The "Metaverse" Is A Lot Simpler Than You Think

When I was younger, I used to play an isometric social game called Furcadia.

Back then I was known as an "art Beekin", someone that users could contact to get assistance on anything from editing avatars to uploading worlds to the platform. Furcadia functionally resembled titles like Roblox and VRChat, but was isometric and comprised of pixel avatars rather than mesh creations. It was an era of the internet where simpler graphics and whimsical design was king.

Furcadia was a great starter community for me. They gave me my first commissions as an artist; I helped to create official avatars for the kitten and owl variety offered in the game for pay. The administration built lore for the main world. One developer and writer for that lore, named Talzhemir, was responsible for quite a bit of it. There are still traces of her work online today.

Talzhemir wrote not just lore, but game theory that connected tabletop roleplay rules to facilitating roleplay online. Here's a page on her ideas of roleplay as an example. As with all game writing, the ideas listed can be dated so don't expect to agree with everything there.

One day I was rifling through Talzhemir's online journals when I came upon some references of attempting to make Furcadia into a 3D game client. Ultimately the attempts failed, but I remember her saying one thing: "One day we'll be in 3D." I do not believe she meant this as a Furcadia "we". I think she meant this as a collective "we", the "we" that is the internet.

That sentence stayed with me for a while.

Fast forward several years.

Live service games are well into 3D territory now. Furcadia is still chugging along, but now a new platform from the creators of the hit title Gorilla Tag has been released called Orion Drift. According to Another Axiom, Gorilla Tag saw millions of users playing games there at their peak. As someone whose game writing and content creation eventually landed her a freelance job writing for UploadVR, I wanted to see how users were reacting to the birth of a new platform.

I teleported in and eventually found myself floating around the "main lobby" space station. Below, I saw waves of players sweeping through the lobby map. The picture above shows how each play area exists on a different point of the station. Move so far away from one area and gravity will shift under your feet until you are properly reoriented for the next area.

Are new players going to accept this mode of movement?, I ask myself. But as soon as I thought that, I heard a kid yell on the mic: "Yesterday we were monkeys. Today we are robots!" A cheer went up from other players at his exclamation. They totally got it. There no questioning and no time needed to unpack what any of it meant. They were gonna be just fine.

If this line of thinking, this "we" persists as we change from one virtual place to another, what does that mean for cyberspace?

That little kid yelling on the mic and Talzhemir very likely don't know each other. How are they both speaking in the same way? Where did this "we" come from?

I have a theory for that.

When I'm online in a 3D space, there are three things I know:

• I'm on the internet.
• I'm in a place, which exists on the internet. I cannot access this place without accessing the internet.
• When I'm not in a 3D place where my friends are, I sometimes think of that other place where they are.

This means I have drawn somewhat of a mental map in my head, "here" versus "there". In a very loose way it serves as my personal map of the internet.

This map can contain all kinds of places online that you frequent. If all your friends are playing Fortnite but you prefer VRChat, you might say "I'm over here in VRChat". Or, "They're over in Roblox right now". Or if there's just one map on a platform someone really loves and they never go anywhere else, you might state the name of that place directly. "He's always on that brainrot map." Something like that.

But "over there" and "over here" or "somewhere else" means you've assigned directions to where everyone is including yourself, all relative to you. The connections you have to these places are very real, though, because it's your personal connection with other people that links those places to you.

That's your cyberspace. It's very different from people's idea of what a "metaverse" is. Whenever something comes into being that media has described as the future, it's always less fantastical than what we imagined it to be. (Though to say any of this isn't fantastical disrespects the medium, but you get what I'm saying.)

Well, here it is. This is your metaverse. It already exists and you've been accessing it for a long time.

Wait, what?

Yeah. This is it. The "metaverse" isn't one platform. It's all of them combined. It's not just the flat internet, either. It's the internet while you're sitting around in a chill lo-fi bedroom map, watching anime with your friends, as you scroll on Reddit from a floating screen. It's seeing a concert in Fornite before you attend a party on Resonite. Every platform or site you frequent is its own planet, orbiting within a solar system that exists in your head.

So why wouldn't anyone want to promote this?

Number one, it doesn't mesh well with the investor bro vision of the future. It isn't so exciting to think of a virtual world you can't scoop up and completely own by yourself. It forces you to share an internet with others, where anyone can buy a domain and build whatever world they want out of it.

When someone argues "Fortnite/Roblox/etc is a metaverse", they're actually saying these places are their preferred platforms. That's the proper term for a live service game that journalists have been using professionally for a while. There is no one platform that is "the metaverse". That's not a thing and will never be as long as there are involved companies competing with one another.

As the XR industry embarks on a new hype cycle with more platforms appearing on the horizon, can we finally put this "metaverse" talk to bed? It's the internet. It's cyberspace. It's The Wired. It's whatever.

But what it is, is something that belongs to everyone. Good luck trying to snap up all that real estate to hoard for yourself.