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Comment by Mistletoe | Hacker News Reader

I don’t buy that the metaverse is a new invention. My brothers and I lived in one many years ago, it was called World of Warcraft around the Burning Crusade era and it was some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my life. This was before Blizzard enabled cross server play and destroyed the socialization aspect of the game. Then you lived on one server and were forced to socialize with the same players every day and make a whole world and society that existed on that one server. You had cities and factions and your guild doing raids and recruiting new players and it was another life. It was wonderful and I’m sure it will happen again someday from some other company and in some other format.

I’m always amazed to look at the servers and imagine all the lives and stories that came from that one piece of hardware.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/97tudn/one_of_world...

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The Metaverse concept has basically existed fully-formed, and even with that exact name, since at least Snow Crash (1992).

The wider idea was clearly floating around in the zeitgeist as the Red Dwarf episode where they get stuck in a game called Better Than Life aired in March that year, a few months before Snow Crash was published.

Or Neuromancer. (Any advance on Neuromancer?)

I think that Neuromancer was about as early as it went, fiction-wise.

But VR was about from the 70s (NASA's JPL had one), and the metaverse is basically VR + chatroom. Popularisation certainly happened by the early 80s, which is presumably where Neuromancer got it from.

Burning Chrome precedes Neuromancer by two years and first used "cyberspace" in the sense of a VR-like network.

True Names, 1981. Which, IMHO, is a far better story than Neuromancer, but also much less stylish, and hence less influential.

And don't forget Lawnmower Man in March 1992 [1] (Snow Crash was June 1992).

I think the "VR headsets" of the day were popular for a few years before both, driving said particular zeitgeist. As mentioned in a sibling, William Gibson { and probably Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem } presaged all this stuff decade(s) earlier.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lawnmower_Man_(film)

I enjoyed Jumpgate back in the day - a space sim MMORPG.

There was quite a funny effect that at a certain level, you tended not to leave the space stations at all. The world was dangerous and losing your ship was a pain in the butt so seasoned players rarely launched and instead socialised and played each other in the training simulation that was inside the game.

I felt the hint of a general principle: if you create a realistic world with risks, chores, costs etc. it has no value. It's not what people seek. People will need to create games within the virtual world to find leisure. The virtual world becomes an irrelevant shell of indirection you need to escape just as you want to escape the real world.

Isn't Eve Online a counterexample to this? From anyone I hear talking about it, it's the reality of it all that makes it compelling.

How it is a counterexample? Doing anything fun in eve requires a group that talks through headsets. That's exactly the leisurely socialization aspect of it. I am hard of hearing and left eve because I can't do that. Playing torn.com[1] instead.

That unlike jumpgate you often leave space station (or safe space) is just a detail cuz death/loss of a ship isn't a big issue.

[1]https://www.torn.com/2658150

You could argue that Eve's attraction is the lack of regulation, the lack of protection from scams, the lack of a police force. All things you get in the real world, more or less.

Eve has just the right mix of reality and unreality to hook its audience.

Reminds me a lot of BBSs. It's hard to develop lasting and deep relationships with random people on the Internet. Just as old WoW, many BBSs had a small group of people who hung out virtually together and you got to know them. It's the closest you can get to lifelong high school and college friendships after leaving school.

Funny enough, BBSs were the way many of the players on WoW servers pre-cross realm would communicate/flame each other outside the actual game.

When I started online gaming with an old multiplayer tank game called Tanarus, we used Usenet. With EverQuest we used EZBoard, then with WoW it was many times the server’s board on the official WoW forums.

While I’m sure there’s a bit of nostalgia shading the memories, I made a lot of friends and great memories!

I think we lost something with demise of BBSs that the Internet was never able to replace. It's one of those things where one technology is better in almost every way, but something gets permanently lost in the transition. One analogy would be the upgrade from vinyl to CD/Digital music.

Minor nitpick: while Usenet closely resembled the older BBS's, it wasn't an actual BBS per se. Ditto the other forum sites.

I guess I was more including Usenet as a part of the progression, not necessarily categorizing as a BBS.

Fair enough on the notice two, but I think people (or at least I) more generically use “BBS” to describe message boards/forums.

Anyways, appreciate the correction regardless, as after looking the actual definition, I was definitely wrong =)!

It absolutely isn't a new invention. The only thing new that everybody completely latched onto was that Facebook changed its name to Meta. People thought that meant the beginning of something new, and Meta themselves certainly didn't want to disprove that notion.

I know multiple people who have long-lasting IRL relationships because of Asheron's Call, preceding WoW by a few years. Same stuff... Get-togethers, group quests, level-up ceremonies, taking care of each other's characters and stuff (until houses came along)

Yeah; the innovative bit in the recent 'metaverse' bubble was getting VCs to shovel money in, not the actual concept.

I had a similar experience on a Minecraft server circa 2011-2015. Most fun I've ever had online, it was magical.

I mean, you are essentially playing small village in those games.

I believe there is something fundamentally perverse about neighbourhood "attrition" for the human mind. Like, you want to know people and have some sameness in your neighborhood. Nowadays people move so much. Especially in big cities.

Such experience still exists in Tibia, 1997 MMORPG.

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