Introduction: Five Stories about Five Core Metaverse Concepts

As I write this in early 2023, over 500 million monthly active users inhabit online platforms that fit the broadest outlines of the definition of the Metaverse at the start of this book. That's roughly one in ten of the entire global population connected to the Internet. (As to that definition's particulars, I'll tell that story in Chapter 1.)

Most of the leading metaverse platforms are outlined in the following table:

The Metaverse Platform Landscape, 2023—Market Leaders

Platform	Monthly Active Users	Accessible Devices	Notes
Roblox	250 million	Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Xbox One	See Chapter 4.
Minecraft	174 million	iOS/Android, Windows, Mac, consoles	See Chapter 4.
Fortnite	83 million (2021)	Windows, Mac, Android, consoles	See Chapter 5.
ZEPETO	20 million (2023)	iOS/Android	Company reports that 60% of users are in Asia; 15% in the Americas; 15% in Europe; and 9% in MENA.
Rec Room	10–12 million	Windows, Meta Quest, iOS/Android, consoles	In April 2022, company reported 3 million MAU accessing through VR, most via Meta's Quest 2.
VRChat	7–9 million	Windows, Quest, Steam VR, HTC Vive	See Chapter 7.
Avakin Life	7 million (2023)	iOS/Android	Developed by UK-based Lockwood Publishing, which in 2020 raised $25 million in Series A funding led by China tech giant Tencent.
IMVU	5 million (2023)	iOS/Android, Windows, Mac	Company reports 200,000 monthly active creators, $1 million paid out per month to creators (Feb 2023).
Second Life	600,000	Windows, Mac	See Chapter 2.
Horizon Worlds	200,000 (2022)	Meta Quest	See Chapter 3.

Numbers in parentheses represent dates of public statements by the platform company or from major news/industry publications. Other figures represent estimates or third-party counts from New World Notes, along with RTrack and Metaversed. consulting.

Anyone not already within this proudly geeky half-billion–sized cohort may wonder why these platforms and their largest representatives—Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, and so on—should have any relationship to the Metaverse. Aren't they just online games?

They are also online games, yes, but their potential extends far beyond that category. All of them share five core features that are integral and unique to metaverse platforms. Taken together, these features offer a new and largely better way to experience the Internet—and an advance to the kind of Internet experience that the remaining nine in ten people online have grown accustomed to.

But rather than discuss these core features in the abstract, let me tell you about five people whose lives have been changed by them.

Fran and the Immersive Virtual World

One day Fran, a senior citizen in Southern California, noticed it had become difficult for her to stand from a sitting position or maintain her balance while upright—the first indications of Parkinson's disease, a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that afflicts millions around the world.

Fran was also an active Second Life user at the time, enjoying it as a fun way to socialize with her daughter, Barbara. Sometimes for fun, she'd have her avatar practice tai chi, a nice visual reference while meditating herself.

Then Fran noticed an odd thing: She seemed to be gaining significant recovery of physical movement—apparently, as a direct consequence of her activity in Second Life.

“As I watched [my avatar],” she told me in 2013, “I could actually feel the movements within my body as if I were actually doing tai chi in my physical life, which is not possible for me.”

For a year up to that point, she sat and even slept in a motorized lounge chair.

After weeks of watching her avatar practice tai chi, however, “I could feel that my body had become stronger.”

Until a day came when she was able to stand without motorized assistance.

“Now,” she added, “I can go from a sitting to standing position without even using my arms to push against the arm rests. This has been absolutely thrilling for me.”

Using a virtual world, in other words, seemed to abate her Parkinson's symptoms.

Fran's story first came to me through Tom Boellstorff, professor of anthropology at UC Irvine. Author of Coming of Age in Second Life (the echo of Margaret Mead is intentional), he's among the most well-respected academics studying the social implications of virtual worlds. Tom met Fran and Barbara offline, recorded video of Fran's physical recovery, then went on to receive a National Science Foundation grant (with his colleague Dr. Donna Z. Davis), to study virtual worlds and people with disabilities.

Though Boellstorff and Davis are anthropologists by training and not medical experts, they have a theory about the nature of Fran's recovery, and hope it can be researched further.

