The Metaverse

MSFS’s “virtual world” is nearly 2.5 petabytes large, or 2,500,000 gigabytes—roughly 1,000 times larger than Fortnite.

In a simplified sense, the Metaverse era can be thought of as involving the use of bits to produce 3D alarm clocks made of virtual atoms. Those with the most experience in virtual atoms—decades of it—are game developers. They know how to make not just a clock, but a room, a building, and a village populated by happy players.

Daniel Ek, the co-founder and CEO of Spotify, has argued that the dominant business model of the internet era has been breaking down anything made of atoms into bits—what was once a physical alarm clock on a nightstand is now an application inside the smartphone on a nightstand, or just data stored on a smart speaker

What I didn’t anticipate, what actually came along to drive down the cost of 3D graphics hardware, was games.

While skeuomorphism† often has utility, “The Street” as a single unifying layer for everything in the virtual world likely does not. Most participants in the Metaverse would rather teleport from destination to destination.

While Animal Crossing: New Horizons is nominally a game, its actual gameplay has often been likened to a virtual form of gardening. There are no explicit goals, least of all something to win. Instead, users gather and craft items on a tropical island, foster a community of anthropomorphic animals, and trade decorative wares and creations with other

a persistent virtual world that reached, interacted with, and affected nearly every part of human existence. It was a place for labor and leisure, for self-actualization as well as physical exhaustion, for art alongside commerce. At any given time, there were roughly 15 million human-controlled avatars on “The Street,” which Stephenson called “the

integration with other apps, 287–88, 300 “instant messaging” applications, 49, 61, 242,

Hero, 160n Habitat, 8 Halo,