While the metaverse uses much more powerful technology than Second Life, and is an open system-more like the Internet 2.0 and less like MMORPG-it still seems likely to face the same challenges as it tries to do too many things, too. Was it a social media platform? Was it a space for virtual meetings? Was it a massive multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG)? If it was supposed to be all these things, there were better, more focused options out there-like Facebook, which started around the same time. No one could say what it was, and this became a problem. In trying to please all people, Second Life began to turn most of them away. But eventually, the novelty wore off and people stopped using it. Even The Office had a short segment on it.įor a while Second Life was enormously popular, boasting millions of users. Companies and universities created virtual campuses, buying into the hype. People could live out their lives in it, buy virtual property, do virtual work for virtual money, and build up virtual communities. Similar to the metaverse, Second Life was hailed as a game changer. What do you think about our work? Take the annual reader survey here > Naturally, due to the technical limitations of the time, the Second Life world looked and felt more like the Sims than actual life.
The metaverse is just the logical conclusion of this.īut what if the metaverse turns out to be merely an updated version of Second Life?įor those who may not remember it, Second Life was a virtual platform created 15 years ago that allowed users to interact with other people through a customizable avatar. He predicted that most of the world will succumb to Zuckerberg’s metaverse and “rationalize the blue pill by telling ourselves that this is not the subjugation of man through the machines but merely an innocent, silly side project for an obscenely rich and socially inept Harvard dropout.” After all, nearly everyone is already addicted to their screens and disengaged from the physical world constantly. No one would, suggested Declan Leary here at The American Conservative.
Play ‘red light, green light’ with your friends in Squid Game.” With all this and more being possible, why bother ever leaving the metaverse? Or your running machine to race against Usain Bolt at the Olympics (and lose). Indeed, this is the way Vanity Fair correspondent Nick Bilton described the metaverse: “You could hook up your exercise bike to race against Maurice Garin in the Tour de France. Those who take a positive view of the change tend to imagine something like the Oasis in Ready Player One, a virtual world where anything is possible and people live out their fantasies for most of their days to escape a drab dystopian reality. When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his bold plan to create an “embodied internet,” or metaverse, many marked this development as something that will change the internet forever.