It is foolhardy to forecast with any great confidence the next great leap in the Metaverse's evolution. Even in retrospect, its progress up to now is remarkably unpredictable:
Minecraft was conceived by a handful of indie developers in Sweden, a ridiculously blocky-looking sandbox game that no major game publisher would ever possibly create.
Roblox floundered for years as an also-ran virtual world for kids, dwarfed by much larger platforms.
Fortnite seemed at first like a knock-off of an already popular online combat game subgenre inspired by a cult Japanese novel/movie.
VRChat was written off at launch as a cesspool for hit-and-run video streamers.
Yet together these unlikely products have amassed an aggregate user base larger than the entire population of the United States.
It is also the case that none of them made their first strides into the market with loud and open proclamations to become the Metaverse, but instead marketed themselves as fun games and social spaces. The best contender to become the primary model of The Metaverse (capital T, capital M) may not call itself that now, and maybe never will, even after satisfying all the requirements laid out in Chapter 1.
That said, my strongest suspicion is that this epochal leap is taking shape as I write these words in 2023.
As a thought experiment, consider just four plausible near-future scenarios:
Garena Free Fire: Largely ignored by the Western game industry as yet another knockoff of PUBG and Fortnite, the mobile-based battle royale game from Garena—a game studio/publisher owned by massive Singapore-based conglomerate Sea Limited—already has the early makings of a metaverse platform, with an open toolset for players to create their own worlds, and following in Fortnite's footsteps, cross-reality appearances by music and sports celebrities.
What it also has—far more than even Roblox—are mass numbers of users, especially in South America and South Asia. As VC Julie Young noted on Twitter in late 2021: “Free Fire has 700 million quarterly active users concentrated largely in some of the highest growth regions in the world.”
All of this positions Free Fire for marketing and expansion into the United States and EU in the very near future. It may have once seemed implausible that an interactive Internet platform first popular in the “developing world” could then become popular in the United States, but the global dominance of TikTok, first developed and launched for the mainland China market, has torn that assumption asunder.
But whereas TikTok's U.S. viewership is stovepiped and separated from its Chinese user base and divided by a language barrier, not to mention highly incompatible political assumptions, there is little reason to keep Free Fire's worldwide user base isolated by national origin. (Certainly not in social areas of the platform that don't depend on split-second twitch action.) This opens up the tantalizing possibility of Free Fire becoming a truly global metaverse platform, one where the culture would be defined by the non-U.S./EU community that first grew with it.
Grand Theft Auto Online: Already a highly active virtual world platform in miniature, with millions of monthly active users who role play as gangsters, molls, and the occasional popo, the scabrously popular franchise could easily evolve into a full-fledged metaverse platform: a geographically accurate re-creation of modern California (albeit drenched in scumbag perfume), it's the most commercially accessible virtual world, replete with functional stores, nightclubs, even banks.
There's already a massive market for a more open-ended version of GTA Online. FiveM, an astoundingly popular, highly customizable modification of the game created by community developers, is attracting more players than the official GTA Online on Steam.
Google CEO advisor Cory Ondrejka roughly concurs with my sentiment here, and points out other candidates beyond GTA:
“You watch the big FPSes, so whether we're talking about Call of Duty or Apex Legends … I think those games will eventually notice that Fortnite Creative is a big deal. And you'll see more creative modes start sneaking their way into some of these games.
“Then you've got a whole other layer, which is the online versions and sort of effectively MMOs of games you wouldn't necessarily expect to have MMO modes. So whether it's Grand Theft Auto, whether it's Red Dead Redemption, Skyrim Online, Fallout, you have all these different games really stretching around different aspects of what is a virtual world, what is the Metaverse.”
World of Valve-craft: Valve, creator of Half-Life, Portal, and Team Fortress and the venerable “gamer's game publisher,” continues to be the Metaverse dog that doesn't bark. A company possessing all the requisite technology and artistry to make a metaverse platform of its own (including proprietary VR headsets) mysteriously declines (so far) to do anything explicitly metaverse-related.
At the same time, Garry's Mod, its mammothly popular sandbox game, already gives players access and customization power to their 3D assets; Steam, its game distribution platform, could easily offer a shared virtual world that acts as a lobby with portals into virtual worlds on the platform. In Chapter 8, I note how most Metaverse visions actually boil down to being Steam with extra steps. So why not just Steam itself, to take the vision further?
Discordia: While Valve has had difficulty creating an active online community on Steam, gamers have flocked to Discord, the social messaging platform. Now boasting some 150 million active users, Discord is also positioned to add an immersive, networked virtual world to its players, perhaps as an optional add-on to server managers.