“We believe that Fran's experience may be similar to results in other current research being conducted with individuals with brain disorders or injury,” Dr. Davis told me back then. “Where, by watching yourself—or your avatar—you are essentially retraining the mind to function.”

While the implications of this have yet to be studied to their furthest potential, they are likely to be profound—especially in the face of a rapidly aging population around the globe. From what we can tell, they are made possible because this happened in an immersive virtual world.

Immersion is the sense of feeling so situated within a 3D virtual world, your awareness of the surroundings beyond your digital screen mostly melts away. Immersion powers the success of videogame consoles, PC games, and even 3D titles on mobile, especially titles in the category called “AAA”—big budget, action-oriented games with highly vivid 3D graphics, such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Grand Theft Auto Online. Each has sold tens of millions of copies, earning revenue that puts them in competition with Hollywood's most successful movies.

Immersion is also what first brought me, through many lateral moves, into the metaverse industry. I specifically credit the astoundingly influential PC game Thief: The Dark Project (1998) for achieving a sense of immersiveness that felt like a fundamental shift. In this story of an antihero cat burglar in a nameless steampunk city, the player progressed through careful awareness of the world, learning to stealthily blend into its shadows. Thief and its many successors convinced me that immersion could elevate interactive experiences beyond mere arcade games into something more profound.

The growing popularity of immersive online virtual worlds, first seen in sword and sorcery MMOs like EverQuest (1999) and World of Warcraft (2003), expanded my excitement; now, other people were part of a virtual world that you simultaneously shared together. Typically, these worlds are fanciful but recognizable simulations of our offline world, with mountains and oceans and cities and the like, visually appealing and varied enough that many people would want to explore and interact within them together.

“For me the foundational thing is that virtual worlds are shared spaces,” as Tom Boellstorff puts it. “They are places online and that's what makes them different from email or Twitter. And you even see this in English with prepositions, where people say you go on Facebook, but you go in Roblox or in Second Life or whatever.” And it's how Fran happened to come across an inviting meadow with a community meditation space for practicing tai chi in Second Life, which ended up changing her life.

Fran is hardly alone. Drawn to this “you are there” quality, a large contingent of people enjoy digital immersion, whether in single player games or shared multiplayer spaces. Steam, a top online distributor of immersive PC games, has about 125 million active users; one in five global consumers reportedly owns a videogame console boasting immersive graphics and audio capability. Hundreds of millions play 3D games on mobile; one title alone, the mobile version of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG), attracts over 50 million daily users at peak.

By my estimate, the existing audience for immersive experiences is about one in four people with Internet access worldwide.

Nick and the Power of Virtual World Avatars

Immersiveness creates a metaverse platform's sense of social presence; avatars create the sense that you are part of that world and can be perceived by others in it at the same time.

Taken from the Sanskrit word for “godly incarnation,” the avatar is your emissary in the virtual world, responding to your commands in near real time. Typically you view your avatar onscreen as if you were its angelic conscience, hovering just behind it, or see through its eyes from a first-person perspective. As you interact with other users through their own avatars, the sense of immersion is enough to create a real-time social context from the ephemera of pixels.

That effect can best be demonstrated by a surprising discovery:

One day, a graduate student at Stanford named Nick Yee wondered what kind of relationship the average person has with their avatar. To test this, he brought male and female volunteers into a lab and had them control their own avatars in the same virtual world; the volunteers could freely move their avatars around in this simulation, standing as close or as far away from each other as they preferred. If they wanted, they could also command their avatar to make virtual eye contact with another avatar.

What happened next was unexpected:

The avatars, Nick discovered, eerily imitated our unwritten rules of social distance and eye contact. In other words, these volunteers’ avatars maintained the same relative distance in the virtual world as they would were they strangers standing near each other in the real world.

Our unwritten rules of gender dynamics and sexuality were also mirrored in this experiment. For instance, when avatars of two straight male volunteers talked with each other, as Dr. Yee explained in his paper on this study, “they were less likely to maintain mutual gaze than female-female dyads and mixed dyads.” They also tended to position their avatars so that they stood side by side with each other while looking away—eerily and unconsciously replicating, for example, how heterosexual men tend to stand next to each other at a bar.

