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There’s never going to be _A_ metaverse. I don’t see why there ever would be. People came up with that concept when we still more or less had a consolidated med

There’s never going to be _A_ metaverse. I don’t see why there ever would be. People came up with that concept when we still more or less had a consolidated media landscape with a few tv networks, one major newspaper per city, etc. Nobody wants to live in a single shared virtual universe, hell most people don’t even seem to want to live in shared reality and have segmented themselves off into echo chambers on social media.

maxander 7y ago
And yet, (almost) everyone has Facebook. There isn't one facebook for techie types and another for evangelicals and another for the elderly and so on, they're all on Facebook. It's a more comprehensive consolidation of it's particular niche than any previous mass media format could have hoped for. It's not impossible that a "metaverse" would benefit from the same network effects. You would want to inhabit the same (virtual) reality as your friends, probably, and they would like to inhabit the same as their friends, and so on. (Which doesn't mean we would like this outcome!)
Animats 7y ago
Well, one of the original visions was Second Life and its open source clone, OpenSimulator. OpenSimulator is a sort of 3D Internet - anybody can have a server, and you can move from world to world. (The world to world transfers have problems - what do you get to bring with you? - but they exist.) Second Life was supposed to be "Internet 3.0". All businesses would effectively have to have a presence in-world. Many large ones did. They're all gone now. The vision of doing things in a 3D world wasn't the right one. SL still has about 2/3 of the users it had at peak, and is going along fine. About 35,000 to 50,000 users at any time, about even with GTA V Online. Sluggish by modern game standards, though, which is a big problem for new users. Rosedale went off to do High Fidelity, which was supposed to be a better Second Life. It works, but it flopped. That company has recently "pivoted to enterprise", having failed with their consumer product. Whether the Metaverse needs gameplay mechanics is an interesting question. It definitely needs game aesthetics. In High Fidelity, when you started up a new region, the world came up as a big piece of graph paper on which you could build. Rosedale thought "build it and they will come". They didn't. SineSpace had the same problem. Sansar (a Linden Labs project separate from Second Life) paid people to build good looking areas. They had a Star Wars prop museum, a Ready Player One prop museum... People came, looked once, and left. Second Life starts new regions with terrain that has hills, streams, rivers, roads, and trees. Sometimes a full city road grid with street lights. Management behaves a lot like a municipal government. Recently, Second Life opened some new areas of "Linden Homes". It's a nice suburbia, and it filled up so rapidly that additional areas are being added. It's developing a suburban lifestyle. There's no plot, but there are picnic and boats and pets and pubs. People hang out with their neighbors, drive around, set up community associations, and have barbecues. This appeals to people for whom middle class suburbia is an unreachable aspiration in real life, a growing demographic.
- buboard 7y ago
  > This appeals to people for whom middle class suburbia is an unreachable aspiration in real life, a growing demographic. Considering the extremely high cost of SL land, i doubt this is true.
  - Animats 7y ago
    It's quite real. A Second Life user of that suburban area wrote: "Not being American, but having been so 'TV Sitcom and Movie Americanised' over my lifetime, this is exactly what I want. When I visited the US the first time, I was in Connecticut, and I was like a kid with my face pressed up on the car window. When I got out of the car and went exploring I am not embarrassed to say I actually teared up, because there were hoops over garages, there was a bike strewn in the front yard and one front yard even had a catchers mitt and some kind of goal net thing. There were flags beside the front doors, it was everything to me."[1] [1] https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/435890-oh-the-banality/?tab=comments#comment-1886684 https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/435890-oh-the-...
    - buboard 7y ago
      This says nothing about their financial situation. US suburbia does not exist in Europe, but not because people are poor.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- jandrese 7y ago
  The SL beginner experience is so aggressively capitalist that it can be a real turnoff. You log in, do the tutorial island thing, and then get kicked into a land of overpriced cash shops from sea to shining sea. Plus the client feels like a something that grew organically out of a research project from the early 2000s and is about as new user friendly as Blender.
buboard 7y ago
> hell most people don’t even seem to want to live in shared reality and have segmented themselves off into echo chambers on social media. Most social media tend to be extremely sticky, and not segregated by echo chambers. It's not like the socialists went to twitter, rightwings went to instagram etc.
lacker 7y ago
There might be one metaverse the same way there is one internet. It's not that you want to share all your experiences with all other people, it's that when you make it easier to seamlessly move between different experiences, you make it easier for any one of them to be used.

