The Metaverse is Nonsense
Jason Warnke, CC BY-SA 4.0
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard a lot about the metaverse in recent months. What was once a niche term has since become mainstream, with all sorts of companies jumping onto the bandwagon to promise a new, innovative experience. But the truth behind the term, and what it promises, is much different than what is being advertised.
Far from the future of the internet, the metaverse instead is a fundamentally nonsensical mixup of conflicting concepts masquerading as innovation. The media hype simply isn’t backed up by reality, and the promises it makes simply can’t be made real.
What is the metaverse?
Depending on who you ask, the metaverse can be a number of things. To some, it’s a generic term for any persistent, virtual world; to others, it’s the end state of the internet – a single virtual world encompassing all possible online experiences. Every game, every website, every app, and every person would all be a part. Regardless of what you definite it as, however, a few constants emerge in all definitions:
- A heavy reliance on virtual reality, specifically in the form of headsets or augmented-reality goggles.
- A connected experience where users from across the world share a common experience in a persistent world.
- A connected experience where multiple games exist in the world, and most if not all items or skins earned can transfer to another game.
- A unique user-created avatar, which may resemble the user’s real-life appearance or something entirely different.
- Strong business integration, allowing users to teleconference and work, shop online, and actively be advertised to by most, if not all major corporations.
Putting aside the virtual reality component, presently a pipe dream so far from reality it’s not even worth discussing, and the integration from real-life corporations, it’s hard not to look at the nebulous concept of the metaverse and realize it isn’t even an entirely new idea. Fundamentally, the metaverse is just an massively multiplayer online game (MMO) – and it’s not an especially compelling one.
The metaverse is an MMO, but worse
During the mid-to-late 2000s, a new fad emerged. A new game, Second Life, became widely touted as the future of online media – like the metaverse, Second Life allows the player to be visually anything in a virtual world. Players can buy and spend money, chat with friends, and any number of other virtual activities. Businesses and universities in particular seemed to love the idea, and IBM notably went all-in on Second Life, promoting it as a way to teleconference and seeing it as the potential cornerstone of a single, interactive experience. But like most fads, interest gradually tapered among the broader world. Second Life still exists today, but it barely holds relevance even among the MMO community, and its time as the future of digital interaction has long side faded.
As it turns out, people don’t want a “second life” that is the same as their first. The concept just doesn’t work for most people, and because of this, virtually every successful MMO draws from either high fantasy or an established media property. From early MMOs like EverQuest, RuneScape, and Ultima Online to licensed MMOs like Star Wars: The Old Republic and Lord of the Rings Online to today’s “big five” of Black Desert Online, Elder Scrolls Online, Final Fantasy XIV, Guild Wars 2, and World of Warcraft, the trend is clear: fantastical worlds far removed from our own are the most appealing. Moreover, almost every successful MMO places an emphasis on role-playing – not just creating a virtual avatar, but engaging in a grand adventure of scope and scale. The idea that grandma is going to buy a VR headset so she can argue about vaccines with her family, shop in a virtual Walmart, or get married in a low-poly environment that would have been outdated in 1999 is so ludicrous it borders on parody. But unfortunately, this the exact future the metaverse is based on.
A decaying genre
One other inconvenient thing about MMOs – they are a genre in decline. With gaming available at your fingertips almost anywhere in the world and the rise of new social gaming genres like MOBAs and battle royale, most MMOs have seen either stagnant player bases or an outright decline since their peak. Longtime champion World of Warcraft has suffered from years of poorly-received expansions, steadily declining from a peak of 12 million subscribers in 2010; according to MMO-population.com, it currently ranks third in active playerbase behind Final Fantasy XIV (2.4 million) and the eternally popular Old School RuneScape (1.3 million), with only around 1.1 million active players in the world of Azeroth.
The new champion of the genre, Final Fantasy XIV, has succeeded seemingly in spite of the MMO format, not because of it; its unique focus on story, strong connection to a legendary gaming franchise, unusually responsive and passionate development team, diverse playerbase, and extremely generous free trial (comprising both the base game and the critically-acclaimed Heavensward expansion, without a limit on playtime) have allowed it to thrive and expand despite a disastrous launch in 2010 and an antiquated monthly subscription model. It’s quite telling that even Amazon’s highly-touted MMO New World – which lacks a monthly subscription – has utterly fallen off the map only a few months after its launch. If even hardcore gamers aren’t that into the genre, how are you going to get a middle-aged housewife to buy in?
Facebook’s folly
No company has fallen further into the metaverse wormhole than Meta (née Facebook). Long obsessed with virtual reality, Mark Zuckerburg has slowly broadened the company’s broad focus from simply destroying the social fabric of America to creating an ever-present dystopian nightmare where a captive audience can be scraped for all their personal information. Its latest effort to hop onto the meta verse craze is the laughable Horizons World, a product which seems to be half Microsoft Teams, half Roblox ripoff. Judging from the reception to its nightmarish promotional video, Horizons World doesn’t seem like it’s going to be the future of anything.
