Read/Listen: My Making a Metaverse That Matters Interview With VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi

For weekend reading/listening, here's the transcript of a new podcast interview with VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi for Making a Metaverse That Matters. You can listen to the whole thing above, and some favorite of my favorite are excerpts below -- on the origin of the book's title, my problem with the "open metaverse" as it's usually conceived, and my chance encounter in Second Life which transformed my view of the virtual world:

"The original title was Why the Metaverse Matters. My agent and I were talking about it. We were thinking about the timing of the book coming out in 2023. Meta was almost certainly going to screw up their metaverse strategy. We’d have to start from the beginning. That’s why we changed the name to Making a Metaverse That Matters, because as we’ve seen so far, Meta has totally failed in that regard, even though Tim Sweeney at Epic, Roblox, and some other big platforms are doing very well. There’s been a disproportionate emphasis on whatever Meta’s doing...

"I think a lot of people who talk about the open metaverse don’t actually talk to user communities about what they want. They don’t necessarily have, as one of their goals, to jump from Roblox to Fortnite and vice versa. There’s very much a dedication to the specific virtual world, the metaverse platform that they’re in. Open metaverse, if you want to call it that, is a goal, but we should follow the lead of the communities, not come down hierarchically on top of them and try to apply a 2D web model to a real time, fully immersive virtual world...

Photo of Mr. Bristol courtesy Russ Roberts

"When my first book came out, The Making of Second Life, I was giving a talk to an architecture group in Beverly Hills. They asked me to show them what people do in Second Life. “Well, people perform live music.” I randomly teleported to this place and there was an avatar of an old black man playing blues guitar in a bayou club. Totally at random I clicked this guy. I clicked his bio.

"He was, in real life, an 86-year-old blues guitarist, Charles Bristol. They asked me to show them something at random and I didn’t even know this guy was here. He just showed up. In the book I get into how he ended up performing live in the metaverse. His grandparents were enslaved people. He’s in his 80s. Somehow he ended up in the metaverse. One of the themes of the book is how we can make metaverse platforms be as diverse and serendipitous as Second Life has proven to be, just on a much larger scale."

Read the rest here and of course, consider getting the whole book!

Comments

[Luther Weymann]

Wagner, ensure you let people know that SL is full of people over 50. I have a huge friends list, and we talk often, and I'm just amazed at how many on my friend's list are over 45 years old, and many older SL veterans are in their 60s and 70s. SL has, for many older people, become a hobby, not a metaverse adventure.