But again, these are only conjectural scenarios. An actual platform currently being developed by an artist with a proven track record may warrant just as much attention.
We first met acclaimed game designer Jenova Chen in Chapters 9 and 11, where he explains how to grow a virtual world based on giving and his strategy for bridging the Metaverse Age Cliff. There is more to that story:
Armed with $160 million raised through his Santa Monica game studio, he has been building what's been described as a “theme park–like” metaverse experience.’ This may seem like a contradiction in terms, but Chen says what he is doing is distinct from the ultimate Metaverse depicted in Snow Crash—where, as he puts it, “everybody has the power to create and download. It's like a big flea market … and people who're really good at making content start to have a brand and then they start to differentiate themselves from each other.”
Chen compares that aspect of the Metaverse to America during the boom times after World War II, when makeshift carnivals with rickety rides, dubious freak shows, and games began to spring up in dusty fields across the country. It felt predatory and unsafe. (“Hey, kid, hit three of those three targets and win a prize.”)
And in Chen's telling, it's what led Walt Disney to found a theme park that still bears his name.
“He wanted to build a park that treats everybody, not just kids, as first-class citizens.” And so the rides Disney created were not just fun for children, but moving and relevant for parents as well.
What he has in mind is an experience like that, building on Sky: Children of the Light, his latest game, which currently counts over 20 million active users.
As with Disneyland, he intends this metaverse experience to be for the entire family. Even as a seasoned designer, he notes, “I have yet to play any game which me and my wife can play at the same time, together with our daughter, and then all of us have a good time.”
Chen's goal is to make this experience the best channel for the Metaverse, whatever platform that ultimately becomes.
“A lot of people are talking about the Metaverse mostly from the infrastructure level,” he explains. “‘Can people upload their things? Can they make money out of it?’ I'm more worried about the content itself. Let the cable company worry about hardware.”
His focus is more essential: “Is it emotionally accessible to a wide range of people?”
He's right that most metaverse conversations have circled far too much around technical infrastructure, while missing the fundamental piece that makes any of this worthwhile.
Every successful metaverse platform evokes emotional chords, from the wonder and awe of exploring a new world to the surprise and delight of sharing user creativity. Chen's goal is to create a broadly accessible experience with a wide enough emotional spectrum to appeal across all demographics.
He also thinks it's in the Metaverse that his lifelong goal of creating the Citizen Kane of games might be achieved.
“What I like about the Metaverse is people automatically assume that whatever happens there is just an extension of life, and therefore they don't have the kind of prejudice that they have towards games—‘only for kids, for the losers.’ You don't have that connotation with [the Metaverse].”
Projects like Chen's leave me hopeful that we will see platforms that can bridge the Metaverse Age Cliff by connecting the very young with the middle-aged and older.
I am a proud member of Generation X, the first cohort to grow up with the Internet and 3D online games. When senior citizen status inevitably grips us by our tattered Nirvana T-shirts, many or most of us (65 million strong) will spend increasingly more of our indoor hours as we always have, immersed in the virtual worlds that still inspire our creativity and imagination. The people we meet and play with in metaverse platforms will tend to be much younger.
We have already seen this microcosm play out in Second Life, where the inquisitive Gen Xers and Boomers who first joined the virtual world in their 30s and 40s are now in their 50s and 60s, among the platform's most active participants. But their social network within the virtual world often skews much younger, as they meet and befriend young gamers, sharing experiences and interests that transcend decades of age difference.
In most parts of the developed world, it is extremely rare—nearly to the point of nonexistence—for people who are not related with each other to regularly and actively socialize with people outside their peer group. It is highly common in Second Life, and an inherently good thing, a mingling of life experiences and aspirations that all can find value in. (The age distance–defying friendship of Second Life performers Charles Bristol, a bluesman in his 80s, and Russ Roberts, an indie musician in his 40s at the time of meeting, is not at all uncommon). As platforms like Roblox and Fortnite begin to show their own age, we may certainly see this trend continue.
Ironically, this may also be the best metaverse use case for Facebook, which was created for college kids in their teens and early 20s but has since become the prime destination for Baby Boomers and older Gen Xers. It will likely look nothing like Meta's original, problematic vision for the Metaverse. Not the high-adrenaline gamer zone for the young strapped into headsets to play with peers, but a place where immersive adventures for all ages (and races, and genders, and nations) can come together.