But putting aside the laughable idea that middle-aged Americans are going to learn to put on a clunky VR headset to do things they can already do on the internet, Horizons World demonstrates perhaps the biggest flaw of the metaverse: it does nothing better than the alternative. Want to virtual conference? Zoom lets you do it without a headset. Want to create fun games? Minecraft, Roblox, and Dreams already exist and are so user-friendly that 12-year olds can operate them. Want a virtual avatar in a cool world? Final Fantasy XIV lets you be a catgirl and ride a chocobo. Want to shop online? You can do it faster and more intuitively on virtually any website. The metaverse is solving a problem that doesn’t exist.
An escape that isn’t
The fundamental constant with all of these experiences is simple: people use gaming as an escape from reality. Even something as simple as Animal Crossing: New Horizons – where there are no winners or losers and where you spend most of your time engaging in seemingly menial tasks like interior decoration and fishing – is still an escape. In contrast, the metaverse is built on something far more insidious – the idea there is no escape. Instead of a diverse internet with millions of websites, games, and any other number of things at your disposal, you have a single, shared, monolithic experience that comprises everything – work, play, shopping. It’s Snow Crash or Ready Player One, but in real life, and that’s not a good thing.
Thankfully, the metaverse as a concept simply can’t work, and I suspect that most in the tech industry know this. The internet is too diverse and too interesting to reduce down to a single, shared virtual world. Rather than an actual, concrete development, most companies treat the metaverse as a buzzword to garner media and investor interest, regardless of how realistic their proposal is. Of course, one doesn’t have to go too far into the past to find any number of tech failures that seem all-too-obvious in hindsight, like the Juicero. If a product exists, and you can tie a tech trend into it, investment is almost sure to follow.
And then there’s the infamous dot-com bubble, where investors blindly speculated trillions of dollars in any company that had a connection to the internet. The bubble grew and grew until it finally burst, leaving a slew of dead businesses in its wake and many, many investors holding the bag. The rush to embrace new technology led to a disastrous outcome – and I fear this is what is in store for those unwise enough to buy into the nebulous metaverse.
You really buried the thesis:
“The metaverse is solving a problem that doesn’t exist.”Report
I guess the real question is do people find it enticing? I don’t think many will. Certainly the developer nerds don’t seem to be jumping on board, although I guess I shouldn’t pretend to be tuned in to the younger dev crowd these days. (I have reached fuddy-duddy status, much to my chagrin.)
In any case, sure the Internet attracted a lot of soulless capital, but it also attracted idealistic hackers, who were willing to work hard to make the Internet a cool place despite (and often at odds with) capital. Sure, ultimately we were absorbed into the structures of capital — which speaking for myself I guess I’m okay with this, as I toil away in my golden cage. But still, the passion was there.
This, by the way, is how I knew that Microsoft would lose it’s stranglehold on tech. Sure, they’re still a big deal and plenty of companies still run their IT on Active Directory, which I’m fine with by the way. Active Directory is actually pretty good at what it does. Likewise Word and Excel continue to be primary business tools. That said, I don’t use any Microsoft products, and outside of gaming I’m not missing much. Things were different back when I installed Linux for the first time. Back then MS owned the desktop. Nowadays they do not. (Although, tbh, I would like to someday set up a PC gaming platform. It’s more an issue of space than anything else.)
Regarding “metaverse” — why would any dev want to invest their heart in mind into that? Regarding the “virtual world” aspect, Mr. Cunningham is entirely correct. If I wanted that, FFIV would be way more fun. (Again, if I ever get around to setting up a PC.) The community is organic and there is an entire queer subculture in that space, which assuming I could get onto the same server as my freaky trans friends (which is perhaps non-trivial), I think I’d like it way more than any anodyne “corporate gay” space in the “metaverse.”
As an aside, we mustn’t let the ghouls have the word “metaverse.” Don’t let them own language. Just No.Report
The metaverse is attempting to solve two problems.
First, Facebook’s PR problems.
Second, having bought Oculus and finding out they massively overpaid. Especially since they decided if you want to buy and use one, you MUST have a Facebook account. Which included my 12 year old nephew, whose mom got him one to play beatsaber. So we faked up a facebook account tied to a one-shot email. Zuck thinks he sold the Occulus to a mid-40s housewife real into MLP and who strangely never posts or uses that email for anything other than password resets.Report
The Oculus 2 isn’t *THAT* clunky anymore (if you get the $50 headstrap). I don’t want to call it light as a feather… but it’s no longer something that you’ll feel the need to take off after a short session. A medium session, maybe.
