CHAPTER 11
Overcoming the Metaverse Age Cliff and the Immersion Funnel
“I tried installing and running Second Life and now my whole laptop screen is black!”, the technology reporter with National Public Radio told me on the phone, somewhat panicked.
And now I was hyperventilating. I had just arranged an interview about Second Life and the metaverse in general with this reporter, who covered technology issues for a major news outlet. (This was during my days as a contractor for Linden Lab.)
But instead of getting the opportunity to show them all the potential of the virtual world, we now faced the likelihood of a PR disaster. A reporter specializing in high-tech news, surely savvy around computers, had just experienced a major client crash, suggesting Second Life had major show-stopping flaws. (A bug? A hack?)
I escalated this issue to a senior Linden Lab engineer who scrambled to a phone so they could walk the news correspondent through some troubleshooting checks. Meanwhile, a team of developers in the office attempted to replicate the “screen goes black on client startup” bug.
After some back and forth dialog, we finally realized what was happening.
This technology reporter for the United States’ most reputed news radio outlet had launched Second Life … and then somehow tapped on the laptop keyboard until their avatar walked into a nightclub and careened into a black marble pillar at the edge of the dance floor.
The viewer camera, which usually hovers just above the user's avatar, simply follows along, displaying what was currently in front of the avatar.
And because the avatar was currently face-planted into a pole, the national correspondent only saw darkness.
I tell this story not to embarrass anyone at NPR, but to illustrate a common theme that's often missed by metaverse evangelists, who have typically loved and played 3D games and virtual worlds since childhood.
There are vast swathes of the global population—the majority really—who simply do not have the first-hand experience, the muscle memory, or, frankly, the personal interest to participate in metaverse platforms.
This is why I expect that metaverse platforms will attract only one in four people within the Internet-connected consumer base.
I attribute this to two related factors, which I'm dubbing:
- The Metaverse Age Cliff: Consumers’ interest in metaverse platforms tends to drop off sharply after their mid-to-early 20s.
- The Immersion Funnel: Consumer interest in interactive 3D graphics tends to attenuate as it becomes more immersive.
They simply reflect what the data, as best as we can tell, shows us. Only a subset of people show highly active interest in regularly interacting in 3D game worlds and experiences; most of them are people in their teens and early 20s. Neither challenge is insurmountable, but they do require some closer understanding.
Aging Out
The Metaverse Age Cliff is not due to a disinterest in video games per se. Every smartphone owner is almost by definition a gamer on some level, and the number of smartphone gamers is estimated in 2022 at around two billion people. However, most of these mobile gamers do not prefer highly immersive experiences with first-person 3D graphics and enveloping stereophonic audio optimized for earphones, but casual 2D games, designed to be played in short, blooping, time-killing bursts.
This is true despite the fact that metaverse platforms and immersive 3D experiences are hardly new concepts. World of Warcraft, the first U.S.-based MMO to gain active users in the many millions, was launched in 2004; Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the immersive sandbox game intended for an adult audience, was launched that same year and went on to sell nearly 30 million copies. In nearly every case, however, the player base for titles like these almost always ages out.
I am among the relatively small coterie of Generation X geeks who fell in love with immersive 3D worlds as kids in the ’90s, and continue to play in them. For the most part, however, the rest of my peers have moved on. Above all, immersion requires extended time and extreme focus, something that steadily erodes in the face of romance, social life, family, work—essentially, adulthood.
FIGURE 11.1 The Metaverse Age Cliff: From Metaversed's 2023 Q1 Demographics Profile
From the Metaversed consulting agency's Universe Chart, Q1 2023
You can see this in Metaversed's 2023 Q1 age profile, with the sharp cliff or steep hill hitting at age 13, and just 3 percent in the 25+ cohort:
I suspect Metaversed's estimate is a bit too bearish, and that it's likely 10–20 percent of total active metaverse platform users are 25 and above. But even then, usage still rapidly declines into users’ 30s, 40s, and beyond.
