How Much of "The Metaverse" Concept Was Made as a Literary Device?

Is "the Metaverse" as we typically understand it mainly made as a literary device, i.e. to tell a cool fun story? On that theme, here's an interesting couple of reader comments inspired by Gabe Newell's skepticism over the Metaverse (at the least in its current incarnations) -- first from Caltech astrophysicist George Djorgovski, who helped launch the university's virtual world campus:

The original Metaverse as envisioned by the cyberpunk fiction writers (Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, Stross, etc.) was essentially an extrapolation of the Internet, as an immersive 3D parallel world where the users interact through their avatars, but with the gaming overtones, for literary purposes.

Somehow that degenerated into a now prevailing interpretation of the Metaverse as a gigantic collection of (interoperable?) games and social spaces, or even just calling individual games "metaverses", which makes even less sense. It is like calling one's website "my internet". Maybe this is because most people engaged in this business come from the gaming world. I think that this completely misses the point, and there is no future in it. All this will accomplish is to doom the term "metaverse" as a misguided notion that will be forgotten and/or mocked.

Instead, we will see a continued evolution of the Internet, where all of the humanity's informational content is, and where most of the human activities are, driven by the evolving technologies, including XR. There will be gaming and social spaces, of course, as there already are in the current incarnation of the Internet as a global parallel cyberspace, along with everything else that people do. And that is where the people will stay. To think that there will be a new, separate gaming and social cyberworld distinct from the evolving Internet, a gamers' Metaverse, is just plain foolish, in my opinion.

Incidentally, Zuckerberg does seem to understand this, never mind all of the usual critiques of him or his company. His record and vision give him a lot more credibility.

Reader Martin K. expands on this, arguing that a lot of the specific features attributed to the Metaverse, such as a vast contiguous virtual world, were also invented to make a cyberpunk story cooler:

I think that the literary purposes don't just determine "the gaming overtones" but a lot more of the features of the metaverse as presented in Snow Crash, Neuromancer, and Ready Player One, e.g.: speed of travel is significantly limited.

Why? For one thing: it's difficult to have an interesting chase without limited speed of travel.

Another example: there is only one, unique metaverse. Why? Because it would be difficult to save the whole real world if a story unfolds in and is limited to just one of a million copies of a virtual world. Yet another feature of the metaverse in those novels: it's persistent, because without actions having persistent consequences, it's more difficult to find meaning in a story. And the list goes on.

My point is: the metaverse in those novels are what they are because they serve literary purposes. I see no reason to expect that the internet will evolve into something even remotely similar: people will not accept significantly limited speed of travel in the internet; people will prefer navigating the internet without random users being able to watch them because they access the same website; people will prefer using text search to quickly scan terabytes of data instead of having to visually search through a 3D representation of that data; and the list goes on.

These are good points, but I think they make more sense when flipped backwards, so to speak. The "cool story" aspects of Snow Crash are what made the Metaverse an exciting concept to the people in technology who read the novel, inspiring them to build something like it.

As Neal Stephenson himself once told me, talking about Oculus' desire to build the Metaverse: "The inspiration is a particular vision of how the virtual world might be organized, which had the good luck, 25 years ago, to be couched in a fun story about a swordfighter and a skater girl." In other words, if Snow Crash wasn't also a fun and ripping yarn, we might not be as excited about the Metaverse as he described it.

Speaking of which, the novel's Metaverse is not meant to be the Internet itself, since in the novel, only a small minority of people online can regularly access it. And while many aspects of the Metaverse may have first been invented to serve a literary conceit, they've also been borne out by actual consumers. A contiguous virtual world is a good setting for a high speed chase -- and it's also what some 150 million people regularly explore, in Minecraft. Turns out a lot of do want to explore a virtual world as a skater girl or a swordfighter -- including Stephenson himself, who put his writing career aside awhile to develop an online swordfighting game.

Comments

[sirhc desantis]

Interesting. Can only comment on Gibson (if I read the other three they never 'clicked') where the tech was used as an adjunct although closely intertwined* (more or less - Idoru was a wee bit diff) to the general yarn.

*bit late here so adjunct not quite the word looking for and paralell has a) too many l's b) not the word either

[Osiris Indigo]

The original intensities of those books plus ready player one, which described it best, could be realized if someone with some IT pockets could put together the best features of There.com, Second Life, and expandable worlds like WoW in an Unreal 5 engine and put together interconnected worlds using the same basic engine like Fortnight and Sea of Thieves and add a component where anyone could craft, build or design objects in world with real scripting that could then be sold, traded, NFTed or swapped, like people used to in There.com

[Martin K.]

> Speaking of which, the novel's Metaverse is not meant to be the Internet itself

That was my main point.

> Turns out a lot of do want to explore a virtual world as a skater girl or a swordfighter

Sure, but exploring virtual worlds is not really what the plots of Snow Crash, Neuromancer, and Ready Player One are about. As far as I remember, they are about no less than saving the world. That works for literature and it probably has helped to make those books popular.

There is a small problem with many adventures of that kind in a persistent, unique virtual world for many users: they can only be experienced once by one group of users; after that, it doesn't make much sense to have the same adventure again. Imagine Tolkien's Middle-earth in the Metaverse. After one Frodo has destroyed the One Ring, that adventure is done and no one else can experience the same adventure because the One Ring doesn't exist any more. Same with the egg hunt in Ready Player One etc.

Ready Player One also includes the solution: non-persistent(!) planets that offer the same experience for all their visitors: anything from arcade games to world-scale adventures. That part of the OASIS looks a lot more like today's existing social VR apps with user-generated worlds.