In 2022, many years after he had become famous as the Second Life avatar artist known as AM Radio, technologist and artist Jeffrey Berg began playing with Craiyon, one of many generative artificial intelligence applications capable of creating impressively detailed images simply from whatever text a user entered.
Curious, he entered the words, “A wheat field under gray skies with an abandoned train.”
In minutes, Craiyon had generated a series of images that eerily looked like The Faraway, his beloved Second Life installation that he had labored so long back then to create.
“I wondered about the impacts it could have on metaverse space creation,” he mused to me, after sharing with me Craiyon's attempts to re-create The Faraway. “3D geometry rather than a generated image from plain text input doesn't seem like a huge stretch.”
After leaving his role at IBM designing UX interfaces and virtual world experiences, where AM Radio was born, Berg eventually joined Arup, a firm that helped engineer the design of fantastic but quite real buildings like the Sydney Opera House.
It's from that perspective that Berg notes how the design of physical spaces is already highly automated:
“Today, engineers use tools such as Dynamo in Autodesk Revit and Grasshopper in Rhino 3D to create designs based on input parameters, often referred to as parametric generative design.” Through largely automated processes, “entire volumetric 3D building shapes are determined, taking into account building position, angle to the sun, soil types, and more.”
So the technology to digitally blueprint 3D virtual world spaces not only exists but is already in practical operation. Linking it to a text-based AI system such as DALL·E, Craiyon, or Midjourney is eventually going to happen:
“I believe we're just waiting for the moment, not the technology, for someone to ask for an environment, Star Trek Holodeck style, and have that environment appear in their headset.”
But what happens to creativity and art in the Metaverse, when luminously beautiful 3D environments can be created simply by speaking the right evocative words into a voice prompt?
“I am hopeful that we can transcend the prompts and look for outputs that show us more than what machine learning can do,” the artist formerly known as AM Radio tells me, after some thought. “That is as good as an artist can create a virtual space experience, and reimagines the way we experience virtual spaces.”
He imagines a scenario where future metaverse artists who come after him will integrate AI with the talent of the human creator:
“Maybe the artist sets up a virtual space for visitors to interact directly with machine learning that provides the visitor with a profound experience about themselves and their interactions with the world around them. In this case the artist constructs a space where machine learning is a visitor to the space as much as the humans who enter the space with it. What can we as artists do in the guiding of those interactions? I am hopeful that experiences waiting to be unlocked will astonish us all, and I can't wait to be there.”
At the same time, AM Radio's current successors can probably rest easy awhile. There's likely to be a substantial interim before AI-generated virtual worlds become genuinely scalable.
“That could happen, but we're a long, long, long way out from it being feasible,” veteran game industry artist Aura Trilio warns me. “Not just because there's a massive lack of training data, not just because nearly all 3D model generation results in extremely unusable topology, but also because retopology isn't in a place where this sort of stuff is worth anyone's time.”
It's one thing to generate an impressive-looking 3D vehicle or house, for instance, but in a physics-enabled virtual world, let alone a multiuser world, an unexpected interaction could lead to disaster. I'm reminded of a level designer on the classic game Skyrim, who once recounted how a poorly optimized pebble on the road unexpectedly caused passing horses to go catapulting into the air.
Or to put it in technical terms, care of Aura:
“There aren't enough 3D models in existence for basically any model to eat and spit out anything usable. Even most bespoke, handmade 3D model generation algorithms spit out models that are completely unusable in games because the logic behind character creation and topology is extremely precise and needs to be carefully thought out.”
In the more immediate future, I think it's more likely that we'll see AI-powered chatbots integrated into metaverse platforms. Last year, I spoke about that possibility with artist Michelle Huang. In a viral demonstration, Michelle trained ChatGPT on reams of entries from her childhood journal—and then had a moving, even enlightening conversation with her younger self.
“It illuminated to me how hard I was on myself, but how much I extended understanding to others,” she explained. “It felt really rewarding to receive this kindness as well, from a younger version of myself.”
Imagine a metaverse platform where you can chat with NPCs directly based on novelists, poets, and public speakers from history and fiction.
“This is the stuff I think that has the most interesting ramifications,” Michelle told me, expanding on the possibilities. “More immersive human/computer interface loops, from conversation with virtual therapists to in-game interactions for virtual worlds; given there is user input, AI could be used to train highly customizable responses or generate unique storylines per use.”
Cory Ondrejka sees a future where cloud streaming of 3D metaverse content might change how we interact with video streaming services like Twitch and Google's YouTube—or even how we stream video in mobile calls.
