Introduction: Five Stories about Five Core Metaverse Concepts

As I write this in early 2023, over 500 million monthly active users inhabit online platforms that fit the broadest outlines of the definition of the Metaverse at the start of this book. That's roughly one in ten of the entire global population connected to the Internet. (As to that definition's particulars, I'll tell that story in Chapter 1.)

Most of the leading metaverse platforms are outlined in the following table:

The Metaverse Platform Landscape, 2023-Market Leaders

Numbers in parentheses represent dates of public statements by the platform company or from major news/industry publications. Other figures represent estimates or third-party counts from New World Notes, along with RTrack and Metaversed. consulting.

Anyone not already within this proudly geeky half-billion-sized cohort may wonder why these platforms and their largest representatives-Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, and so on-should have any relationship to the Metaverse. Aren't they just online games?

They are also online games, yes, but their potential extends far beyond that category. All of them share five core features that are integral and unique to metaverse platforms. Taken together, these features offer a new and largely better way to experience the Internet-and an advance to the kind of Internet experience that the remaining nine in ten people online have grown accustomed to.

But rather than discuss these core features in the abstract, let me tell you about five people whose lives have been changed by them.

Fran and the Immersive Virtual World

One day Fran, a senior citizen in Southern California, noticed it had become difficult for her to stand from a sitting position or maintain her balance while upright-the first indications of Parkinson's disease, a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that afflicts millions around the world.

Fran was also an active Second Life user at the time, enjoying it as a fun way to socialize with her daughter, Barbara. Sometimes for fun, she'd have her avatar practice tai chi, a nice visual reference while meditating herself.

Then Fran noticed an odd thing: She seemed to be gaining significant recovery of physical movement-apparently, as a direct consequence of her activity in Second Life.

"As I watched [my avatar]," she told me in 2013, "I could actually feel the movements within my body as if I were actually doing tai chi in my physical life, which is not possible for me."

For a year up to that point, she sat and even slept in a motorized lounge chair.

After weeks of watching her avatar practice tai chi, however, "I could feel that my body had become stronger."

Until a day came when she was able to stand without motorized assistance.

"Now," she added, "I can go from a sitting to standing position without even using my arms to push against the arm rests. This has been absolutely thrilling for me."

Using a virtual world, in other words, seemed to abate her Parkinson's symptoms.

Fran's story first came to me through Tom Boellstorff, professor of anthropology at UC Irvine. Author of Coming of Age in Second Life (the echo of Margaret Mead is intentional), he's among the most well-respected academics studying the social implications of virtual worlds. Tom met Fran and Barbara offline, recorded video of Fran's physical recovery, then went on to receive a National Science Foundation grant (with his colleague Dr. Donna Z. Davis), to study virtual worlds and people with disabilities.

Though Boellstorff and Davis are anthropologists by training and not medical experts, they have a theory about the nature of Fran's recovery, and hope it can be researched further.

"We believe that Fran's experience may be similar to results in other current research being conducted with individuals with brain disorders or injury," Dr. Davis told me back then. "Where, by watching yourself-or your avatar-you are essentially retraining the mind to function."

While the implications of this have yet to be studied to their furthest potential, they are likely to be profound-especially in the face of a rapidly aging population around the globe. From what we can tell, they are made possible because this happened in an immersive virtual world.

Immersion is the sense of feeling so situated within a 3D virtual world, your awareness of the surroundings beyond your digital screen mostly melts away. Immersion powers the success of videogame consoles, PC games, and even 3D titles on mobile, especially titles in the category called "AAA"-big budget, action-oriented games with highly vivid 3D graphics, such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Grand Theft Auto Online. Each has sold tens of millions of copies, earning revenue that puts them in competition with Hollywood's most successful movies.

Immersion is also what first brought me, through many lateral moves, into the metaverse industry. I specifically credit the astoundingly influential PC game Thief: The Dark Project (1998) for achieving a sense of immersiveness that felt like a fundamental shift. In this story of an antihero cat burglar in a nameless steampunk city, the player progressed through careful awareness of the world, learning to stealthily blend into its shadows. Thief and its many successors convinced me that immersion could elevate interactive experiences beyond mere arcade games into something more profound.

The growing popularity of immersive online virtual worlds, first seen in sword and sorcery MMOs like EverQuest (1999) and World of Warcraft (2003), expanded my excitement; now, other people were part of a virtual world that you simultaneously shared together. Typically, these worlds are fanciful but recognizable simulations of our offline world, with mountains and oceans and cities and the like, visually appealing and varied enough that many people would want to explore and interact within them together.

"For me the foundational thing is that virtual worlds are shared spaces," as Tom Boellstorff puts it. "They are places online and that's what makes them different from email or Twitter. And you even see this in English with prepositions, where people say you go on Facebook, but you go in Roblox or in Second Life or whatever." And it's how Fran happened to come across an inviting meadow with a community meditation space for practicing tai chi in Second Life, which ended up changing her life.

Fran is hardly alone. Drawn to this "you are there" quality, a large contingent of people enjoy digital immersion, whether in single player games or shared multiplayer spaces. Steam, a top online distributor of immersive PC games, has about 125 million active users; one in five global consumers reportedly owns a videogame console boasting immersive graphics and audio capability. Hundreds of millions play 3D games on mobile; one title alone, the mobile version of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG), attracts over 50 million daily users at peak.

By my estimate, the existing audience for immersive experiences is about one in four people with Internet access worldwide.

Nick and the Power of Virtual World Avatars

Immersiveness creates a metaverse platform's sense of social presence; avatars create the sense that you are part of that world and can be perceived by others in it at the same time.

Taken from the Sanskrit word for "godly incarnation," the...