Games as a lens to what the Metaverse will be

When trying to predict what the future will look like, I find that a lot of inspiration can be found in the present. The metaverse has been on everyones lips lately and this article is my first thoughts on how to bring this concept down from the abstract "buzzword bingo cloud".

At heart I'm a gamer. I've probably spent a total of 3-5 years of my life playing various computer games and they have been a massive help in inspiring me, bringing me back up when I feel down, and I've had my fair share of moments of utter joy in computer games.

My most expensive apparel is digital

And by now you are probably wondering about that handsome cowboy in the cover photo. That is me playing John Marston in Red Dead Redemption 2, and apart from having a fuller beard than I'll ever get, he is also wearing what is undoubtably the most expensive piece of apparel I've ever owned.

To get this jacket you have to find, hunt and skin several rare animals that are only present very few places in the vast environment that is the gameworld. This took me a quite a while and dedication to find and I felt the same excitement crafting it as if I had received a new jacket in the real world.

When you consider the time spent on getting this vs my salary it easily becomes the most expensive jacket I've ever bought.

This is important in a few ways:

• The sense of excitement at getting new stuff is not intrinsically bound to the physical world.
• Good games combine stories, interactions and game loops to keep people engaged for hours. Sometimes keeping people coming back for years.
• This basic transaction of time (or money) for digital skins is already happening across thousands of games and for millions of people today.

When do we get to the metaverse?

I would argue that the future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed.

Counterstrike launched in 2000, Eve-online in 2003 and World of Warcraft in 2004. These are all very successful multi-player games that are still very relevant and being played today. They have massive expansive stories, many of them involving players or based on player interactions. They also have extensive economies often based on player-generated items.

I will most likely go into further detail of each of these games in the future. But just to name a few of the most interesting and surprising stories for me from these games are the following:

• A plague in World of Warcraft that ended up creating an in-game pandemic not unlike a real world pandemic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident
• A single battle in Eve-online costing $378.000: https://nordic.ign.com/news/43417/eve-online-breaks-its-own-guinness-world-record-for-the-costliest-video-game-battle-in-history
• Skins in Counterstrike have created a thriving economy with real world money and some fetching quite significant amounts. I'm not that active in Counterstrike, so unfamiliar with this, but have seen prices over 100k mentioned in several articles.

In these games we already have digital worlds where millions of people spend real money for digital items, they have spent years of their life building their avatar and interacting with other players. This goes all the way to getting married in these worlds as has been the case in World of Warcraft.

So in my opinion the template for what the metaverse will look like is already here. The challenge is connecting these different worlds together, allowing people to move between them and scaling this system to an internet sized virtual world.

But the biggest challenge of creating the metaverse is first and foremost to create an engaging world where people actually want to spend their time.