First of all, thank you for reading. There's so much word vomit about AR and VR that I'm surprised you can handle any more. I really appreciate it. I hate talking about what so many people think is just a buzzword, but here we are.
I don't think I have anything new to say about the tech's newest craze, "the metaverse." That's the problem. If you ask someone "what is the metaverse?" it's not that they wouldn't be able to tell you; they wouldn't know which one you're talking about. I mean that literally. At Thanksgiving, ask your weird Uncle what he thinks about the metaverse. He'll probably mention something about virtual reality or Facebook before spouting off something homophobic.
There's World of Warcraft, Roblox, Rec Room, Minecraft, Animal Crossing, and I'd argue, even Zoom.
Despite not having any new hot takes, I can't stop thinking about our new mixed realities. What I hope, literally pray for, is that the metaverse never becomes one place. I want a different, evolved form of the open web. The thing that excites me more than anything is new immersive places to explore, create, and play. Especially play. The most advanced "metaversed" platforms are all games. For me and so many others, these digital realities existed far before VC's started salivating about the possibilities of virtual shopping malls where you can throw whatever shit-coin of the week at NFTs of cartoon characters. We've been exploring digital game worlds for decades. I can barely remember a time when I didn't have the ability to log on and enter a multiplayer game that had its own universe, like Neopets or Club Penguin.
More than anything else, online gaming (okay and pr0n) pushes the limits of consumer tech hardware and software. There's a reason that the Apple App Store has TWO navigation tables dedicated to general gaming apps AND its own Arcade. Try to find a commercial for a phone that doesn't feature someone beaming at their screen as a race car zooms around a track at the highest frame rate possible.
So obviously, the problem of siloed platforms is not new to games, either. Every few years new consoles release along with exclusive AAA titles. And yet, it's games like Minecraft that run on nearly every screen you can get your hands on that have the furthest and most diverse reach. The games with the furthest reach are also technically accessible in that they don't need a ton of computing power to run.
If your software can provide a good experience on a cheap smartphone and a Playstation 5, like Minecraft, you're in a good spot to succeed. That's because diversity is good for digital worlds as much as anything else.
It's troubling but unsurprising that every CEO talking about the metaverse talks about "openness and interoperability" but doesn't acknowledge the obvious fact that it will initially be occupied by a very small demographic that can afford to interact with these new experiences, let alone create them.
The word "metaverse" itself comes from Snow Crash, the dystopian sci-fi novel that a bunch of nerdy white men remember fondly from the early 1990s. And the vast majority of people building these new virtual worlds are the newest generation of boy kings who will be dictating a large part of how we spend our time.
When I started interviewing people for FACTORYSETTING5 in 2020, I quickly learned that the loudest voices all sounded the same. This shouldn't come as a surprise but I thought maybe, just maybe, this time could be different. We may be at the mercy of what sort of AR and VR hardware is created, but we're not stuck with the conventions and tropes associated with it. There's still time to get more people, more interesting people, in front of new AR and VR audiences. Let's do it together. No one elected these boy kings, and there's still time to dethrone them.
Mark Zuckerberg didn't invent social networks. Facebook wasn't an original idea, and neither is the metaverse.
TBC