"Gaming is like masturbation. Everybody does it, but nobody likes to talk about it."
So why the f*ck do we call it 'the metaverse' now?
You can’t open your eyes in the morning without getting them bombarded with ‘news’ about the metaverse. People are buying virtual land for millions and millions of dollars, setting up fashion shows, creating NFT-shoes avatars can wear and more and more and more.
It’s tiring…
Why? Because there is no such thing as a metaverse. A metaverse should be a digital universe in which you can, for lack of an easier explanation, live your life. You wake up in the metaverse, you go to your job in the metaverse, you go to drink beer in a bar with friends in a metaverse. And that should all be done in ONE metaverse, not in separate instances.
Those separate instances already exist and have for al long long time. And you’ve probably interacted with one, or maybe even more.
They’re called videogames…
You know, those things in which you control an avatar to go do stuff. Mostly kill other people or aliens, or maybe race a car or two. But you can do more mundane stuff like drink a coffee with a friend, walk around a town, go horse back riding or even just sit in the grass enjoying the sunset. It’s absolutely nothing new. Just look at any GTA game that came out in the past decades…
But if they are so similar to the metaverse, why don’t we call them ‘the metaverse’? I don’t know. But it gets even weirder, because there are some really crappy games like Decentraland, which do get called a metaverse.
Why the differentiation between the two? It probably has something to do with the ability to earn cash with NFT’s and buying real estate… But I’m not going down that hyped up rabbit hole right now.
In the last year spoke to a couple of metaverse experts (yes, they exist). All those conversations got a bit weird when I asked what the metaverse is in their eyes. Without fail, they all started explaining immersive 3D-experiences, as you read about in the news. But all their examples had one thing in common: they where essentially games, but less sophisticated.
When I told the guys I saw those experiences for what they are: immersive 3D-experiences or even games, the same as we did until the magic buzzword ‘MeTaVeRsE’ came to be, you could tell they never thought about it that way.
It seemed like the ‘experts’ where all blindly jumping on the bandwagon which clearly was going the same direction as every other buzzwordmarketeer, straight to the holyland called the metaverse where Zuck probably is God.
But that’s beside the point I’m trying to make here.
Now, I must say there are constructive conversations about the metaverse in which I can have a level discussion of what it is we’re actually talking about. And more importantly where we stand now.
And usually those conversations end in the same conclusion: there is no metaverse, and we don’t know if there ever will be one. What is for damn sure is that there are videogames (which are eerily similar to the metaverse) and that they represent a growing market with huge opportunities in the future.
It feels to me like we’re trying to get gaming to be mainstream by calling it the metaverse. All the while gaming is already mainstream. It’s the biggest entertainment industry worldwide, even bigger than movies. And yet we act like it doesn’t exist among professional adults.
It’s still seen as a thing sweaty, unhygienic losers who don’t know what the outside world looks like, do in a dark attic. Still, after the industrie has been booming for more than 40 years.
Although the 69 billion dollar deal Microsoft did, might have helped getting gaming to be more accepted. Even when Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, told the press it was all about preparing for the metaverse, which it most clearly was NOT.
I think Seamus Blackley, the creator of the Xbox, says it best: “Gaming is like masturbation. Everybody does it, but nobody likes to talk about it.” And I think it’s about time we professional people get to call the metaverse for what it is: a videogame.