Raph Koster: Real Talk about a Real Metaverse

I love this article because it puts the metaverse in historical context, which is so important post the 'ahistoric turn' where people can't believe they are living in a unique moment separated from the rest of our experience.

That said, I think it underestimates the importance of improving technology.

Virtual Reality has been a north star of our culture since at least the 1980s being a persistent theme in fiction and science fiction (you knew Star Trek The Next Generation had jumped the shark when in half the episode they never left the Holodeck) and in culture such as video games, as much as the reality was a pale shadow of what we imagined.

I remember the bad old days of VRML in the 1990s when I argued with people who thought it was all junk because it didn't measure up to games like Doom and Descent and others didn't realize what a big problem it was that it was inevitable that you'd wind up turning your back to a 3-d model and not being able to find it again. Today I dream about turning an abandoned big box store into a VR park -- the other day I found out that Disney tried this and failed in the 1990s.

What I do know is that culture lags technology. Futurists in 1970 expected people would be getting personalized news from a service like the web in the early 1980s, and they did in the form of services like VideoTex, MiniTel and Compuserve.

One thing that killed it was that the technology was expensive; in principle a single corporation could have designed an end to end system (the phone company in France did) but without a clear plan to make money on it (or save money by not printing phone books) they wouldn't do it. By the time the web came along people were able to build it without worrying about what it costs and think about paying for it later.

Facebook became a household word and insinuated itself into commerce not because it was adopted by firms like Apple, General Motors, and Disney, but because the Thai Restaurant with great food and terrible atmosphere put "Like Us On Facebook" in all of their marketing materials and made Facebook a key touchpoint for their customers.

I agree with Ralph that 2-d presentation will always coexist with 3-d presentation, but 3-d presentation may well get better and much more accessible to a wider range of organizations. The frustration we've had since the 1990s might very rapidly fall away to something that looks like Ready Player One.