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In the fourth quarter of 2020 and first quarter of 2021, the gaming industry had two of its largest-ever initial public offerings (IPOs) in Unity Technologies and Roblox Corporation, both of which wrapped their corporate histories and ambitions in Metaverse-related narratives.
Prior to Roblox’s IPO filings in October 2020, the “Metaverse” had appeared only five times in US Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
That same year, Bloomberg, a software company that provides financial data and information to investors, catalogued more than a thousand stories containing the word Metaverse. The prior decade had only seven.
was a place for labor and leisure, for self-actualization as well as physical exhaustion, for art alongside commerce.
In 1935, Stanley G. Weinbaum wrote a short story titled “Pygmalion’s Spectacles,” about the invention of magical VR-like goggles that produced a “movie that gives one sight and sound . . . you are in the story, you speak to the shadows, and the shadows reply, and instead of being on a screen, the story is all about you, and you are in it.”†4 Ray Bradbury’s 1950 short story “The Veldt” imagines a nuclear family in which the parents are supplanted by a virtual reality nursery that the children never want to leave.
Philip K. Dick’s 1953 story “The Trouble with Bubbles” is set in an era where humans have explored deep into outer space, but never succeeded in finding life. Yearning to connect with other worlds and life-forms, consumers begin to buy a product called “Worldcraft” through which they can build and “Own [Their] Own World,” which are cultivated to the point of producing sentient life and fully realized civilizations (most Worldcraft-owners eventually destroy their worlds in what Dick described as a “neurotic” “orgy of breaking” intended to “amuse some god suffering from ennui”).
Isaac Asimov’s novel The Naked Sun was published. In it, he described a society where face-to-face interactions (“seeing”) and physical contact ar...
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In 1984, William Gibson popularized the term “cyberspace” in his novel Neuromancer, defining it as “A consensual hallucination experienced
daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation. . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.
Gibson called the visual abstraction of cyberspace “The Matrix,”
Though many find this idea frightening, Baudrillard argued that what mattered was where individuals would derive more meaning and value—and speculated it would be in the simulated world.
These would-be Metaverses have not been centered on subjugation or profiteering, but on collaboration, creativity, and self-expression.
Some observers date the history of “proto-Metaverses” to the 1950s during the rise of mainframe computers, which represented the first time that individuals could share purely digital messages with one another across a network of different devices. Most, however, start in the 1970s with text-based virtual worlds known as Multi-User Dungeons. MUDs were effectively a software-based version of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Using text-based commands that resembled human languages, players could interact with one another, explore a fictional world populated by non-playable characters
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growing popularity of MUDs inspired the creation of Multi-User Shared Hallucinations (or MUSHs) or M...
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MUSHs and MUXs enabled participants to collaboratively define the world and its objective. Players might choose to set their MUSH in a courtroom, while taking on roles such as defendant, attorney, plaintiff, judge, and members of the jury. One participant might later decide to transform the relatively mundane proceedings into a hostage situation—which would then be diffused by a poem that was mad-libbed by the other players.
great leap came in 1986 with the release of the Commodore 64 online game Habitat, which was published by Lucasfilm, the production company founded by Star Wars creator George Lucas. Habitat was described as “a multi-participant online virtual environment” and, in a reference to Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, “a cyberspace.”
“Citizens” of Habitat were in charge of the laws and expectations of their virtual world, and had to barter with each other for necessary resources and avoid being robbed or killed for their wares. This challenge led to periods of chaos, after which new rules, regulations, and authorities were established by the player community to maintain order.
The 1990s saw no major “proto-Metaverse” games, but advances continued. That decade, millions of consumers took part in the first isometric 3D (also known as 2.5D) virtual worlds, which gave the illusion of three-dimensional space, but only allowed users to move across two axes. Not long after, full 3D virtual worlds emerged. A number of games, such as 1994’s Web World and 1995’s Activeworlds, also empowered users to collaboratively build a visible virtual space in real time, rather than through asynchronous commands and votes, and introduced a number of graphic/symbol-based tools to make
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2007, a stock exchange was launched on the platform with the aim of helping Second Life–based companies raise capital using the platform’s Linden Dollars currency.
Throughout the 2010s, bands of users collaborated in Minecraft to build cities as large as Los Angeles—roughly 500 square miles. One video game streamer, Aztter, constructed a stunning cyberpunk city out of an estimated 370 million Minecraft blocks, having worked an average of 16 hours per day for a year.
By the end of 2021, Adopt Me!’s virtual world had been visited more than 30 billion times—more than fifteen times the average number of global tourism visits in 2019. Furthermore, developers on Roblox, many of whom are also small teams with fewer than 30 members, have received more than $1 billion in payments from the platform. By the end of 2021, Roblox had become the most valuable gaming company outside of China, worth nearly 50% more than storied gaming giants Activision Blizzard and Nintendo.
In 2020, hip-hop star (and Kardashian family member) Travis Scott hosted a concert that was attended live by 28 million players, with millions more watching live on social media.
Today, the thousands of miles of “dark fiber” across America are a largely underappreciated enabler of the country’s digital economy, silently helping content owners and consumers gain access to high-bandwidth, low-latency infrastructure at low prices. But in the years between the laying of these cables and the present day, many of those responsible went through bankruptcy. These include Metromedia Fiber Network, KPNQwest, 360networks, and, in one of the largest bankruptcies in US history, Global Crossing.
Enron was so convinced of the imminent and insatiable demand for highspeed data
that in 1999 it unveiled plans to trade bandwidth futures like oil or silicon, assuming businesses would want to book capacity up to years in advance lest they encounter enormous swings in per bit delivery costs.
