Last month, New York Times wrote about something hardly new or believable: a wedding in the “metaverse”.
The bride wore a floral tiara with a gray, button-down dress befitting a downtown office. The groom looks like Jeff Bezos. At the reception, there are guests and there is a stage, showing pictures. Everything is familiar, except the location. Where have they been? As it turns out, the bride’s office attire isn’t so out of place. Instead of a church or a hall, their wedding takes place in the “metaverse,” specifically a low-key, unknown virtual world called Virbela, a faster-growing spin of the reality company eXp World. Holdings, which employs both halves of the couple.
Let’s make one thing clear: Yes no metaverse. At least not yet. No one really agrees on what the metaverse is, but averaging together is better reliable definitions provide a continuous social networking space, intersecting with the IRL economy and integrating with other online platforms. Currently, nothing is doing this on any noticeable scale. Instead, we have a few virtual worlds of great interest like Second Life, a handful of popular online multiplayer role-playing games like World of Warcraft, and lots of tech companies save saliva on a new way to brand their range of digital products and services. And, of course, there’s also Virbela and its relatives which are weird, underpopulated things straight from the 2005 version of Internet Explorer.
Wrists, of course. Tech companies have discovered the benefits of describing the metaverse as a continuation of their own products or services. For example, Meta has decided that virtual reality integration is important to the metaverse; and conveniently, its Horizon Worlds runs on the company’s Oculus Quest headset. Then there are blockchain companies preaching the essentials of their own coins on their own cyberspace. Now, after nearly a year of hype, it just got a little easier to separate meat from meta-fats. What we’re dealing with here is cyberspace — connected, incarnated and saved. Still only one problem. Everything that’s really desirable about this metaverse is like a down-to-earth version of the online game that millions of people have been playing for decades.
It’s been 20 years since the wedding bells first rang in Second Life. Game developer Square Enix included the mechanics of sending invitations, making vows, and exchanging rings in 2002 Final Fantasy XI. Outside of video games, online games have provided the most compelling functionality associated with the “metaverse”—typically, with higher graphical fidelity, more complex social systems, and at scale. significantly larger tissue. As architects and professional cyber governors, it is the game developers themselves who have iterated and mastered two to three truly promising properties of a metaverse, which largely revolves around socializing. in the virtual world.
Since 1996, player furry avatars have stood around typing in MMORPG Furcadia32-bit grassland. Yet here we are, more than two decades later, listening to tech executives lecturing on what digital girls did back then. It would be nice not to worry too much to see those moderators do it with such bravery. Mark Zuckerberg offers fun to build future of work in the Metaverse of Meta evokes the breathless predictions of early tech journalists about how, in a brave new world to come, corporate culture will shift to Second Life. They promised there we would drop our winged Sonic the Hedgehog avatars to each other’s bedrooms to talk about Dow Jones. Schools will also be uploaded, technologists believe. “Aaron Delwiche, an assistant professor at Trinity College in San Antonio,” reads a 2004 WIRED article, “usually gathers the students in his Games for the Web class in a rare classroom: metaverse called Second Life.”