As someone who has VR goggles and has played his fair share of VR games, there are real problems with VR that I have not heard that the Metaverse addresses. The first and foremost is that if you move around with your eyes and ears and your inner ear does not “feel” you moving around, your body is programed to make you evacuate the contents of your stomach after a couple minutes of this (luckily, you only start getting nauseated after a few minutes). Standing in place is fine. Teleporting is mostly okay (Skyrim and Fallout 4 do this). Moving at a slow or brisk pace that mimics walking around in real life? Yak city.
Second is the whole computer overhead thing. I happen to have a 3070 video card that runs Cyberpunk 2077 like a champ. It also runs Skyrim and Fallout 4 like a champ. I cannot imagine running VR on less than a 1080. Like, the 1080 is the floor for a decent experience.
Most people do not have 3070s. Most people do not have 1080s. On top of that, have you *TRIED* to get a next gen video card in the last two years? If you have, you know that you can’t get your paws on one. The bitcoiners and the NFTers have them all. So that’s going to get in the way too.
Maybe there are drugs that can help with the former (dramamine? Maybe?) but we’re going to need a *LOT* more cards to make the metaverse look good. Of course, if we’re okay with renders that allow for the average workstation to use it (not even the average workstation in Asia or Africa… the average workstation in the US), we’re going to find ourselves with a metaverse that doesn’t even look particularly good. Which is an anchor tied to its waist.Report
Re “the whole computer overhead thing” — none required for the Quest. Granted the graphics aren’t as good as a full VR rig, but they’re good enough for casual fun.Report
Maybe good enough for casual fun is what the Metaverse needs. Lord knows, there are a lot of complaints out there about games that sacrifice “fun” for “looking good”.
But the Metaverse needs a killer app that is actually fun. Just pointing out that games in 2010 were better ain’t gonna be enough to get people to play a game that has 2010 kinda graphics for more than a session if the game isn’t also fun.Report
I don’t think the killer app will be a “game” in the traditional console sense. The things that are basically traditional video games but VR-ified are kinda neat for a while but mostly leave me unsatisfied; the things I keep coming back to are more like “simulations”, like the golf and ping-pong I mentioned below.
When they were over for a visit, my daughter’s athlete boyfriend left the discussion circle to try out a boxing sim and emerged 45 minutes later drenched in sweat and eagerly talking about the experience. Then my daughter, whom he had started teaching how to punch, tried it against the first sparring partner and gave out a little scream when the punches started actually coming at her. The difference between doing this with buttons and a joystick while watching a picture on a screen vs actually seeing the guy in front of you and throwing actual punches is huge.Report
Sure, but that’s why VR is awesome and could change things (Moss was amazing, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes was used (in the beforetime) as part of our hiring process, TheBlu could be used to fundraise for coral reef preservation).
But the Metaverse is going to need something that you go to the Metaverse for.
I’m guessing that it’s not going to be a single-player experience or even a small group experience. It’s going to have to be MMO adjacent, family friendly, and something that appeals to… hoo boy. Both Team Leads and gamers.
If there’s something there, I’m sure the creator will make a *MINT*. But I don’t even have the slightest idea where that stuff would overlap.
My best advice would be to find and steal the WoW, EVE online, and FFIV people and give them some ‘shrooms.Report
The problem is that “Ralph Breaks the Internet” happened. People will want a metaverse where you you might visit Facebook’s VR world, but you don’t want Facebook to BE the VR world. Which means Google, and Amazon, and Microsoft, etc. will all have their own VR worlds, and standards will have to be decided upon, etc.
Kinda like how everyone started surfing the internet on AOL, and quickly realized that AOLs version of the web sucked, so you stopped visiting AOL pages, installed a non-AOL version of Netscape, and used AOL only as an IP (until local IPs came about, then you started using the AOL CDs for skeet).Report
Yesterday I played some VR mini golf with my work buddies — the physics are great, and even though in the game we’re just floating avatars, the experience overall was a lot like a real game would’ve been. We’re out on the course chatting about the best way to approach the hole, razzing each other about lousy shots, looking around at the view, etc. The ping pong game I have is amazingly realistic — I played a game with my daughter 90 miles away and it was like we were hanging out in our basement. Not that I’m saying the metaverse is a thing (certainly the tech would have to improve a lot before i’d want to hold a VR meeting for any reason other than novelty), but i do think the VR experience is a little more than just a fancier way to play computer games.
The clunky headset is definitely a problem though — my wife said to let her know when they’ve managed to shrink it to the size of a pair of glasses and maybe she’ll try again.Report
I’m surprised Facebook, er, Meta, is still highly valued. It seems to me to be the only one of the biggest tech companies that doesn’t create anything. The one way I can see the currently-proposed Metaverse working is as a self-fulfilling prophecy. If every company thinks they’re going to need to have a presence, it could become a central location. But it’s telling that Zoom seems to be the biggest non-pharm success in the covid crisis.Report