(2023-02-25) Metaverse Creator Neal Stephenson On The Future Of Virtual Reality

Metaverse creator Neal Stephenson on the future of virtual reality. What’s your preferred current definition of the metaverse?

There’s lots of people in it. You can interact with them in real time, no matter where they are.

They’re in fictional spaces, doing fictional things.

It’s not all one unified walled garden. There are different bits of it that are created and maintained by different people and the central metaphor for going from one of those experiences to another is movement through a virtual space.

we’re going back to the late 1980s. It was pre-Doom [the breakthrough 3D shooting game], which came out the year after Snow Crash (1992) was published. Doom accomplished things that I wouldn’t have thought possible for another 10 years.

I think that foundational layer is more about enabling and making things available than deciding how things ought to be

My outfit, my magic sword and what have you, is going to travel with me from one environment to another. So suddenly, my code, my IP — which was ultimately created by a whole bunch of different designers and content creators who don’t even know each other — that is all travelling with me into various environments

The game I’ve played the most in the last year is Valheim, which started as an incredibly small group. However, they’ve synthesised a world: all kinds of intangible elements came together in a way that worked.

The aspect that appeals to me is that you’re completely alone in this world. Every time you launch a new game, it spins up, algorithmically, an entirely new, randomly generated world that is enormous. Unless you invite somebody in, you’re free to explore that world all you want and never have to interact with another human being.