No one told the volunteers to behave this way with their avatars in a virtual world. Indeed, it's unlikely anyone told them about the rules of eye contact and social distance in the real world. Yet somehow, they felt such an intuitive connection with their avatars’ perspectives that they re-created these unconscious social rules, as if these avatars really were an extension of their real-life selves.

While the results of Yee's study (“The Persistence of Nonverbal Social Norms in Online Virtual Environments”) may surprise many readers, they are less likely to shock the many hundreds of millions of people who play Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite Creative, and other metaverse-type platforms. For those of us accustomed to avatars in shared immersive spaces, this phenomenon is part of the magic: the uncanny sense that we are really there, in the simulated space, and that we share it with others, even when we are logging in from the other side of the world—they are also, somehow, right by our side.

The sense of avatars as people also seems to apply to the avatars that individual users control. In another series of studies led by Nick and his Stanford colleague Jeremy Bailenson (a pioneer in virtual world/VR research), they found that when a volunteer is embodied in a physically attractive avatar, they are more willing to talk with others and express more open, self-confident friendliness—in both the virtual and the real worlds.

Bailenson and Yee dubbed this “the Proteus effect,” after the shape-shifting demigod of Greek mythology, and it reinforces the previous finding: Avatars help empower us and connect us in a meaningful way with others in a virtual world. (The Proteus effect can also be abused, often to socially disturbing effect. But more on that in Chapter 13.)

Jeff and the Power of User-Generated Virtual World Content

There once was a tall and rangy artist who wandered the green countryside of Ireland as an itinerant painter for hire, and through various serendipitous twists, eventually wound up as a UI designer at IBM. It is there that Jeff Berg's manager suggested he try a thing called Second Life that everyone seemed to be talking about at the time.

So he did, exploring the technical and artistic possibilities of the platform. Someone told him it was impossible to build a simulated wheat field in this virtual world, but with some practice, he built one, hand-drawing some of the digital textures, to make it seem all the more real.

Berg dubbed it “The Far Away,” and it invited you to stroll through a golden expanse wrapped around a rusty train with tracks lost beneath the seemingly windblown grain. Second Life users, learning about the place, would teleport or fly there in an endless stream of avatars whose incongruous appearance made these settings seem even more surreal—sex vampires and robot furries and supermodels and space commandos and cyberpunk cowboys, all milling about in God's country.

Berg’s virtual wheat field, in a word, became famous. He created that place and others to evoke nostalgia for the time before the Internet. He succeeded at that. Tens of thousands of people visited his Second Life installation, moved and made nostalgic for this bygone time.

And then Berg himself, in an ironic turn, also became famous. Or rather his avatar did, whom he named “AM Radio.” Ardent admirers messaged him, telling him that exploring his works had saved them from suicide. Two people who met as avatars in the middle of his wheat field wound up getting married in real life. Many fans sent him romantic messages. Many pursued AM Radio around Second Life whenever he logged in, wandering the virtual world in a greatcoat and top hat, the way star-struck art mavens from another era might trail after a celebrated painter in Paris.

AM Radio's fame even started spilling out into the real world. Berg was ordering coffee at his local shop, only to overhear the two young women behind the counter talking about Second Life. As she prepared his order, one barista enthused about a beautiful wheat field she had just visited there. And Berg realized she was talking about “The Far Away.” Berg is shy and not exactly outgoing in real life, and this attention was overwhelming.

As he explained to me later: “I grabbed my coffee and thanked them and ran out the door.”

Essential to a metaverse platform are creation and editing tools that enable users to reshape and customize the virtual world around them into user-generated content (UGC). There are thousands if not millions of people like AM Radio across many metaverse platforms, acclaimed and even dearly loved for their creativity, made possible by these tools that turn users into creators. You will meet many of them in the coming chapters.

The tools themselves vary wildly from platform to platform; in some they are simple, enabling users to, say, click and drag prefab furniture around their virtual homes. Other toolsets enable creators to customize a user experience so thoroughly that what they build is nearly indistinguishable in quality from immersive content created by teams of well-paid game professionals.

An equally important point here: On a metaverse platform, all content can be user-generated content, and every activity performed by users is by definition UGC. Even a user's avatar randomly walking around and chatting constitutes UGC; their very presence and social activity contributes to the immersive environment. It might seem trivial to describe avatars socializing and chatting as UGC, but I can assure that it is not. It's why metaverse platforms invariably have a cottage industry of virtual wedding planners, emcees, DJs, and so on who make a decent side income from their social skills.

The power of UGC has already been proven in the early ’90s by the modding community—gamers who collaborate online to modify and tinker with a game's art assets and coding to create enhanced or completely altered game experiences, which they then share with each other as unofficial add-ons for the original underlying game.

Modding has changed the game industry so often, it is taken for granted that businesses worth billions of dollars can be altered by the creative work of a dedicated team of amateur creators (or sometimes, just one).

Modding led to the mainstreaming of the Metaverse itself. Summarizing wildly, it was modding that turned the sci-fi action hit Half-Life into a terrorists versus counterterrorists multiplayer mod called Counter-Strike (created by two amateur developers, Minh “Gooseman” Le and Jess Cliffe). Still one of the world's most popular games, Counter-Strike helped foster a massive audience for other realistic military combat simulators, including a series called Arma. A title from the Arma franchise was then modded into a battle royale game called PlayerUnknown: Battlegrounds (created by Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene). This in turn helped foster a massive audience for battle royale games, leading to a new gameplay mode in Fortnite—setting the stage for that game to evolve into one of the largest metaverse platforms you'll read about here.

At each of these stages, it was the creativity and dedication of lone grassroots creators and tiny teams to inspire and excite millions of gamers, altering an entire industry in the process. But even more often, metaverse artists like AM Radio create for the sake of art and expression itself.

But with art, of course, commerce is not far behind.

Gizem and the Battle to Make Virtual Money Real

Once upon a time, a girl sitting by herself in an ancient city traveled through a looking glass full of lightning and changed her life forever.

Gizem Mishi was a college student at Okann University in Istanbul when she came across a YouTube video of “Skye Galaxy,” a bohemian-looking avatar with a powerfully resonant voice, performing in a virtual world to a throng of swaying fans. This was how Gizem first discovered Second Life. By the time she attended her second Skye Galaxy performance, she had learned the world's creation tools well enough to create a polka dot dress for herself—her first item of avatar clothing for the platform.

This virtual concert was transformative for at least two reasons. For one, someone in the audience messaged her about the dress, wondering where she had bought it. Gizem instantly realized that there was a massive demand in Second Life for virtual fashion. (Another message she received during the show was more personal, but that's a story for Chapter 2.)

Gizem founded a clothing line and gave it a brand name, Blueberry, offering decidedly feminine styles that she herself might wear in offline life, when hitting the town on a girls’ night out. She sold these items for Linden Dollars, the official virtual currency of Second Life, which for a processing fee, a user could sell to other users for real money. (At an exchange rate of about L$250 to $1 USD—or in Gizem's case, the equivalent of $1 USD in Turkish lira.)

And while most of her clothing items were priced at the Linden Dollar equivalent of $5 USD or less, sales strongly grew, as did her community of fashionista fans (her “Berries,” as she would dub them).

By 2013, Blueberry was netting $60,000 a year from Second Life content.

By 2014, when Gizem was creating virtual fashion on a full-time basis, Blueberry was making an income in six-figure range.

By 2015, when Gizem was not yet 25 years old, Blueberry was grossing over $1 million a year.

And then in 2016, the real world interrupted the growing Blueberry empire in the most unlikely way:

A faction within the Turkish Armed Forces launched a violent coup d’état against President Erdoğan, forcing Gizem into a surreal situation where she was creating attractive outfits for avatars while very real explosions and the rumble of choppers shook the walls of her home.

The end of the coup only exacerbated her problems, because in its aftermath, Erdoğan blocked Turkish citizens’ access to Internet services that managed online payments, including PayPal. And so the virtual fortune she had worked so hard to amass drifted in the purgatory between the virtual and the real.

The rest of Blueberry's story will be told in Chapter 2, but I tell this part now to illustrate another key component of a metaverse platform: integration with the real world, primarily (but not exclusively) through the international monetary system.

Or to put it bluntly: The Metaverse includes the ability for creators to make money from their virtual world content.

Many traditional online games also enable players to earn real money from their gameplay. But this is rarely part of the official game itself, more often falling into the gray market category of “gold farming.” For instance, where one player (typically in a poorer part of the world) will spend many hours of gameplay leveling up their character or amassing in-game wealth and resources—and then selling it on a third-party site such as eBay.

In a metaverse platform, the virtual-to-real economy is part of its intentional design and is focused around what players themselves create.

Gizem Mishi's story of selling virtual fashion during a violent military coup is fairly unique. But her success is pretty commonplace. On every successful metaverse platform, there are hundreds if not thousands of people who make a real-life living, and sometimes a small fortune, from the virtual content they create.

The emergence of this new economy built on virtual worlds is still not fully appreciated outside the relatively small circle of companies creating metaverse platforms. (Even the wider game industry as a whole has been slow to grasp its implications.) To better explain it, I'd compare it to another media platform altogether: YouTube.

Launched in 2005, the video-sharing site rapidly evolved into the world's most powerful platform for user-generated content, fostering a grassroots community of creators who embraced the video tools made available by the iPhone and other consumer-level devices.

“The nature of the platform led to really quick evolution and iteration of content, compared to traditional Hollywood cycles,” as Hunter Walk puts it. Walk, part of Second Life's early founding team, left Linden for Google and helped scale up YouTube after the search giant acquired the video platform in 2006. The rapid user creativity happening on YouTube pretty quickly reminded him of what he had seen on the early metaverse platform.

“When I got to YouTube, I saw the same hyper-evolution of creativity,” as he recalls. “It wasn't intentional, unlike Second Life, where it was built in. On YouTube it had more to do with the nature of the medium and the creativity community, riffing off different themes.” (More on Hunter, by the way, in Chapter 2.)

More organic and interactive than traditional broadcast content, YouTube videos created by someone with enough dedication, no matter their background, are able to attract a massive audience—and in the process can create a lucrative career. The most popular YouTube stars have subscriber bases in the many tens of millions, translating into more engagement than what most network television programs attract. For Gen Z and younger, YouTube (and its fast-rising would-be successor/competitor, TikTok) has effectively replaced television.

Metaverse platforms are now making the same thing possible in virtual world spaces. In the same way that smartphones gave grassroots creators the power to create near-professional-quality videos, metaverse platforms give anyone with a laptop the power to create games and other immersive experiences that rival what heavily funded major publishers and digital studios can create.

This democratizing phenomenon is already happening. On Roblox, for instance, the most popular user-created experiences are played by more people than most of the top games on Steam and other major game distribution platforms. Just as Gen Z would generally prefer to watch hours of YouTube videos produced on an iPhone rather than bother with network television programming, the Roblox user base often prefers the metaverse experiences created by a handful of amateurs over AAA games produced by teams of professionals costing tens of millions of dollars.

Mr. Bristol Meets Millions

In late 2008 I gave a talk for my first book, The Making of Second Life, to a Los Angeles architecture and design group. By then, media attention over the first mainstream attempt to launch a metaverse, once feverish, had started shifting to a skeptical tone. The many companies and brands that had opened an official HQ in the virtual world were seeing scant return on their investments, while Second Life's monthly active user numbers mysteriously refused to grow. (More on all that in Chapter 2.)

So while I put as much enthusiasm into the Beverly Hills talk as possible, I delivered it despite a nagging sense that Second Life, and the Metaverse as a broader concept, would not be as transformative as many of us had originally assumed.

Then something happened that changed my perspective.

During the preshow sound check, the conference team casually asked me to show them what people did in Second Life for fun. I mentioned that many musicians performed live in the virtual world by streaming their mic and instrument through their computer, earning a side income through tips. I launched Second Life on my laptop to show them and randomly teleported into a ramshackle nightclub packed with dancing avatar patrons.

