• mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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    11 months ago

    The Metaverse

    There is no such thing. But rarely is there less of it than when people slap that label on Fortnite. Christ alive, John Carmack’s original plans for Quakeworld were closer to what Snow Crash described, and I’ll bet Carmack knows Neal Stephenson was telling a rude joke.

    • Immersive_Matthew@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      There are many Metaverses like VRChat and Rec Room. Very small still in terms of global users as it is just so insignificant right now, but that will change in the decades to come. Carmack does believe in the Metaverse as he once said:

      “I have pretty good reasons to believe that setting out to build the metaverse is not actually the best way to wind up with the metaverse."

      I agree. The Metaverse will just emerge naturally as no one really knows what will bring the people right now. Like Walkabout Minigolf has turned out to be a fairly large Metaverse even though few would think of it as such. My VR Theme Park that is online is the same. These are the emerging Metaverses. There will be many more coming. It has to be immersive to be the Metaverse so thinks like Fortnite would not count presently.

        • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          Even that reading is giving it too much credit, by calling it what it wants to be. Money-addicts could build The Oasis. They cannot build the metaverse. No individual force can. No more than any single billionaire dork could have built the internet. A network, yes. A network of networks, yes. But it can’t be the network of all networks, unless it’s a cooperative endeavor of basically everyone.

          And it’d never work as-described because a flat objective map of virtual space is dumb as hell. Like asking which website is north of Reddit.

          It shouldn’t take an in-depth two-hour video to dismiss “virtual real estate.” Saying it out loud will do.

      • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        “There’s lots of internets like reddit and Facebook.”

        The metaverse is a punchline. Completely ignoring how everyone today is throwing the word around with a thousand incompatible private definitions, and pretending everyone else is on-board with their particular made-up goal: Snow Crash was a satire of 1980s cyberpunk, and making the internet a virtual mall was a slap in the face.

        There will be no such thing. It’s a stupid gag. I say this as someone with a 2004 Second Life account. I used VRML. I have been through this hype cycle more than once. VR could succeed beyond our wildest dreams, and it still wouldn’t be the great big concept you’re slandering by applying it to a minigolf game.

        And for fuck’s sake, if there’s more than one of something, it can’t be a “the.”

        • Immersive_Matthew@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          It is “the Internet” though and there is more than one and we all accept? I do not understand your point there. Your passionate reply reveals there is a lot of emotion behind your words. I remember having similar conversations in the early 1990s about theInternet where it was compared to a fad. The Metaverse is a thing that will only grow and make sense in our day to day.

              • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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                11 months ago

                Also: whining about tone, as if that has any bearing on meaning, is a fallacy. Which you’ve done twice now by projecting the apparently terrible quality of… having emotion… onto some completely impersonal criticism of rich idiots’ shallow fantasies.