maxander 7y ago

And yet, (almost) everyone has Facebook. There isn't one facebook for techie types and another for evangelicals and another for the elderly and so on, they're all on Facebook. It's a more comprehensive consolidation of it's particular niche than any previous mass media format could have hoped for. It's not impossible that a "metaverse" would benefit from the same network effects. You would want to inhabit the same (virtual) reality as your friends, probably, and they would like to inhabit the same as their friends, and so on. (Which doesn't mean we would like this outcome!)

Animats 7y ago

Well, one of the original visions was Second Life and its open source clone, OpenSimulator. OpenSimulator is a sort of 3D Internet - anybody can have a server, and you can move from world to world. (The world to world transfers have problems - what do you get to bring with you? - but they exist.) Second Life was supposed to be "Internet 3.0". All businesses would effectively have to have a presence in-world. Many large ones did. They're all gone now. The vision of doing things in a 3D world wasn't the right one. SL still has about 2/3 of the users it had at peak, and is going along fine. About 35,000 to 50,000 users at any time, about even with GTA V Online. Sluggish by modern game standards, though, which is a big problem for new users. Rosedale went off to do High Fidelity, which was supposed to be a better Second Life. It works, but it flopped. That company has recently "pivoted to enterprise", having failed with their consumer product. Whether the Metaverse needs gameplay mechanics is an interesting question. It definitely needs game aesthetics. In High Fidelity, when you started up a new region, the world came up as a big piece of graph paper on which you could build. Rosedale thought "build it and they will come". They didn't. SineSpace had the same problem. Sansar (a Linden Labs project separate from Second Life) paid people to build good looking areas. They had a Star Wars prop museum, a Ready Player One prop museum... People came, looked once, and left. Second Life starts new regions with terrain that has hills, streams, rivers, roads, and trees. Sometimes a full city road grid with street lights. Management behaves a lot like a municipal government. Recently, Second Life opened some new areas of "Linden Homes". It's a nice suburbia, and it filled up so rapidly that additional areas are being added. It's developing a suburban lifestyle. There's no plot, but there are picnic and boats and pets and pubs. People hang out with their neighbors, drive around, set up community associations, and have barbecues. This appeals to people for whom middle class suburbia is an unreachable aspiration in real life, a growing demographic.

buboard 7y ago
> This appeals to people for whom middle class suburbia is an unreachable aspiration in real life, a growing demographic. Considering the extremely high cost of SL land, i doubt this is true.
- Animats 7y ago
  It's quite real. A Second Life user of that suburban area wrote: "Not being American, but having been so 'TV Sitcom and Movie Americanised' over my lifetime, this is exactly what I want. When I visited the US the first time, I was in Connecticut, and I was like a kid with my face pressed up on the car window. When I got out of the car and went exploring I am not embarrassed to say I actually teared up, because there were hoops over garages, there was a bike strewn in the front yard and one front yard even had a catchers mitt and some kind of goal net thing. There were flags beside the front doors, it was everything to me."[1] [1] https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/435890-oh-the-banality/?tab=comments#comment-1886684 https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/435890-oh-the-...
  - buboard 7y ago
    This says nothing about their financial situation. US suburbia does not exist in Europe, but not because people are poor.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
jandrese 7y ago
The SL beginner experience is so aggressively capitalist that it can be a real turnoff. You log in, do the tutorial island thing, and then get kicked into a land of overpriced cash shops from sea to shining sea. Plus the client feels like a something that grew organically out of a research project from the early 2000s and is about as new user friendly as Blender.

buboard 7y ago

> hell most people don’t even seem to want to live in shared reality and have segmented themselves off into echo chambers on social media. Most social media tend to be extremely sticky, and not segregated by echo chambers. It's not like the socialists went to twitter, rightwings went to instagram etc.

lacker 7y ago

There might be one metaverse the same way there is one internet. It's not that you want to share all your experiences with all other people, it's that when you make it easier to seamlessly move between different experiences, you make it easier for any one of them to be used.