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There will never be a metaverse! The amount of electricity and device manufacturing required for it to exist at scale will likely exhaust our capabilities as a planet and lead to yet more conflict and strife.
And that strife will be in the real world. The thing about “real” is that it always wins over “virtual”.
(Aware of the fact that I'm taking time out of my day to read HN) I really wonder how many adults > 25yrs and < 60yrs have the time to immerse themselves in any type of digital world / metaverse experience. If I was a teenager or in college, then yeah I can see it... but there are so many things to do in the 16hrs we have each day, and I already kick myself for not finishing that book, or getting an extra workout in,…
Metaverse would also wrap itself around a lot of the things people do already, like watch movies or concerts, coupled with games of any size and type. So as opposed to a stereotypical 6-hour WoW raid lifestyle, you could, for example, watch a virtual concert with friends, then afterwards jump onto a couple rounds of some Fortnite game variant, similar to how we do it today but just within the 'verse. But you could also immerse yourself for longer if you want to.
Honestly Metaverse seems more to me like a digital version of a big shopping mall with a bowling alley, arcade, and movie theater. You can hang out all day there or just drop in to get something from a store, or just get dinner and a movie.
i always thought it was WoW. lots to do, but all gatekept and previously defined/allowed
For example, let's say you're playing a game of Checkers. That's separate from real life. You can't buy a captured Checkers pieces on eBay and then in your next game of Checkers, start with more pieces than your opponent. Being able to do those things would cause the game to break down, because the game would no longer be a contest of your wits in Checkers, it would be a contest of your existing wealth. You can't purchase points in a basketball game, you can't purchase mulligans in golf, etc. A lot of people in the blockchain/NFT space seem to be of the position that games don't currently let you purchase things with real money or sell them to other players for real money because they lack the technical capabilities, but that is not and has never been the problem. There's also the "trading an item in one game for an item in another game" but that's equally useless, it's the same thing but with a barter system, and the barter system would eventually just give way to money anyway. The problem is that introducing those mechanics causes the magic circle to break down.
By contrast a metaverse is a metaverse because the things happening in it are not in a separate, isolated space. Both games and metaverses are virtual in nature, but what makes something a metaverse is the lack of a magic circle, while what makes something a game is the presence of a magic circle. The metaverse is a virtual facet of reality; games' whole thing is that they are not reality.
A metaverse can contain a game, but not vice versa. Plus WoW is entirely owned and operated by one entity; a metaverse is pretty definitionally a situation in which any party can create their own space without needing the permission of another party, kinda like anyone can create a website without needing the permission of any party. Well, of course, you need an IP address and if you want people to be able to reach it, a DNS record and if you want SSL some certificates, so that's not a perfect analogy, but the web isn't really decentralized anyway (for these specific reasons).
Minecraft is great but to my knowledge you can't make a portal in one Minecraft world to another world, you can't take an object from one Minecraft world to another world, and you can't transit from one simulation to another simulation (all Minecraft worlds run the same simulation: the Minecraft simulation). It's not really a metaverse in that it's not one connected uncoordinated space, it's many separate, instanced…
(Aware of the fact that I'm taking time out of my day to read HN) I really wonder how many adults > 25yrs and < 60yrs have the time to immerse themselves in any type of digital world / metaverse experience. If I was a teenager or in college, then yeah I can see it... but there are so many things to do in the 16hrs we have each day, and I already kick myself for not finishing that book, or getting an extra workout in,…
Minecraft is great but to my knowledge you can't make a portal in one Minecraft world to another world, you can't take an object from one Minecraft world to another world, and you can't transit from one simulation to another simulation (all Minecraft worlds run the same simulation: the Minecraft simulation). It's not really a metaverse in that it's not one connected uncoordinated space, it's many separate, instanced…
Right now the talking heads are trying to sell us a metaverse on the idea that one account could have a persistent inventory between Minecraft and Valheim and Terraria, but anyone who's ever played a game can tell you immediately that this makes no mechanical sense whatsoever (cross-game promotions are common, and welcome (e.g. an Aloy costume in Monster Hunter World for PS4 owners, or Nintendo Amiibo giving you random rewards in various games), but don't involve literally round-tripping your character between games of potentially wildly disparate genres), and anyone who's ever written a piece of software can tell you immediately that this would be an infeasible logistical nightmare to implement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read a recent interview from mark zuck about the metaverse and someone asked him a similar question. He had an actually really insightful answer. 1) Most american adults watch several hours of TV per day. alternatively, many play a few hours of video games. (The actual per-person-per-day numbers are very high compared to the average 2hr/week i watch tv but whatever). Most of TV and Video Games are about ignoring re…
I'm frustrated that everywhere I look I keep seeing "metaverse" and "VR" used interchangeably. All of the things described above are VR, and none of them are the metaverse. Watching TV or playing a game in an immersive, distraction-free VR environment sounds great, and will happen, and it's not the metaverse, it's just VR. Working in a virtual home office has the potential to be extremely productive, ergonomic, and s…
eg. maybe your vr home has digital art, but that art can also exist and be viewed in other mediums. Or you can all sit at home and watch VRTV with friends, but one friend just watches on their phone on the bus.
Or a virtaul office desk, that can have coworkers visiting. The office server can be hosted on your corp servers (or, the social networking, maybe you self host your personal office), but when you leave to go virtually home, you're now in your home, hosted by fb nee meta.