“Roblox still has not crossed the age gap yet,” as acclaimed game designer Jenova Chen tells me. “People seem to just retire and graduate to Fortnite after they reach 12 years old because you leave your middle school and go to high school—it's like, ‘Oh, you're still playing that game? That's not cool anymore.’”
Here again, Second Life is both an exception and an aspirational role model. Back in 2008, Linden Lab reported that a full one in three members of the active user base were in their 30s and 40s; this user base has largely remained with the platform, so that with its 20th anniversary in 2022, much or most of the user base is in its 40s, 50s, and older.
As Philip Rosedale put it to me, “Second Life still exists, in part, because nobody's replaced it.”
There are likely reasons for this resiliency that can be replicated in other metaverse platforms, which I'll come to later in this chapter.
The Immersion Funnel, however, may be even more challenging.
Inside the Immersion Funnel
Many or even most people only want immersion in small doses, for the simple reason that immersive 3D graphics tend to give them motion sickness. In a 2012 study published in the National Library of Medicine, 67 percent of adults and 56 percent of children reported feelings of motion sickness after playing a standard console video game with 3D graphics for up to 50 minutes. (It has been dubbed “simulator sickness” because the condition was noticed decades ago when military pilots first began training in full-motion flight simulators.)
As I mentioned when discussing Meta and VR, researchers led by danah boyd have also observed a tendency for women to experience more motion sickness than average in 3D simulation.
Just as fascinating, there also seems to be a racial component to motion sickness. Han Chinese, and potentially other Asian ethnicities, have been observed to tend in this direction (documented in the academic papers “Chinese hyper-susceptibility to vection-induced motion sickness,” 1993, and “Effects of ethnicity and gender on motion sickness susceptibility,” 2005).
Virtual world researcher Nick Yee, who shared those papers with me, saw this phenomenon firsthand when advising the developer of a first-person shooter game:
“They were getting a lot of churn in their tutorial,” Nick tells me. After going through the data, “what it ended up being was that a lot of their Chinese players were literally getting sick because of the specific kind of gameplay in the tutorial that was really bad for motion sickness.”
Apple prototype designer Avi Bar-Zeev saw similar reactions when developing what came to be called Google Earth, the fully 3D mirror world. Different humans, he found in tests, do not process 3D graphic spatial representation in the same way:
“There's a group of people who map the space in three dimensions,” he says. “They can picture wherever they are three dimensionally, and can mentally rotate that picture and have a sense of their position in the world relative to some cognitive map. And then there's a whole group of people, 50 percent of the population, who map by landmark. So they don't necessarily have a sense of where they are in [the 3D virtual] space, but they know ‘When I see this, I turn left.’”
Women, he found, tend to navigate by landmarks:
“What we learned was that skews a little bit more towards women in terms of the perceptual mapping, versus the spatial 3D mapping, [which] skewed more towards men. And that doesn't necessarily mean it's genetic, either; it could be that it's a skill that men learn playing video games. It could be that by playing 3D video games, you help [hone] that skill … which isn't useful for a whole bunch of things, except maybe playing video games and building virtual worlds.”
Here again is another hurdle for full mass adoption of the Metaverse. If the propensity for motion sickness has some basis in genetics (as it seems), it may be insurmountable.
If navigating 3D spaces can be learned through practice, by playing 3D video games, then the barrier is social, and about as challenging. Hardcore 3D gamer spaces tend to be male-dominated and infamously toxic to women and girls. As I discuss in Chapter 3, Fortnite is also a partial exception to this rule; Blizzard's colorful shooter Overwatch counts 16 percent regular female players, more than double the genre average (according to Quantic Foundry). But by and large, for many reasons, most females aren't clamoring for highly immersive 3D experiences.
Widening the Funnel
Moving past the motion sickness caused by full immersion might require changing the very nature of how virtual worlds are displayed—and accepting the extra costs required to make them more accessible to a more diverse range of people.
One possible solution is keeping the 3D camera locked in a fixed position, so that the user enjoys the action as if they were peering into a dollhouse.
This presentation is not unlike what's displayed in the phenomenally popular game franchise The Sims (with over 200 million copies sold), where the players typically control characters from a serene God's eye view. (If God were a slightly deranged reality show producer.)
