We cannot completely know how metaverse platforms of the next few decades will grow and evolve. But if the past is any guide (and it always is), and we are dedicated to making the best possible Metaverse, worthy to be The Metaverse not simply because it satisfies the core technical requirements but because it thrives on maximum human flourishing, we do have some fairly reliable rules to go by.
Learning from the debunked myths explored in Chapter 8, we know some of the fundamentals: The Metaverse must be multiplatform and mobile-facing, and not fully orient itself around XR devices; its user community must be interoperable across platforms; its avatars and graphics should not be hyperrealistic, but expressive, responsive, and highly customizable instead. And web3 aspects will probably not be involved, except perhaps on an experimental basis.
Positive principles for the Metaverse are more nuanced and subtle and include:
The failure of Decentraland and other blockchain-based metaverse platforms, as covered in Chapter 6, illustrates the limitation of virtual worlds that begin with virtual real estate sales and other speculation. The users attracted to them tend to be there in search of easy riches and rarely become active participants in the virtual world itself.
By contrast, one rule of thumb for judging whether a metaverse platform is successful is this: You will find a subset of content creators who create not primarily for profit but for the benefit of the user community, and social recognition by that community.
We have seen that in powerful examples across many metaverse platforms, from a professional game artist creating free games in Roblox, to an unemployed developer creating and then open sourcing a C# compiler to help VRChat creators, to a technologist with IBM creating transcendent works of immersive art in Second Life simply for the sake of sharing that vision with others.
This social spirit is not simply about idealism. Second Life founding member Hunter Walk, who left Google/YouTube to become an influential venture capitalist, sees this community-centric approach as fundamental to its sustainability as a platform.
As he puts it in a rhetorical question: “Is this a space that feels owned by the people or does it feel owned by companies—where the business model was set before the creative model? My belief is that parts of a successful metaverse will be more open and jazz-like—creative model first, business models second.”
A related realization is that getting community correct first and foremost matters most of all.
“If you invest in creating a positive environment up front,” as Linden Lab/Meta veteran Jim Purbrick puts it, “you can get a positive feedback loop. If you don't set that up up front, you end up with a toxic environment; it's super difficult to turn that around later on.”
When VRChat was besieged by YouTube trolls, it very nearly ran the risk of being branded as a troll haven, and then being abandoned when those trolls became bored. By creating a karmic trust system that rewarded active users who contributed positively to the community, VRChat instead grew and thrived.
When VRChat was wracked by a user protest (Chapter 7), part of the outrage was driven by the removal of some user-made modifications that helped players who were color blind and had other challenges. It's part of a phenomenon I've seen over two decades: people with various physical and mental disabilities finding deep and lasting value in metaverse platforms. The very elderly and physically disabled; the housebound, seeking a portal into new possibilities; veterans with PTSD, connecting with each other through the anonymity of avatars across far distances; those for whom in-person social interactions for various reasons are excruciating, but who still yearn for human connection; those with severe vision impairments, who rely on a virtual world's audio cues and text-to-audio options to create a place for themselves in the community. For people like these and many more, creating a metaverse platform with maximum accessibility for everyone is not simply a matter of satisfying regulatory requirements or even just out of ethical obligation (though it is also definitely that): Accessibility is essential to a metaverse platform's success.
Every metaverse platform that's been launched without game mechanics has failed to gain mass adoption; every metaverse platform that has gained a large audience was first launched explicitly as a game, or is embedded with game mechanics. That ludic framework may be as explicitly game-like as Fortnite or as meta as VRChat's karmic trust system, where continued good behavior earns greater access. Second Life, as we see in Chapter 2, squandered its early success by frustrating new users with a lack of game structure or goals. As we also saw, a game structure is not an artificial imposition to a platform but a recognition that a virtual world with avatars is inherently a game-like play space, dependent on rules of shared imagination.
As it happens, games are also the most proven way to satisfy Philip Rosedale's ultimate goal for the Metaverse to be a platform as openly convivial as Burning Man. For the 80,000 or so souls who attend the Black Rock festival yearly, it may be easy to meet anyone there (most of whom, by a happy coincidence, happen to be various levels of stoned, attractive, and naked). For the rest of the world, it might be a good idea to first play a game together. It's no coincidence that most third spaces, from pubs and bars to parks and beaches, also center games as a primary social lubricant.