“A massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.”
The purpose of a virtual world can be “game-like,” which is to say there is an objective such as winning, killing, scoring, defeating, or solving, or the purpose can be “non-game-like” with objectives such as educational or vocational training, commerce, socializing, meditation, fitness, and more.
best example of the computation-persistence interplay comes via the game EVE Online.
In Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the Metaverse is an enormous, planet-sized, and richly detailed virtual world with a nearly infinite number of unique businesses, places to visit, activities to do, things to buy, and people to meet. Nearly everything and anything done by any user, at any time, can persist forever.
Netflix has other tricks, too. For example, the company receives video files anywhere from months to hours before they’re made available to audiences. This gives the company a window during which it can perform extensive, machine learning–powered analysis that enables them to shrink (or “compress”) file sizes by analyzing frame data to determine what information can be discarded. Specifically, the company’s algorithms will “watch” a scene with blue skies and decide that, if a viewer’s internet bandwidth suddenly drops, 500 different shades of blue can be simplified to 200, or 50, or 25.
Netflix will pre-load content at local nodes. When you ask for the newest episode of Stranger Things, it’s actually only a few blocks away and therefore arrives right away.
Fortnite’s social experiences, such as its famous 2020 concert with Travis Scott. In that case, “players” converged on a much smaller portion of the map, meaning the average device had to render and compute far more information. Accordingly, the title’s standard cap of 100 players per instance was halved, while many items and actions, such as building, are disabled, thereby further reducing the workload. While Epic Games can rightly say that more than 12.5 million people attended this live concert, these attendees were split across 250,000 separate copies (meaning, they watched 250,000
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EVE Online stands apart from games like World of Warcraft and Fortnite because all users are part of one singular and persistent realm.
January 2021, the largest battle in EVE’s history occurred. It was more than twice the size of the prior record and the culmination of a nearly seven-month escalation between the Imperium Faction and a coalition of enemies called PAPI.
Concurrency is one of the foundational problems for the Metaverse, and for a fundamental reason: it leads to exponential increases in how much data must be processed, rendered, and synchronized per unit of time.
Both the Metaverse and Web3 are “successor states” to the internet as we know it today, but their definitions are quite different. Web3 does not directly require any 3D, real-time rendered, or synchronous experiences, while the Metaverse does not require decentralization, distributed databases, blockchains, or a relative shift of online power or value from platforms to users. To mix the two together is a bit like conflating
the rise of democratic republics with industrialization or electrification—one is about societal formation and governance, the other is about technology and its proliferation.
Yet another question is whether centralized server models can ever support a nearly infinite, persistent, world-scale Metaverse. Some believe that the only way to provide the computing resources needed for the Metaverse is through a decentralized network of individually owned—and compensated—servers and devices. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
“Skeuomorphism” refers to a technique used in graphical design in which interfaces are designed to mimic their real-world counterparts.
In the mainframe era, which ran from the 1950s through the 1970s, the dominant computing operating systems were those of “IBM and the Seven Dwarfs,” typically defined as Burroughs, Univac, NCR, RCA, Control Data, Honeywell, General Electric. The personal computer era, which began in earnest in the 1980s, was briefly led by IBM and its operating system. However, the eventual winners were new entrants, most notably Microsoft, whose Windows operating system and Office software suite ran on nearly every PC in the world, and manufacturers such as Dell, Compaq, and Acer.
The story of the mobile era takes a similar shape. New platforms rose or emerged, namely those of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, with Windows falling out of the category altogether and PC-era manufacturers displaced by new entrants such as Xiaomi and Huawei.
In 2021 alone, over $16 trillion was settled through blockchain/cryptocurrency networks, which to many experts are foundational enablers of the Metaverse (more on this in Chapter 11). Visa, as a point of contrast, processed an estimated $10.5 trillion.1
The entertainment industry was arguably one of the last segments of the global economy to embrace the internet, with the “Streaming Wars” only really beginning in 2019—nearly 25 years after the first public demonstration of streaming video.
Even audio, one of the simplest media categories to deliver over IP, remains a mostly non-digital medium, with terrestrial radio, satellite radio, and physical media comprising nearly two-thirds of US recorded music revenues in 2021.
In 2000, Japan even placed export limitations on its own beloved giant, Sony, fearing that the company’s new PlayStation 2 device could be used for terrorism on a global scale (for instance, to process missile guidance systems).2
extraordinary—the most realistic and expansive consumer-grade simulation in history. Its map is over 500,000,000 square kilometers—just like the “real” planet earth—and includes two trillion uniquely rendered trees (not two trillion copy-and-pasted trees, or two trillion trees made up of a few dozen varieties), 1.5 billion buildings, and nearly every road, mountain, city, and airport across the world.
That online games remain “mostly offline” is even a surprise to avid gamers.
Microsoft Flight Simulator aspires for every town to not just differ from one another, but to exist as they do in real life. And it doesn’t want to store 100 types of clouds and then tell a device which cloud to render and with what coloring; rather, it wants to say exactly what that cloud should look like.
The average latency of a packet sent from Amazon’s northeastern US data center (which serves NYC) to its Southeast Asia Pacific (Mumbai and Tokyo) data center is 230 ms.
most internet cables are not laid as the crow flies—they must navigate international rights, geographic impediments, and cost/benefit analyses. As a result, many countries and major cities lack a direct connection. NYC has a direct undersea cable to France, but not to Portugal.
