I was just doing a podcast interview about the book, happily getting into the weeds about the Metaverse and its history, when the host asked me a question that caused me to go blank:
"So what are some movies and TV shows about the Metaverse you recommend to listeners?"
By brain seriously went empty for what felt like three minutes before I finally mentioned a recent example (which I won't reveal until the podcast comes out).
Ready Player One would have been the most obvious example to mention right there; but while I liked the Spielberg adaptation just fine, it now leaves a bad aftertaste. (Which probably contributed to my brain freeze.) The movie doesn't add much to the original concept from Snow Crash, for one -- other than basically presenting it as a fun, single shard multi-player video game. Worse, depicting the virtual world as only being accessible through VR has created a unfeasible and frankly undesirable vision that's inadvertently caused enormous damage to the concept's evolution.
None of that's the fault of original author Ernest Cline, of course, and not taking away anything away from the novel's success! If anything, I'm faulting executives who only read and recommended his novel.
As I write in Making a Metaverse That Matters, the book was made required reading for new employees at Oculus before and after its acquisition by Facebook -- even if that meant ignoring earlier, more important readings:
