What I find interesting is that when Stephenson wrote REAMDE, he said that he had come to the realization that MMORPGs were how the Metaverse happened in real l

What I find interesting is that when Stephenson wrote REAMDE, he said that he had come to the realization that MMORPGs were how the Metaverse happened in real life. From https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/09/19/neal-stephenson-reamde-video-games/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/09/19/neal-step... > That was the thing I totally missed in Snow Crash. When I was thinking up the Metaverse, I was trying to figure out the market mechanism that would make all of this stuff affordable. Snow Crash was written when 3D imaging graphics hardware was outrageously expensive, only for a few research labs. I figured that if it were ever going to become as cheap as TV, then there would have to be a market for 3D graphics as big as the market for TV. So the Metaverse in Snow Crash is kind of like TV. > What I didn't anticipate, what actually came along to drive down the cost of 3D graphics hardware, was games. And so the virtual reality that we all talked about and that we all imagined 20 years ago didn't happen in the way that we predicted. It happened instead in the form of video games. And so what we have now is Warcraft guilds, instead of people going to bars on the street in Snow Crash.