More recently, Nintendo's Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a casual multiplayer simulation game that became a runaway hit during the pandemic (over 40 million copies sold thus far), also constrains the camera, mainly keeping it to a diorama position with slow camera tracking to leisurely follow the action.
This, however, introduces another challenge. While a constrained camera appeals to most casual players, it tends to alienate hardcore gamers who feed on the thrill of high-speed, first-person or “over the shoulder” views, and the ability to move their camera eye around the world at will.
A hybrid approach may appeal to both groups, with the option to choose either display setting. This has never quite been attempted. More likely, different parts of the virtual world may have to operate by different rules of gravity and kinetics. Teens may enjoy high-velocity running gun battles in the virtual desert on dune buggies, then drive them over to a neighborhood of the Metaverse where grandma spends time, noticing that when crossing into her zone, their vehicles have been slowed to a putt-putt crawl.
Bridging the Age Cliff
The realization that the Metaverse is still mostly for kids has haunted Philip Rosedale:
“Getting adult users into social, virtual worlds as opposed to just escapist or relaxing video games or something, that remains the big challenge of our time,” he tells me. “There's not a lot of proof yet that you can get people who are older than 18 to hang out in a lean forward, socially engaged way with other people in a virtual world or metaverse. We're not there yet, but I remain as enthusiastic from an optimistic-doing-good-for-the-world perspective as I ever was. But it has certainly turned out to be a lot harder than I thought, if you were to ask me in 2006.”
My hope, at least, is that the cliff can be turned into a trampoline, with activity slacking into people's 20s and 30s, as they enjoy all the fleshy delights of young adulthood. But as marriage, family life, and financial comfort finally kick in, people who cherished their time in the Metaverse a decade or two ago can find themselves returning back, to reconnect with old friends and make new ones.
Journeying Across the Age Cliff with Jenova Chen
One potential bridge across the Metaverse Age Cliff is being created by a completely new approach to the challenge.
Shanghai-born game designer Jenova Chen has devoted his career to proving that a game can be as artistically accomplished as Citizen Kane. Many (including myself) believe he's already succeeded, creating a series of acclaimed titles that expand the possibilities of immersive entertainment.
Chen succeeded most vividly in his best-selling game called Journey, in which the player must traverse wild lands and the remains of an ancient city to reach the summit of a strangely glowing mountain. It pairs favorably with the films of Hayao Miyazaki—achingly beautiful and melancholy, but hopeful for humanity. Chen made that last aspect possible by making Journey a kind of virtual world in miniature that two people could play together. In a brilliant innovation, the players are anonymous and can communicate only through gestures. Many players describe the profound feeling of emotional bonding they have, wordlessly sharing an adventure with another person in the world they'll likely never know.
When I ask Chen about a solution to the Metaverse Age Gap, his answer is refreshingly unique:
“First of all, you have to create emotional accessibility.”
The first challenge to that is recognizing that some emotions tend to be closed off by age:
“You might enjoy some kind of body horror film when you're a kid because kids by nature love to be scared … evolution made us want to be scared of some things as a kid because then you know to run, and survive. As you grow older, you don't enjoy that horror film anymore; as an adult, we are scared of something that is more deep, which is a scare of something that is unknown—so like mystery, suspense, thriller is more of the adult version of a scare.”
Chen shows me a chart of movie genres and their highest box office popularity according to age and gender, where sci-fi action is most popular among men aged 35–44, romantic comedy most popular among women aged 25–34, animation among teens of both genders, and so on.
“You have to create emotional combinations like cocktails to catch the young and old, and men and women. So if you think about a Disney movie, like for example The Lion King, it's animated, it's very colorful and vivid. So young kids will find that attractive. It's in a fantasy land where animals talk and they want to be friends, so it's hyper social. So women and men both are interested.
“Parents need to feel something emotionally, like the beginning of Up and the end of Toy Story. They have this moment where adults have a joyful tear. They get adopted, meaning after they watch the films they can talk about life using the film as a kind of medium.