Onstage, the avatar of a tall and regal old Black man was performing resonant blues guitar while singing with a raspy voice. I assumed this was just an average Second Life user who had merely customized their avatar to seem old.

But when I went to check his real-life biography in his avatar profile, my jaw dropped.

He was, in fact, an elderly African American blues master by the name of Charles Bristol, 87 years old at the time.

“How y'all doing,” Mr. Bristol's avatar said with a gravelly whisper into a booming mic piped into this Second Life bar by the virtual bayou. “My name is Charles Bristol. And I've been trying to make something of myself for all my life.”

FIGURE I.1 Charles Bristol, 88, performing live in Second Life

Russ Roberts / Etherian Kamaboko

When he was born in 1921, the electric guitar did not exist and slavery was still a living memory. But somehow, Mr. Bristol would live long enough to see a Black man become president and, perhaps just as unexpectedly, see himself made into an avatar, so he could extend his decades-long music career into something called the Metaverse.

His entrance into the virtual world, I later found out, was made possible by total happenstance: A much younger neighbor in North Carolina, also a blues musician, invited Mr. Bristol to a virtual world jam session. Russ Roberts himself discovered Second Life in an online musician forum. (“They pay you to play?!”) On a visit to Russ’s home, Charles saw him playing in Second Life. “I asked Charles if he wanted to play online while we recorded his material.”

By the time I stumbled into him myself, Mr. Bristol had been performing in Second Life for over a year. Too weary to frequently perform at real-life venues as he once did as a younger man, Charles now had this digital venue and access to hundreds of new fans around the world. He would go on to play in the virtual world for many years after that, with a Second Life fan group, Charles E. Bristol Blues Project, dedicated to his virtual shows.

That one random encounter helped keep me engaged with Second Life, and the concept of the Metaverse in general, writing about it whenever I can amid other editorial projects.

Because the truly shocking thing is this: Up until then, I had no inkling at all that Mr. Bristol was in Second Life, encountering him only by blind luck.

Who else was also in there?

When a metaverse platform achieves mass growth, the possibility of magical, serendipitous chance encounters like this become ever more possible; there are simply more and different people to meet in a shared, immersive space, increasingly from outside the social circles we are born into.

This teeming population also makes it possible to consider metaverse platforms as a viable alternative to traditional social media, especially among millennials and Gen Z early adopters.

I say “traditional” because metaverse platforms typically have key social networking features within them, such as the ability to friend and directly message others on the system. It's just that in a metaverse platform, your friendship network tends to extend far beyond simply friends and acquaintances from real life and, unlike, say, Instagram or Twitter, rarely includes people with real-world social capital (that is, celebrities and influencers).

By and large, people become friends in metaverse platforms because they enjoy their company and creativity. And these are typically connections from around the world, with often wildly diverse and surprising backgrounds.

The Metaverse offers us the chance to meet people from around the world through our anonymous/semi-anonymous avatars. And ideally, to be judged not by our real-life identities but through the creative expression and sociability that we bring to the platform.

We can see the early glimmers of this hope in recent studies on video games (effectively training wheels to the Metaverse). Even now, they are rapidly drawing attention away from social media:

In a fall 2021 report from reputed consultancy Deloitte, the authors noted that 20 percent of Gen Z consumers preferred playing video games over engaging on social media (20 percent versus 7 percent). Meanwhile, a 2019 University of Montreal study with 4,000 adolescent volunteers found that social media increased kids’ feelings of depression, while gaming did not.

Why? The Montreal researchers speculate that social media depresses teens due to “upward social comparison” (feelings of inadequacy, when seeing others’ social posts) and “reinforcing spirals” (searching for downbeat social media content to mirror and amplify their own depression).

Social media's potential for harm has been well documented elsewhere, including by staff of the companies themselves. Witness “the Facebook papers” of whistleblower Frances Haugen, a series of horrific revelations culminating in the company's internal report suggesting that the mere act of using Instagram causes depression in teenage girls.

Whereas with online games and virtual worlds, kids play together in real time, with the serendipity of multi-user experiences unlikely to inspire reinforcement spirals, and any comparisons they make to one another being less about their family's wealth and privilege, let alone their physical appearance, but to the skills, creativity, and sociability they each bring to the digital space.

