The Metaverse was everywhere I looked earlier this year, and I just didn’t buy it. From companies claiming they would build a real version of Ready Player One to Facebook’s Meta rebranding and more, it was impossible to avoid in early 2022. Yet even with all the hype around it, it was an idea that just didn’t fly with me.
For starters, it just felt so dystopian. Ready Player One’s real world is crumbling, with players preferring to spend their time in virtual reality. I remembered the early 2000s young adult novel Pendragon, where the main characters end up on a dead planet, whose inhabitants had lived perfect virtual lives before running out of food (man I forgot young adult novels were dark).
But the biggest thing that got me is that it feels so antisocial. Instead of spending face time with friends and family, you’re just… what, flailing your arms around in the living room? Who would ever want to do that? I was thinking, of course this was dreamt up by Silicon Valley suburbanites. But then suddenly, I got it. After thinking for a bit, the appeal of the metaverse did start to make some sense to me, because I remembered living a prototypical version of it all the way back in 2006.
When I was in middle school living in suburban Los Angeles, it was hard to go out and see friends. Besides one neighbor, most of my friends were driving distance away, and it’s not like they were giving 6th graders licenses to drive. But what I did have was Runescape. It was basically a cheaper version of World of Warcraft, a massive multiplayer open-world game. There were quests to complete and monsters to slay, all in a world where you could get together with your friends and thousands of other people. It was incredibly liberating to have access to an entire world when the real world was so inaccessible.
In high school, the games of choice became Halo and Call of Duty. With Xbox live, I was mic’d up and could now voice chat with my friends (and get in arguments with strangers). I remember endless matches of Search and Destroy in Modern Warfare 2 and long nights of Black Ops Zombies. While I eventually did get a license to drive, friends living a 40-minute ride from my home made socializing a lot tougher. If I wanted to socialize with friends, the best way to do it was with a few late-night online games.
College was when the “proto-metaverse” started to come apart. Instead of being miles from my friends, I was a 5-minute walk from them. Why would I ever go online when I could grab food and drinks with my friends in person? Gaming was still a part of my college experience, but instead of online, it was split-screen matches of Beerio Kart. If I did play online games, it was in a room with my friends and our laptops as we attempted to defeat each other in Civilization V.
Ever since college and beyond, online multiplayer gaming has never really been a part of my life. Living in San Francisco, my friends are still very accessible, and there’s no reason for me to play online when I can meet my friends at a bar in person. Split-screen gaming is still a part of my life, as it’s always a good time to host friends with some drinks and rounds of Boomerang Fu.
The one time I briefly returned to the metaverse was in the spring of 2020. When the world was quarantined and the outside world was closed for business, I found solace in being able to return online to see friends, playing games like Left 4 Dead 2 in order to continue to socialize. But as the world returned to normal, online gaming disappeared from my life once more.
Looking back at my time in Los Angeles, I can see the appeal of something like the metaverse. If you can’t get out of the house (because you’re too young or too old), how else can you get together with your friends? Games like Fortnite and Roblox (games that claim to focus on the metaverse) are just a continuation of the same online culture that existed in the early 2010s. While living in a dense city like San Francisco makes socializing in person a breeze, for millions of Americans (and people around the world), it’s much easier to socialize over an internet connection.
So really, I don’t see anything too crazy in the idea of the metaverse, as it’s solving the problem of social isolation. What is crazy to me though, is that the metaverse is a viable solution to that problem. But I get it. After 70 years of car-focused planning, changing our cities to be more dense and walkable is a challenge. Instead of being excited for the future of the metaverse though, I’m instead excited for the future of our real world, where folks can live in a place where seeing friends and socializing is as easy as going online.
I think virtual reality will outstrip the metaverse in the short term. Once VR is a big chunk of homes, the next iteration of the metaverse, taking advantage of more sophisticated and accessible VR, will take off. Incidentally, I got into gaming during the pandemic too, after like a 15-year hiatus. Damn, a lot has changed!