Is Metaverse the Future of Gaming?

The Metaverse is a nebulous concept that has been floated about, by some, as the next big thing, and people often want to jump on board these kinds of things. We want to be part of the next big thing, but for every early adopter of the iPhone, there’s also an early adopter of the Google Glass. And, for those who are even able to remember that thing, it did not last. So, how should we view the Metaverse?

There are the optimists. The people who believe that the Metaverse will revolutionize everything and provide us with a new digital utopia. However, those optimists need to be a little more grounded than they currently are. The issue with being too excited about this kind of technology is that this tech is most famously in the hands of gigantic corporations that probably don’t have your best interests at heart.

These companies want to be able to harvest your information and they also want to turn the Metaverse into the next big workplace that they can control. Sure, there are fun things you can do in the Metaverse, but it will also be the place you may end up doing work, such as with Play-to-Earn games, or the place you may go to feel closer to others. These companies essentially want it to be the new social media and the new office.

 

Here’s the problem. Companies like Meta would want the Metaverse to be a clean, controlled place. A place they can better advertise to you, a place they can better get you to buy stuff, but if you want to see what a proper digital utopia looks like, in which it really is the next frontier, then you should have a look at something like VRChat instead.

VRChat was, and that past tense “was” is very intentional for the reason that will become apparent, a game in the broadest sense. You could do everything that you can do in the Metaverse, except that you could play it ever since early 2017 rather than the few months of Meta’s involvement in this space, and it was a great place for many people. Now, the reason you can’t really call it a “game” in the traditional sense because it’s more of a series of chatrooms where various other things can be done, like watching stuff or playing mini-games.

However, VRChat allowed intensive mod support. So, there was everything. There were rooms modeled after various fictional and real-world locations, it became a bastion for people who struggle in the physical world, and it was just a place of unmitigated creation. Still, you may notice all this “was” stuff. Well, that’s because VRChat axed its mod support.

Mods may allow for some amazing things, but they also allowed for the contravention of copyright law and, of course, there were people who figured out how to have sex in the game. And not just sexting, they had full-on setups. People Make Games did a great investigative piece about this a few months ago if you want to learn more. Now, on one hand, this is pretty amazing. A place for pure, unfettered creation where people can get up to all sorts of things and, when they’re just consenting adults, it should all be fine, but breaking copyright law and allowing adult-only content is bound to draw attention.

So, VRChat got rid of it all. Safer to burn it down than risk a lawsuit, and this should be seen as prescient of the Metaverse as a whole. You see, Meta, the company that refuses to call itself Facebook anymore, is not going to anger advertisers and legislators. They do not want to invite regulation or angry lawyers. They want to play it safe.

And playing it safe means that the Metaverse will never be anything like VRChat. It will never be a place of true freedom because it will always be corporately controlled and operated. They will not allow extensive, unregulated mod support because that will be bad for their bottom line. They cannot allow that to happen. They will not allow that to happen. The Metaverse is going to be a dull, boring thing forever because it’s run by a company that’s too afraid of scaring away the moneymen.

VRChat knew it would never be some titan like Facebook, but Facebook is never going to allow itself to be anything but a titan. So, they will push the Metaverse, they’ll pretend it’s the final frontier, but it isn’t. It’s a thing that some people will use for a while and then it’ll fall away. Or it’ll stick around as a relic of something that could never become what it wanted to become, like all those MMOs that couldn’t compete with World of Warcraft, like WildStar.

 

And as such, it will never have a massive influence on gaming. But gaming may take to it for a while. Gaming loves doing gimmicky nonsense that doesn’t stick. Think about it. Take a trip down memory lane. Remember when every console had its own special controller, but then we all fell behind the DualShock/Xbox Controller layout. Remember when they tried to convince everyone that 3D was the next big thing? Remember when Sony tried to make motion controls a thing by forcing you to sometimes do something with your controller in a game, like turning a wheel or something else that was utterly trivial.

These things didn’t become the next big thing because they could never be the next big thing. They were just gimmicks. Gimmicks come and go. They ebb and flow with the tide. They’re attempts by corporations to try and get something, anything, to stick. Something that can set them apart. Nintendo had a hit with the Wii, so everyone tried to emulate some aspect of it, but not even Nintendo fully recaptured the cultural force they possessed because of the Wii.

Fads, trends, and gimmicks come and go. We were also told that VR could replace screens, but most of us would never wear one of those things unless we were completely alone. Imagine gaming with the VR headset while other people are present. That would be ridiculous because we already know what works: a screen.

We figured out the main means of working with games back in the nineties already, and it’s doubtful that anything else is going to happen to really and truly shake things up. Maybe the Metaverse does do that, but it’s not very likely.
 

Justin van Huyssteen (@LC_Lupus)
Senior Editor, NoobFeed