These findings solidify my sense, based on years of virtual interviews, that teens and other vulnerable groups thrive in metaverse platforms. Shrouded behind the relative safety of their avatars, which are customized to reflect their personality or at least their current mood, they feel free (perhaps for the first time in their lives) to improvise their own identity and value system within the marionette theater that is a metaverse platform.

And as kids interact more in metaverse platforms, they seem to spend less time engaging in social media.

“Observationally, I would say that one is likely to displace the other,” as Anya Kamenetz tells me. NPR's lead digital education correspondent, Kamenetz saw this phenomenon while writing The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life and The Stolen Year: How COVID Changed Children's Lives, and Where We Go Now. “If they're engaged in a metaverse platform it would tend to displace social media use.”

This strikes me as an intrinsic good. Since roughly 2010, as Facebook, Twitter, and other social media ascended, we have somehow learned to accept the costs and risks associated with them, tolerating an entire generation growing up while marinating in the toxic petri dish of Likes and Shares, as their parents and grandparents, goaded by invisible algorithms, also express the worst versions of themselves.

Kamenetz agrees with my own observation that in recent years, social media content has itself been substantially altered by metaverse platforms. Where once kids’ social media consumption seemed overwhelmed by would-be influencer videos, many kids now instead opt to spend more time watching what other kids are creatively doing in Roblox, Minecraft, and other virtual worlds: “Game watching video is a huge interest for kids,” notes Kamenetz. (Indeed: At the end of 2021, YouTube reported that videos about Minecraft had surpassed 1 trillion total views and were by far the most-watched content on the platform.)

Beyond the Metaverse's potential to shift our focus away from the templated self of social media (as my colleague Amber Case calls it), the goal of millions of users sharing the same immersive space offers a chance to expand their range of human connection to encompass the entire world.

“Looking back from the clearer vantage point of COVID,” metaverse pioneer Philip Rosedale mused on Twitter at the height of the pandemic lockdown, “I realize that all my work, and especially Second Life, has been about trying to connect with strangers. We must find a way to continue.”

He's right. First created to connect fellow students at Harvard, Facebook has always been intended as a network connecting real people who know each other in the real world; it's why the average user has a predictable coterie of acquaintances from family, school, work, and neighborhood, largely of the same age, economic class, and race/nationality.

But a metaverse platform by its very architecture makes it possible to meet people of all ages, nations, and backgrounds.

I'm always stunned to scroll through my contacts to review the people I first met as avatars: a 20-something Ukrainian who runs a popular Second Life brand but fled her home as invading Russians converged on her hometown; an Iraqi arts professor who excitedly logged into Second Life through his sputtering, postwar Internet connection from the ancient city of Babylon; a young Japanese sex worker, who in between porn shoots created in Second Life an eerie memorial to the nuking of Hiroshima; a professor at Princeton's Interdisciplinary Studies Institute for Advanced Study, one building over from Einstein's old office, who busily creates cosmological simulations in the open-source spin-off of Second Life. A priceless wealth of people I almost certainly would not have met, had we not shared the same virtual world.

This is why mass adoption is so essential to the Metaverse. Not simply because having millions of active users means more profit for the companies that create these platforms. But because it means enabling people like Mr. Charles Bristol, and still more diverse peoples around the world, a chance to meet, connect, and express themselves in a new global community.

Because if the Metaverse matters at all, it means mattering to people like him.

At the height of the latest Metaverse hype wave—starting with Roblox's IPO in March 2021, perhaps peaking with Facebook's name change to Meta—the definition of the Metaverse somehow became comically broad to the point of meaningless. And though it was derived from a classic novel by a still-celebrated working author, the Metaverse slowly devolved into whatever its least humble evangelists claimed it to be.

That is why my book began with a clear and succinct definition. There is a whole untold story behind those words, and it begins at least three decades ago. And while the full story is little known until now, the Metaverse was always, from its conception, much more than a mere cyberpunk conceit.

How do I know? I asked Neal Stephenson.