Remember the Metaverse? Touted in 2021 (and into 2022), it was this groundbreaking new technology that was going to change the way we interacted online. No more would it be websites and chatrooms — it would be a digital world. Cyberspace. We would be like Tron, like The Matrix, like Mega Man Battle Network. Millions of dollars were poured into it by companies like Facebook and proponents of Web3 proselytized about digital ownership in Decentraland powered by digital currencies and those magical NFTs.
Folks, I’m here to tell you that the metaverse is real. It’s not just real, but it’s been here. Not just since 2021, but for years and decades before it. I’m talking about, of course, MMORPGs.
Massively multiplayer online role playing games have been around since the late 1990s (and even earlier if you include MUDs [multi-user dungeons] as part of the genealogy1). From Ultima Online to RuneScape and World of Warcraft or Second Life, these video games are shared online spaces where multiple players are able to run around and do stuff. Sometimes that stuff is a player’s personal quest, sometimes it’s teaming up with other players for a big quest, and sometimes it’s coming up with a way to game the virtual economy. Point is, it’s a world you can log into and interact with other people all doing their own thing.
I’ve been thinking about MMOs (and the metaverse) lately because I’ve gotten into Star Wars: The Old Republic, an MMO that came out back in 2011 that finally released a Mac build, meaning I can play it without having to jump through virtual machine hoops. Sometimes, I play the game alone and roam the galaxy as a Jedi or Smuggler or Bounty Hunter and doing Star Wars stuff. But the real fun — and indeed the reason I got into the game in the first place — comes with playing it with my brother and friends.
Every now and then, when schedules align, I’ll log on alongside three others and we’ll find some mischief to get up to. It might be helping one player with their story quest, it might be doing one of the four-player flashpoints, it might also be us trying to decide what to do and then realizing it’s too late at night to actually do anything. All the while we’re connected on Discord and catching up. The game is fun (and cracking that teamwork for a tough Flashpoint boss is so gratifying), but it’s also a medium to virtually socialize.
If all this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s one of the things I enjoy about Destiny. And it’s also one of the reasons I was nonplussed by the promise of a metaverse a few years ago. Virtual spaces exist and they have existed, what does a company like Facebook or a Web3 architecture offer that’s new?2 Accessibility is perhaps the best argument for a franchise/system agnostic shared world, but there are a myriad varieties of online games these days, from Animal Crossing to Fortnite. With so many options available, what did a platform that heralded giving its avatars legs with massive fanfare have to offer?
Having already lost around $80 billion on its great metaverse experiment, Meta (née Facebook) is ‘pivoting’ away from its old promises and repositioning its ‘game’ as a mobile app and competitor to very established (and wildly popular) games like Fortnite and Roblox. It seems the social media giant has finally realized, after burning through the annual GDP of Slovenia, that their revolutionary tech is hardly novel.
A big reason that MMOs and other shared visual spaces (and with VoIP platforms like Discord, any online game can be a shared space, be it Among Us, Golf With Your Friends, or board games) are so popular is that they augment social interactions without trying to replace it wholesale. I don’t want a virtual place I access just to see my friends — I want to see my friends while we do something together. There are also a dozen ways for me to take work meetings, taking one in Facebook’s metaverse would be as weird as taking one in Destiny.
Getting into The Old Republic over the past few months has only given me a greater sense of skepticism towards any new metaverse touted by a tech baron as a revolutionary new virtual town square. We have metaverses, we’ve had metaverses, and we’ll continue to have them. And even though my brother and I live on opposite sides of the United States, we can hang out together in The Old Republic and catch up as we fight bad guys with lightsabers.
- MUDs sound fascinating, both from the tech idea of taking an early game like Zork and making it multiplayer over nascent computer networks and from the social aspect of one of the first things people did with games and the internet is figure out how to connect with each other. ↩︎
- If I hear one more person describe how owning an NFT means you own it forever and everywhere in any incarnation I will either sigh in deep disappointment and shake my head. ↩︎
Essays, Not Rants! 