“So this is how you catch everybody, parents and kids, women and men: to have that emotional accessibility to all ages.”
Chen’s breakthrough game Journey came with a weave of suspense and drama, targeting the two quadrants of men and women in their 30s. (“This is what I would call the Oscar category.”)
His latest game, Sky: Children of Light, was designed to appeal to both these groups but also incorporates anime aesthetics appealing to a younger audience, but in a more social context.
“The game right now actually is 70 percent women [players],” who tend to skew younger. “However, we have many 70- and 80-year-old players in their own group, and my mother-in-law is 68 and she plays every day.” There's also a small contingent of older men, “because they actually use the game as a tool to connect with their daughters [who play].” (The quadrant of younger males, however, is lacking: “They say, ‘There's nothing you can kill here, it's so boring. Why would I play a game only about making friends?’ So the young boys are out.”)
Chen’s metaverse-flavored follow-up to Sky will attempt to bring them in, too:
“We are building another theme park. I don't want to miss those hardcore gamers, who I used to be. So the young boys cannot be left behind. Sky to me is kind of like the princess castle in Disneyland, kind of for younger kids who're not looking for a thrill and action. They will enjoy Sky, but we're building something that will be a nice counterpart to Sky that will together be able to attract the rest of the age and gender group.” (More on that and its relationship to the future of the Metaverse in Chapter 12.)
Beyond any bridges that artists like Jenova Chen can bring to the Metaverse Age Cliff, it's incumbent on the industry to advocate for itself and elevate the conversation. We know this can succeed because it's already been done before.
Metaverse Mindshare and a New State of Play
Second Life did not become a mainstream media darling in its peak period simply because of its evocative name and its powerful creation and monetization features. And its marketing budget was modest by game-industry standards. There's another reason why politicians, established artists and writers, and academics across multiple fields, among many others, frequently cite Second Life, and not other metaverse platforms, to this day.
What Linden Lab did back then—and what current metaverse platforms are not doing now—is create mindshare around the technology and culture they are trying to create.
Second Life's mindshare was actively fostered by Linden Lab from the start—first by Linden Lab executives in the early years, as they planned out the virtual world's future.
They reached out to experts “[with] deep backgrounds and a very wide range of areas of expertise,” Cory Ondrejka tells me. “We had this army around us of incredibly deeply thinking folks. They didn't always agree with us, they often would just throw grenades at us … we had a community around Linden of some of the brightest people in their fields, who we could bounce ideas off of, and we were really never afraid to do that.”
We rarely see that kind of outreach emanating from contemporary metaverse platform owners.
“[T]hat's not the norm, especially for really big companies,” Cory observes. “It just gets scary to try to operate that way.”
But the very act of seeking wisdom from a wide range of experts creates mindshare roots that quietly spread awareness through these experts’ own social channels.
This culminated in the State of Play, a conference hosted at New York Law School beginning in 2003. Founded by law professor Beth Noveck (who went on to become a technology advisor in the Obama Administration), State of Play was attended by top academics in jurisprudence and sociology, the multidisciplinary field of game studies, and executives from the game industry.
State of Play is where Philip Rosedale made a landmark Second Life policy announcement. Crafted with the advice of Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, and then widely covered throughout the game and business press, he announced that Second Life users would retain intellectual property rights over the content they created on the platform. The policy was immediately and vigorously debated by the brilliant minds in attendance. That the announcement was made there, and not at a self-promotional tech conference (as is usually the case), immediately enshrined Second Life as being on the daring vanguard.
In doing so, Rosedale positioned the virtual world as not just an online game, but a phenomenon that artists, writers, designers, and innovators should engage with. Reporters, noticing this buzz, quickly followed. That interest quickly spread into mass media. So when the second State of Play kicked off the following year, an entire news crew from MTV was there, too.
An academic conference like this is long past due for contemporary metaverse platforms—a venue to reposition these virtual worlds away from merely being games or commercial enterprises and establish them as platforms for creating art, education, and culture.
It will likely lead to difficult questions, and definitely to fairly heated debates. But these discussions are what is needed to help us bridge the Metaverse Age Cliff.