Ready Player One is Ernes’t Cline’s cyberpunk fantasy about an all-encompassing virtual reality ‘metaverse’ that allows users to bring beloved movie franchises, video game avatars and anime characters to life. Set in a near future world, the Metaverse is the refuge of our near ancestors living in a rapidly decaying urban blight-scape. As the outside world becomes less tolerable, the Metaverse serves as school, church, movie theater and gladiator arena. Citizens of the world increasingly turn to the Metaverse as a refuge from poverty, misery and boredom.
The purpose of sci-fi offers a glimpse as to a potential future path for our society. For example, Neal Stephenson’s mid-80s novel Snow Crash, which coined the term Metaverse, and seems to be hold a very strong influence over RPO, predicted the creation of the internet, itself. In it, a young pizza ninja, by the name of Hiro Protagonist infiltrates the seedy underbelly of another Metaverse to try to find the cause of a computer virus that is also deadly to humans.
But is the RPO Metaverse something that could be built in our lifetimes? The technology may yet exist, but technology might not be the greatest barrier to its creation. In an episode of the AI-centric podcast, AI-ffected, host Russ Gooberman interviewed Dennis Antapli, an AI coder and MMO analyst. In their discussion, Russ pines for a future where he can export his favorite video game avatars, especially his beloved Elven Champion Skystrider, from pre-WoW MMO Dark Age of Camelot, into a RPO-like, cross-functional metaverse.
Dennis, drawing upon his extensive MMO expertise, proceeds to rain on Russ’s parade. He notes that while the technology may allow the avatar-happy Metaverse to exist, it’s not likely to combine all of these different intellectual properties due to the high potential cost of licensing all of them.
Antapli also notes that an MMO character is nothing without her world’s ruleset. Once the ruleset is gone, the character, her armor and abilities don’t have any meaning or any context. And so, a world that incorporated characters from all of these different rulesets would have to develop some kind of ultra-complicated meta ruleset that would allow all of these avatars to interact in a coherent and balanced way. The likelihood of this meta-ruleset to be created is also very unlikely.
So, for anyone else looking for the world of Ready Player One to appear on a device like the Apple Vision Pro, you may be waiting for a very, very long time. For a technological hurdle is one thing to overcome. Overcoming massive, legal, financial and logistical hurdles may just kill the possibility of a real, all-encompassing Metaverse.
