realms subscription. There are servers, but custom servers are very new (like, in-alpha new) and not allowed on consoles (or at least on Switch - I don't own the Xbox or PS4 versions to test).

So that's another problem with the idea of a metaverse - the current system has way too many barriers in play to make it work. Remember how Sony made your Fortnite account a PS4 exclusive so you couldn't use your lootboxes on Switch? Imagine that, but 2000x worse, if someone actually tried to bring the metaverse to consoles.