As an advertiser, you can bet that my brain is already sprinting down the aisles looking for ways to weaponize it and make kickass advertising work. But as a nerd and a gamer, I find it completely absurd. It’s the kind of internal conflict that’s enough to make a grown man cup his face in his hands and ugly-cry in the shower. But enough about me. 

If you also watched Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta announcement and felt your eyes roll so hard you could see the back of your brain, I hope that these words can offer you some comfort. You’re not alone. You’re not crazy. It is total nonsense. But in this brave new world that we live in, what isn’t?

The metaverse is nothing new

We already have a metaverse. It’s called the internet. And within it, we’ve had a lot of metaverses for a long time. Remember online forums? Second life? Reddit, Roblox, VR Chat, the list goes on. The metaverse was born as soon as we gained the ability to connect devices from across the globe in near-real-time. And since then, people have been hanging out in interconnected cyberspaces for decades. I still remember a time when my friends had to log on to World of Warcraft just to get a hold of me and end up doing homework in a virtual tavern in Dalaran. We just couldn’t do it with clunky VR headsets yet.

Minecraft allows cross-platform play between phones, consoles, PCs, and VR headsets between its 180 million monthly active users, has its own user-generated content platform with its own currency, an educational version designed for teachers and their class, and persistent cloud-based worlds that anyone can create, share, and log on to. And it’s had those features for a while now. 

So I’ll say it again. We’ve been hanging out in interconnected cyberspaces for a long time. What’s different about Meta’s metaverse? 

Nothing.

It’s a redundant concept. They just found a way to slap a meter on it. By creating its own sub-internet, Meta can own and control everything it contains: every entry point, every device, and every piece of information shared on it. And of course, it goes without saying that there’s a lot of money to be made there. Facebook is not resonating with younger audiences, so it found a new way to gross us out with another attempt at keeping us within its grasp at all times. But will it work?

People have been obsessing over the ‘metaverse’ since Snow Crash and Ready Player One, two sci-fi novels that popularized the idea of an immersive digital presence across virtual worlds. And when our beloved tech billionaires talk about the metaverse, they’re primarily drawing from that vision of living in cyberspace. Since then, we’ve made steps to make it happen with the rapid development of VR headsets, haptic feedback technology, motion controls and omnidirectional treadmills – all of which were spearheaded by the video games industry. It’s no surprise that any conversation around the metaverse inevitably leads to a discussion about gaming.

But for me, this is where it really falls apart.

With great power comes a great VR headset

In this latest attempt at gamifying our every day, it’s important to remember that a large majority of early adopters will be gamers. Why? Because most people aren’t shelling out hundreds of dollars on a VR headset. Hell, most people have never even worn one on their face, let alone experience its own unique brand of motion sickness that puts rollercoasters to shame. VR headsets are currently almost exclusively owned by gamers and the gaming-curious.

I love VR. It’s one of those things that manages to be both underrated and overrated at the same time. I just don’t think that the tech as it is today can support the tall claims that Meta is making about their metaverse. Can you imagine having to strap on all that shit every time you want to make a call? But we’re slowly getting there.

I remember playing around with an Oculus Rift Development Kit in 2013 and being incredibly excited to see where VR could take us. Then in 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus and my heart sank. I knew immediately that it was the first step in a daunting downward spiral towards the predatory monetization of my digital existence. Since then, Meta has made leaps with entry-level standalone hardware like the Oculus Quest, but how do you think they can price it so low? Like other console manufacturers like Sony and Microsoft, Meta makes a loss on the console in favor of promoting adoption. And now, with talks of integrating NFTs into the metaverse, the Triple A gaming experience is about to take a serious turn for the worse.

A true singular metaverse would destroy gaming

Every conversation around the metaverse and NFTs inevitably leads to gaming, with the claim that it’s going to help us unify our digital life into a single account, where everything we own in one game will be transferable to another, and we’ll be able to sell anything to anyone and make real money out of our hard-earned digital goods. But why the hell would I want that? Keeping aside the sheer logistical nightmare of determining the value of a Minecraft chicken egg in Halo, this ‘vision’ ignores another million problems about how games are made, and how they’re played.

Not every game is Fortnite, where characters from different franchises can just exist in the same world and the story doesn’t need to make sense. The majority of games out there are loved because they are narrative masterpieces of complicated character relationships and immersive world-building. The last thing any player wants to see in World Of Warcraft is some guy carrying an AK47 he brought over from Call of Duty. Not only would it break immersion, but it would also break balance, and balance is something that gamers and developers alike take extremely seriously. This doesn’t even account for the many problems with integrating “real value” into gaming experiences.

We already have functioning gaming metaverses (some more functioning than others), and having spent quite a bit of time in them, I can tell you that there’s nothing more disenchanting than the moment you add interactions with strangers into the mix. Anyone who has spent any kind of time in VR Chat knows that it is not what you want your every day to be like. 

Essentially everyone who’s currently hyping metaverse games has little to no experience in making or playing games, but maybe it’ll happen if we just keep repeating the right buzzwords enough times.

The metaverse is a branding exercise

At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that the Meta rebrand is just Facebook’s way of distracting investors from all the criticism of its toxic social platforms, and it was probably the right move for them.

People in tech have been chasing this vision of the metaverse for a long time, and so far, no one has succeeded. And in my opinion, Meta hasn’t shown any sign that it’s going to be different so far. Can you imagine having to set up all that gear just to attend a meeting that could have been an email? With the state of consumer technology as it is, a true metaverse in the magnitude of Ready Player One is still very far off.

In the end, I predict that the Meta Metaverse will go the way of Facebook. For advertisers, it’s gonna offer us brand new ways of interacting with our audiences on their level, allowing us to immerse them into branded experiences like never before. For consumers, it will start off shitty, then get kinda cool, then they’ll tweak it and make it worse than it started, and the cycle will continue until the next hype train comes along.

— Jay