With cloud streaming, Cory observes, “what starts as video and switches to static or switches to a more game-like experience becomes a very sort of smooth continuum. And it seems inevitable to me that we'll see exploration in what is currently the video chat space around more games and virtual world experiences. Because that has a lot of nice properties—you can make eye contact. You can move around a space where we have a more situated conversation about something.”
We now take it for granted that we can instantly bring up an interactive 2D map of our surroundings on our phone within seconds. Ondrejka sees a time where it'll be trivial to stream interactive 3D content from a metaverse platform onto our devices for everyday practical reasons:
“What if it's so easy to use Epic products that when you're meeting people at an event, you don't just say ‘I'm meeting you at this restaurant.’” Rather than texting a series of confusing written clues of where your table is located, you could create annotations on a 3D mock-up of the space, and send that as a text.”
In Ondrejka's examples, useful immersive apps like these might integrate into our everyday digital lives so that there's no dramatic shift to the Metaverse that suddenly changes everything, but becomes an enhancement to our daily lives:
“All of those are creating these on-ramps to virtual worlds and Metaverse-like experiences, and I think it becomes a more regular part of how we access computing and information, and how we access each other,” as he puts it.
As for whether Cory Ondrejka himself might return to this work, taking leave as advisor to Google's CEO:
“It's certainly an area that I still have opinions and interests in,” he tells me, grinning. “I love what I'm doing right now, but life is long, time is long, so there are always chances to go back to the Metaverse again.”
Ondrejka's current perspective sees the Metaverse gradually becoming a part of the mainstream Internet experience through the side door of various peripheral use cases. To my mind, it contrasts sharply with what Philip Rosedale sees ahead: a nearly insurmountable challenge to create a Metaverse that is not a game, that is enjoyed not just by kids but by people of all ages, and has mass adoption.
“I think sometimes the industry makes a mistake and says, ‘We're going to take a leaning back experience, like Call of Duty, something like that, and we're going to make it somehow something that a billion people want to do,” as Philip Rosedale puts it to me.
“And that design arc, I don't think really makes sense. Because I don't know that a billion people all want to lean back and kind of trip out on the same experience, like chasing people around and shooting at them or whatever.
“I think instead, we have to look at more lean-forward experiences, like Zoom, and ask how we generalize those to get to a Metaverse rather than starting from games.”
He cheerfully allows that gamers often do meet each other in real life after playing together online, even forming fast friendships and marriages. But in his eye, that's despite, not because, of how the world is designed:
“For the most part, the whole structure of it is to abstract the people into avatars in a way that makes them play a role, where everybody has a pretty good understanding of what the rules are.”
Rosedale argues for this approach for both practical and principled reasons:
“I think sometimes we're trying to scale up games, but keep people leaning back and kind of relaxing. And I don't think that's going to work. And maybe, ethically and morally, maybe we don't want it to? We may not want to give everybody SOMA, you know, we may not want to all kind of veg out?” (He means the pleasant hallucinogenic that pacifies the population in Huxley's Brave New World.)
This sharply contrasts with John Carmack's oft-stated preference for a mass-adopted metaverse, where the “crass commercialization” of a fun online game will eventually become popular enough that it will attract mainstream crossover users:
“[W]hen people like John Carmack, for example, talk about video games, he talks about it from the mindset of, ‘Can't we build an escape from the real world that is incredibly pleasurable and exactly what we want it to be, and nominally single player, right? Like just a wonderful experience.’ And I think that's a laudable goal.” (But as we'll see in Chapter 13, that goal may come with a high price.)
“Think how different Second Life would be if you just expected everybody to behave the way you wanted them to,” Carmack says. “It wouldn't be a very rich experience, if everybody was [like] an NPC that was just really super nice to you. That would be maybe cathartic or relaxing, but it wouldn't be engaging in the way that Second Life is.”
I take him to mean all the examples of positive connections between people from many backgrounds that happen daily in Second Life—the very kind of stories I've written about for nearly two decades.
“Are we talking about a moment here when two strangers need to figure each other out and come to an agreement? Or are we talking about an experience like No Man's Sky or something, right?” That's the acclaimed game where players get to explore whole galaxies with thousands of flora- and fauna-rich planets—but generally play alone.
“And of course, Second Life can be that way too. But as we know, a lot of the time in Second Life, you're engaging with people very substantially, trying to sell them something, trying to build something.”
I believe this can be achieved on a broad scale with a vast user base, and I have advice that may better get us there.
But first, some last warnings on the dangerous snares ahead.