Something magical was lost when our focus in metaverse platforms moved away from live, immersive social creation, and we resigned ourselves to offline editing in 3D software programs. While I hesitate to call this a hard and fast principle, because there are several exceptions, I'm dedicated to the belief that it remains the most unique and profoundly exciting feature of metaverse platforms: the ability to instantiate objects from nothingness into the virtual world, and in real time—while working with other avatars around the world—and then together shape these disparate pieces into a jaw-dropping 3D experience.
Founding Second Life CTO Cory Ondrejka agrees:
“Focusing on approachable in-world tools would be where I start; and make sure that the act of using in-world tools is so much fun, and showing people how to use the in-world tools is so much fun, you can really build your hook there to begin with.”
But where Second Life and Minecraft enabled prim-based creation, Ondrejka believes the future is enabling users to dynamically build with high-definition 3D objects:
“I think I'd be very focused on holding hard constraints that what you can build in-world is as high quality as what your core developers can build. You can't have an escape hatch like, ‘Oh, here are the cute little tools we gave for the audience, but when we really want to build, we go off and use [a professional offline 3D editor].’”
With its steady growth in monthly active users (from 40 million in 2016 to upwards of 170 million in 2022), Minecraft remains the shiniest testament to the power of multiuser collaboration, contributing new content—and new social/community bonds—to the virtual world with a speed and diversity of creation to make the platform feel endlessly fresh. (According to Minecraftservers.org, there are well over 30,000 private servers set to Creative Mode.)
Among current metaverse platforms with a strong VR-centric focus, Rec Room probably has two to three times more monthly active users than VRChat. It too enables live, collaborative creation:
“In Rec Room, you're doing it with up to 40 people across almost any platform, voice chatting and co-building and hanging out the entire time,” as a dedicated creator on the platform told me. “You don't have the friction of needing to go download Unity or Roblox Studio and learn all of this dev-tool stuff on your own. Plus other Rec Room users will teach you how to build in real time.”
What we do in a virtual world unfolds in real time. That's key to the power of the Metaverse, and also among its chief hurdles, since the most fun or interesting activity is destined to be missed by most members, if only by dint of the world's different time zones. As I note in Chapter 4, it was the early metaverse communities of Minecraft and later Roblox and others that embraced YouTube and Twitch to share their activity in a time-shifting context. (Or even enjoying the latest event as passive viewers, without having to make the full, attention-consuming leap into the virtual world.)
Due to this need, Discord also rapidly grew among gamers and metaverse denizens, giving them a place for asynchronous conversations and content sharing, as well as a channel into their favorite virtual world community that they can access while multitasking.
To this day, most metaverse companies miss this insight, treating social media as a kind of afterthought as opposed to deeply integrating it into their platform from the start and treating it as a part of their virtual world.
On a broader level, a metaverse platform deeply integrated with social media extends its reach from the immersive space, acting as a draw to new users. On a still broader level, a social media ecosystem devoted to more virtual creativity and fun, and less real-world toxicity and outrage, amplifies the moral force of the Metaverse.
We have explored how ultrarealistic human avatars can negatively shape the culture of a metaverse platform, arguably shifting Second Life in its later years from a highly imaginative creative platform to a heavily materialistic, often-toxic consumer-driven experience (with some creativity still persisting on the sidelines). This variety of avatar definitely did not grow Second Life's user base. And once again, human avatars were only one of many types in Snow Crash, with its virtual world shared by avatars of all species and varieties.
What's also clear is how much nonrealistic, heavily stylized avatars have succeeded instead:
Roblox and to a lesser extent Fortnite created avatars ideally suited to their target core demographic: the former, simple, blocky avatars evocative of LEGO characters, most appealing to young kids; the latter, semirealistic human avatars with a expressively cartoonish aesthetic reminiscent of characters from a Star Wars animated series or the hit video game Team Fortress—IP highly popular with teenage gamers.
While VRChat launched with semirealistic human avatars as its default option, the openness of avatar customization encouraged players to expand the actual spectrum of avatar appearance to include anime characters, furries, and avatars based on popular film and TV cartoon characters. This wide range of creativity went on to influence the kind of content created in VRChat in general, moving far beyond environments where human avatars organically “fit.”
The challenge, as discussed in Chapter 11, is presenting a selection of default avatar options with aesthetics that are broad and diverse enough to attract nearly all demographic groups, and can grow the community in a positive direction. This remains a goal for the metaverse platforms of the future.
