30 Years Later, "The Metaverse" is Still Struggling to Find Its Elevator Pitch

I started reading this recent New York Times feature on the Metaverse with a rising sense of "Looks like we finally made the mainstream!" triumph... which rapidly decayed into frustration. Because the overall editorial tone struck me as: "We're not quite sure what the Metaverse is but some people sure are talking about it a lot, so I guess that's something?" For instance:

In fiction, a utopian metaverse may be portrayed as a new frontier where social norms and value systems can be written anew, freed from cultural and economic sclerosis. But more often metaverses are a bit dystopian — virtual refuges from a fallen world. As a buzzword, the metaverse refers to a variety of virtual experiences, environments and assets that gained momentum during the online-everything shift of the pandemic. Together, these new technologies hint at what the internet will become next.

While there is a lot of corporate interest in the metaverse, skeptics abound.

Strauss Zelnick, the chief executive of the game publisher Take-Two, said in a May earnings call that he was “allergic to buzzwords,” and suggested the metaverse could be all hype. “If you take metaverse, SPAC and cryptocurrency, in five years, will any of this matter? I’m not sure it will,” he said. Then there are those who wonder whether interest from the tech sector is simply opportunistic, or missing the point entirely.

Unsurprisingly, no one in the Metaverse business interviewed for the Times article is able to cleanly articulate a concept of the Metaverse that explains what it's for, and why it's better than the platforms we already have now. 

Having pitched the concept of the Metaverse in various contexts to many different kinds of people, I understand the suspicion that it's only a buzzword, liable to crash and burn when a skeptic's follow-up question is, "OK, but why should I care?"

In fact, I've learned over many years to only mention the word "Metaverse" to people (almost entirely in the tech industry) who are likely to know and love Snow Crash or Ready Player One. I had hoped the recent Spielberg adaptation of the latter novel would help mainstream the concept, but it was a modest hit at best. And in either novels' case, the concept still only makes sense and seems compelling within their dystopian context: The real world is so horrible in the future, most everyone spends life in the Metaverse.

Or to put it in contemporary terms: The Metaverse as an escape from the real world seemed pretty compelling during a global pandemic, but now as Summer vacation trips are overbooked (my home town in Hawaii is currently teeming with ransacking tourists), the power of that use case rapidly erodes.

My own solution to the elevator pitch problem? I'd rather be non-utopian about it and reference something that is working now. For instance:

The Metaverse is a bit like a Steam -- except an immersive social space with much better creation and monetization tools for everyone.

That pitch, at least, tends to interest anyone in the game industry, seeing as Steam has 100 million+ active users. Then again, I'm not convinced The Metaverse will extend beyond gamers who know and love immersive 3D spaces -- and that's only some 1 billion of the nearly 5 billion people on the Internet. (Speaking for myself, I'd count myself the king of infinite space, if I helped build a Metaverse as large as Steam.)

That Discord is a lot bigger than the individual games is an important thing to ponder in this discussion. https://t.co/kF5DsYpuJl

— Philip Rosedale (@philiprosedale) July 10, 2021

And then yet again -- as Philip Rosedale recently noted, commenting on this Times story -- even gamers spend as much time on Discord (very much not any kind of Metaverse-type experience) as they do in any immersive world, if not moreso.

As it happens, I recently asked Philip for his definition of the Metaverse, expecting a pithy reply. Sine Wave CPO Adam Frisby called it a "shared canvas". But Philip, who's spent more time thinking and creating the Metaverse on a high level more than just about anyone in the world, turned very thoughtful, and said this:

I've been using that word for a long time, and I'm probably responsible for using it in ways that I would now be less confident in talking about.

In short, I think that the older I get and the wiser I get, and the more I contemplate virtual worlds in my work and the work of others over a lot of time now, the less I am sure what everyone means by the Metaverse I don't think we have a solid idea of what it means.

In my own thinking I would say that the Metaverse is... the digital space between us. And what we're really trying to get to with the Metaverse as Adam says is a creative space that consists of our shared agreement on the space in between us.

Which is a great place to start! But when talking to anyone outside our relatively small community of Metaverse evangelists, we're still in for a very long elevator ride.

Comments

[Jon]

I don't know about anyone else, but those moving/changing/flickering advertisements on the right side of the page really destroyed my reading experience. I just couldn't concentrate on this interesting article at all. Eventually, I had to get a big piece of cardboard to block off the right side of the monitor. Ever since those flickering adverts has been added to your blog, Hamlet, I've been dreading clicking on to it. Are those ads here to stay?

[sirhc desantis]

"... who are likely to know and love Snow Crash or Ready Player One. " Interesting that - before getting in to the malarkey of SL I had never heard of the first. To this day not read either and the only fun thing about the RPO film was playing spot the product placement. Rest was ho hum dull. Hell, had never seen the matrix either - about the only possible thing that might have piqued my interest would be some kind of Gibson spin at the time and that would have been another totally off base thing.
So even to me, trying to pitch 'the metaverse' using those as refs would result in a big yawn.

[Kyz]

Trying to describe the metaverse is like trying to explain "fuhgedaboutit" from the film Donnie Brasco.

"‘Forget about it’ is like if you agree with someone, you know, like Raquel Welch is one great piece of ass, ‘forget about it.’ But then, if you disagree, like a Lincoln is better than a Cadillac? ‘Forget about it!’ You know? But then, it’s also like if something’s the greatest thing in the world, like mingia those peppers, ‘forget about it.’ But it’s also like saying ‘Go to hell!’ too. Like, you know, like ‘Hey Paulie, you got a one inch pecker?’ and Paulie says ‘Forget about it!’ Sometimes it just means, ‘forget about it.’"

Depends on the context, who you're talking to, what you're talking about. And most people who are not in the know are not going to understand it anyway. Fuhgedaboutit.

[Argo Nurmi]

A historical note. There was an effort to define common internet protocol mechanism to link virtual worlds into a metaverse of sorts. Pretty much history now, forgotten by most except a few pudits. Among the papers there might be some useful concepts and definitions. High Fidelity had its own model so not sure if anyone added to it after the design group was ended.
Notice the dates, this might not be accurate but I think it was pretty much powered by folks from the Labs until the Great Layoff.

Might be interesting if you are an internet protocol type

https://tools.ietf.org/wg/vwrap/charters