Mark Zuckerberg starred in a video that featured, along with an inexplicably placed bottle of barbecue sauce, an important announcement for the company. Facebook was officially changing its name to Meta, a sign of just how much Zuckerberg has staked the company’s future on the metaverse. After watching the presentation, we still weren’t exactly sure we understood what the metaverse is, or why we’d want to participate in it. So we did some digging.

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Video games have been bringing people together virtually for decades in a way that more closely resembles the metaverse than other online media. Some games incorporate so many features of a metaverse, the similarities are hard to unsee. Some argue that Minecraft should count as a metaverse. It’s a game people spend hours upon hours in, literally sculpting their own worlds cube by cube. If the world is hosted on a public server it can be shared by huge numbers of people, each one of them capable of contributing to it. Minecraft economies have cropped up organically where players can buy and sell goods with in-game currency or legal tender.

Another game that’s been pointed to as an existing metaverse is Fortnite. It had a meteoric rise as a free-to-play battle royale, but it’s grown into so much more. Its popularity brought big competing powers together like Microsoft and Sony, allowing players using hardware from each company to play together and even use characters that were once exclusive to their games like Kratos from God of War and Master Chief from Halo.

So a lot of ingredients are there, but for a few key reasons some would argue they fall short of a true metaverse. For one, they’re still experienced the same way we consume most things on the internet: through a flat screen. To separate itself from the internet as we know it, users should feel a sense of “presence”, like they’re actually inhabiting the world.

What we have today also falls short in two other key areas. One is the limit for concurrent users in a world.

One more thing the metaverse requires is greater interoperability, although exactly how much no one can agree. You might consider each of these games a metaverse unto themselves, but what many futurists picture is one massive, all-encompassing online realm. It’ll even include the internet as we know it today and augmented reality that sits atop the real world.

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Read More:

What is the metaverse and how will it work?
“Essentially, it’s a world of endless, interconnected virtual communities where people can meet, work and play, using virtual reality headsets, augmented reality glasses, smartphone apps or other devices.”
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The meaning of the ‘metaverse,’ and all the terms you need to understand it
“It is unclear whether there will be one metaverse or many different separate metaverses (or any metaverse at all, really), but this seems to be the one constant: The metaverse is an immersive next-generation version of the internet, likely rendered by virtual or augmented reality technology.”
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The Metaverse Is Already Here — It’s Minecraft
“The truth is, a thriving metaverse already exists. It’s incredibly high-functioning, with millions of people immersed in it for hours a day. In this metaverse, people have built uncountable custom worlds, and generated god knows how many profitable businesses and six-figure careers. Yet this terrain looks absolutely nothing like the one Zuckerberg showed off. With Minecraft, you make a metaverse, not the metaverse. This is why these worlds work so well. If a metaverse is yours, you set the rules of engagement. You can allow open-ended activity; you can create your own property-rights systems; you can ban malign activity, or encourage malign activity. If you don’t like one world, another beckons.”
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Seeker+ is your home for deep dives, fun facts, rabbit holes, and more. Join host Julian Huguet as he unapologetically nerds out on the oddball history, astounding science and intriguing future around topics that will make you the smartest person at your next trivia night.
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