Jenova Chen's heavily stylized sylph-like avatars for his upcoming metaverse experience offers us one promising avenue.
Beyond that, the creative space remains wide open. As Nick Yee points out, in the history of virtual world/metaverse platforms over the last few decades, roughly 95 percent of them have been centered around human/humanoid, one-to-one embodied avatars.
It's likely that the Metaverse cannot keep growing without addressing this largely unchallenged assumption.
“There's this whole separate evolutionary branch of what are other ways we could be doing work and play and social interaction if we weren't forced into this one user, one avatar and embodied assumption,” as Yee puts it. “What if you could control multiple avatars at the same time? What if multiple people had to control the same avatar?”
The main goal, Yee writes to me, is “to look at the ‘social architecture’ (i.e., the hidden parameters and rules) in virtual worlds (and that includes the design and affordances of avatars) intentionally rather than as arbitrary/accidental outcomes or simply replicating reality. Or put another way, to think about the goals of a specific virtual world and to make sure the social architecture supports those goals.”
In Chapter 10, for instance, Yee mentions how changing the size or visibility of avatars would help make metaverse-based meetings more productive “because we know that group discussions are typically unbalanced if left to their own devices.”
In a similar way, Yee argues, setting limits for avatars up front so that they can't easily evolve into the Malibu curse that hampers Second Life to this day:
“[W]e might consider what goal we're trying to reach (or lean towards). For example, if the goal is to discourage hyper-consumerism/materialism, then less realistic/blocky or simple/uncustomizable avatars may be more productive—if there is literally no way to make your avatar look better or different, then you stop spending time doing so, and you spend your creative energies elsewhere (e.g., early Minecraft).”
As a thought experiment—and hopefully an inspirational starting point—Nick Yee asks us to consider how a metaverse platform might evolve if the avatar choices don't follow the traditional path of humanoid and one user-one avatar, and instead, the designers make some dramatic departures up front:
“Consider also the possibility of breaking the current assumptions of what having an avatar means and the potential social consequences of:
Some of these suggestions may seem radical to virtual world/metaverse platform colleagues, but variations of them have been implemented in online games with some success.
“I think once we start brainstorming how differently we could be doing avatar design/control,” as Nick Yee puts it, “it becomes clear very quickly how unimaginative virtual worlds have been and how large the potential design space actually is.”
We saw in Chapter 2 how, when Linden Lab open sourced its Second Life viewer software too soon, it permanently isolated the existing community from new users, permanently hurting its growth.
It also illustrates the need for a metaverse platform's corporate owners to gradually evolve with its most dedicated users.
“The economic impact of potential changes was a really, really strong emergency brake on everything we were trying to do,” as Philip Rosedale puts it. A user-created innovation, once it becomes popular with the active community, cannot be removed without serious consequence.
Or as Rosedale puts it: “Creative economies can't be changed very much after they're initially released.”
And we see in Chapter 7 how VRChat embraced something like this principle, incorporating a user-made tool into its development kit, then hiring the user who created it.
To say metaverse companies and communities must grow together implies that they must thrive together, sharing in the success that they make possible together. This means treating community creators as cherished collaborators and offering them the best possible revenue share.
Following something like this principle, Linden Lab shares its revenue from Second Life about equally with its community creators. It is a key reason why that virtual world still hums with life, even after nearly 20 years of existence. As I show in Chapter 4, however, leading platforms like Roblox still fall short of that ideal.
At some point soon, however, the community creators who make metaverse platforms possible will understand their power and advocate for themselves. Enlightened companies will embrace them as collaborators and flourish together.
A Metaverse that matters undermines the corrosive power of social networks to depress, anger, and divide us further by amplifying our offline outrage and envy.
A Metaverse that matters offers a creative platform where anyone, especially grassroots creators, can create content and experiences that are as appealing as what legacy media has to offer or more so—enabling them to thrive on the love of the user community, build a business for themselves, or both.
A Metaverse that matters affords us the ability to simulate nearly any experience in a shared immersive space, empowering a variety of applications from education and training to prototyping and marketing and beyond.
A Metaverse that matters will enable billions of people from many countries to interact with each other in a virtual world where offline identity and the prejudices based on it become secondary in a shared immersive space, a space where creativity, community, and fun matter more.
A Metaverse that matters is now in our hands to build.