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Comment by explaininjs | Hacker News Reader

There is no the metaverse currently, but there are many metaverses. The definition itself is shaky and contradictory across sources. But to summarize, a metaverse is a "set of digital spaces that you can move seamlessly between", it will include "familiar 2D experiences, as well as ones projected into the physical world and fully immersive 3D ones too". It can be accessed via your phone or computer, or a VR reset for "full immersion". Fortnite is a metaverse, but some say Roblox and Minecraft aren't. I couldn't tell you how that distinction was drawn.

My favorite metaverse is RuneScape, but I unfortunately haven't visited in a decade or more. Steam might also be considered a metaverse. Which would imply Xbox Online and all that are too.

[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/meaning-of-met...

[2]: https://about.meta.com/what-is-the-metaverse/

[3]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/09/23/fortnites-...

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Not sure the Roblox and Minecraft exclusions make sense. Maybe they used to in the past but they act as all other current forms of metaverses do, like VR Chat or Second Life or GTA Online.

The consideration of Steam and Xbox Online as a metaverse is one I'm not too fond of. It kind of messes the entire idea up as you're not really using 3D avatars to communicate with others in a way that sort of replicates reality. If Steam and Xbox get considered as metaverses, we're now suddenly calling Twitter and HN also metaverses which is a bit absurd when we have perfectly reasonable names for them.

Also while the current implementations of metaverses are quite limited and mostly game related, people are setting their sights on future goals. Mainly interoperability. Right now you can't go from Runescape to VR Chat in any seamless way, you lose your friends lists, items, accounts, expectations and standards, etc. There is some work being done here, for example Epic created EOS as a layer of interoperability between any games without the usual restrictions, however the project is still very much in early stages and acts as nothing more than a universal friends list/account for now.

I was thinking more of TF2 when I brought up steam (I suppose my age is showing...). The momentary interaction is using TF2's models and game logic, but all the "metaverse" stuff is using Steam's logic (chat, inventory stores, trading, etc.)

That I definitely agree with. I also think you're right here in regards to viewing Steam's Steamworks as a sort of abstraction layer or prerequisite for their metaverses to work. Without Steamworks, TF2/CSGO/L4D/etc become isolated experiences.

That just seems like a rebranding of "the internet" to me

I don't buy this definition where everyone is having their own metaverse. There's nothing meta about that. If anything is a metaverse it's the internet, and it just sucks as a metaverse because we've let big companies and their walled gardens dominate it and prevent freedom of movement. Practically, metaverse is now a useless word since Zuck and team started promoting/misusing it.

Prior to the misuse, it had always meant a single unified network[0]. I maintain that if there is no one metaverse, there are none. Don't let the confused BS that comes from marketing people change the meaning of words.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse

There may have been only one metaverse in Snow Crash, but there's absolutely nothing that requires there to be only one metaverse. Hell, practically the whole point of virtual reality is to remove the limits and scarcity of the physical world, and thus limiting yourself to a single metaverse is antithetical to the very concept.

At its most basic, a metaverse is just a persistent virtual space shared among multiple users. We have lots of those, and have had them for years, and unsurprisingly they're pretty much all video games.

> but there's absolutely nothing that requires there to be only one metaverse.

Aside from how it was specifically used, the way the word is formulated alone suggests there should only be one. Meta loosely means above, and encompassing, on a higher plane. Verse comes from universe obviously. The unified world, above everything.

This is just another case of people confidently misusing words so prominently that the meaning changes, which "is allowed", obviously.

> a metaverse is just a persistent virtual space shared among multiple users. We have lots of those, and have had them for years

Yes, we've had them for years, and we didn't call them metaverses, and nothing was lost in that time. That's good evidence for my prior assertion that the word (with its new definition) is practically useless.

I think we're just having a semantic argument now; just because meta roughly means "above" doesn't imply singularity (you could envision a metametaverse above multiple metaverses). And the existence of a singular observable universe doesn't preclude the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics or the accompanying "multiverse".

> That's good evidence for my prior assertion that the word (with its new definition) is practically useless.

I think the word is not only useless, it's actively off-putting to most people.

> limiting yourself to a single metaverse is antithetical to the very concept.

I want to also dispute this point. The idea of the metaverse from Snow Crash was one that was federated and interoperable, like the internet was historically, and still remains, at a low level. The standardized nature of the metaverse's spacial analogy was key to the concept. It was the internet, but represented and navigable as physical space. I'd say it's "independent metaverses" that are antithetical to the concept of a metaverse.

> practically the whole point of virtual reality is to remove the limits and scarcity of the physical world

This alone makes Zuckerberg's project not a metaverse IMO. The whole thing exists to enforce scarcity.

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