it is 1:30 am
metaverses are really funny to me. we collectively decided that people who wanted to live online were lame creepy weirdos in the aughts and now a bunch of rich fucks are trying to convince us that it's actually cool if you involve crypto. stupid. i dont really want to spend words dunking on metaverse or crypto shit because if you throw a rock on twitter you will hit 1 million billion words dunking on metaverse and crypto shit and im preaching to a small choir, like a "small catholic parish in new england" choir in terms of both size and utter devotion to the cause.
what is a little interesting to me is that metaverses aren't really new at all and that a lot of mmos seem to be or have been metaverses.
world of warcraft BACK IN THE DAY (coughs like the worlds oldest shittiest guy) was really, really popular for a video game and a lot of ink got used talking about not only the cultural conventions and practices and tendencies of its population but also about its economy. and it wasn't even the first of its kind to get this kind of analysis! edward castronova determined the gdp per capita of everquest in 2002 , which would have ranked 77th highest in the world if norrath was a country (this remains my favorite factoid for when i want to impress other trans women using my knowledge of the specific genre of video games i obsess over). second life lived a long and fruitful life and is still sort of around. eve online is still causing real financial damage to people. world of warcraft IN THE CURRENT DAY (coughs like the worlds youngest least shitty baby) lets you buy gold for money, which OFFICIALLY gives its currency, and therefore your activities within the game, an actual monetary value. we live in a world full of metaverses! people are constantly buying digital goods with real money! why arent all the crypto-laden attempts to do metaverses getting off the ground?
this is the part where i actually dunk on metaverses
i think facebook is the only company trying to make a metaverse that has any business making a metaverse, and thats because social media and metaverses are in direct competition. forgive me for sounding like an oldest shittiest guy again but all the people who could potentially get really into second life are like, facebook grandmas now. there's a way to have a life online, and it's free, and it doesn't require an expensive pc, and advertisers are wicked attached to it, and it's called social media. facebook could conceivably get meta off the ground if meta didnt like, suck, and if meta did actually successfully subsume facebook's userbase, it would really change people's basic expectations of how online interactions should work and what medium they should exist in. but it's never going to work because it 1) is based on prohibitively expensive and useless hardware (VR) and 2) sucks.
as for online games, i dont think the industry is currently pointed in a direction where online ecosystems will flourish like they used to. social media is a huge, easily accessible place to have online interactions, and mmos no longer have to serve as the primary avenue of communication between their players, having been supplanted by discord and such. a lot of players at this point consider interactions between players to be a negative in multiplayer games, which makes sense considering that going on twitter after an sff author makes a contentious tweet feels like you're watching a bunch of elves autoattacking each other to death and there's only so much of that a person can take unless you are a sick, sick puppy like me. after about a decade of online ecosystems being uniquely huge, horrible, and terribly relevant to our daily lives, people don't want any more of them, even if this one lets them pyroblast unsuspecting alliance players once every three minutes.
"but cadence classic wow was a success" yeah that's because classic wow was able to appeal to nostalgia - nostalgia for the game itself, sure, but especially nostalgia for that pre-facebook online ecosystem. "sense of community" is maybe the most repeated three-word phrase that comes to mind, and it makes sense - the game gave you an artificial identifier (faction) and put you through the same experiences as other people with that identifier, so of course you're going to be inclined to have some sense of camaraderie with those other people and more willing to go autoattack the shit out of the people with the opposite artificial identifier. people do that stuff on twitter and tumblr and so on now, except the identifiers are real things like "transgender" and the people you're autoattacking online are autoattacking you back for reasons that actually endanger you.
my big point i guess is that there really isnt any wonder big ambitious pvp mmos have trouble getting off the ground these days. online conflicts via social media are nasty and personal and remarkably unsilly, and it makes sense that nowadays people want to avoid taking part in online ecosystems in favor of carefully curated multiplayer-optional experiences (mildly off topic: i have a feeling most people play souls games with invasions turned off). my bigger point is that if elon musk manages to sink twitter he will revive an ailing genre of multiplayer games and become my greatest hero. pleaselikeandsucucsghufgghsdlgjf
