Avatars from Roblox, the ubiquitous Lego-like children's video game
When Lil Nas X rode in to Roblox, he wasn’t there to play. Wearing his trademark pink cowboy hat and boots, the young rapper and TikTok star towered over the audience, throwing shapes pre-recorded by a motion capture suit. Simultaneously, another, littler Nas X was in among his fans, interacting via one of Roblox’s ordinary toy-like avatars.
With 33m views across four replays in November, it was not a bad start for the popular video game platform’s hopes of becoming a hub for virtual concerts. But it also exemplified a 30-year-old idea that is suddenly gripping Silicon Valley investors, engineers and insiders, and pumping up the values of numerous tech companies – not least Roblox, whose value has surged from $24.8bn (£17.8bn) to $37bn since its public float this month.
“We think there is a real chance for Roblox to become the metaverse,” explained a partner at the revered venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz when it invested last year. “To create a metaverse!” said Fortnite’s creative director when asked about his end goal. Facebook, Snapchat and China’s Tencent are all said to be building it. There is a Metaverse Ventures, a Metaverse Capital and even a virtual real estate firm called Metaverse Properties. Advocates describe it as a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity, just as disruptive as the internet itself.
“I don’t know what it is,” says F Randall Farmer, who co-created the first ever large-scale virtual world at Lucasfilm in 1986 and has been building online communities ever since (as well as possibly the first virtual weapon of mass destruction inside Second Life). Having been through two previous metaverse moments, he sees it as a buzzword used to “fan hype” around any number of disparate companies that don’t sound as cool if one simply says they make video games or social networks.
The first metaverse appeared in Neal Stephenson’s breakout 1992 novel Snow Crash, where characters donned virtual reality (VR) goggles to enter a shared cyberspace where they could chat, buy drugs and appear in any shape they like. Stephenson has been hugely influential, anticipating Bitcoin and inspiring the Kindle with his stories before officially advising Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin and the augmented reality (AR) firm Magic Leap. “I’ve seen [Snow Crash] repeatedly in people’s homes,” says anthropologist Jan English-Lueck, who has spent the last two years interviewing VR and AR developers.
Matthew Ball, a partner at the venture fund Epyllion Industries and a prominent metaverse hawk, describes it as a grand, unified pool of persistent 3D spaces that users navigate as embodied individuals, not just web browser sessions. Crucially, he says, it must have a “fully-functioning economy”, be filled with content created by its users and allow data and digital items to be freely ported across its breadth instead of trapped in Apple-style walled gardens. “The full vision remains seemingly fantastical and decades away,” Ball wrote in January, “[but it] has become the newest macro-goal for many of the world’s tech giants.”
Roblox and Fortnite look closest to that dream. Both span multiple closed gaming platforms, with Fortnite notably wielding its sheer popularity to break Sony’s traditional PlayStation iron curtain. Both let users create and sell virtual items and content, which Roblox has nourished into a whole parallel games industry whose developers made $329m last year. Both are also well-established among Generation Z, whose oldest members are only about a decade away from entering middle management and wondering why their back always hurts these days.
Crucially, each company has persuaded numerous bands, brands and media empires to join the party, letting their often jealously-guarded intellectual properties jostle together in one world. At the South by Southwest remote conference on Wednesday, Roblox’s global head of music John Vlassopulos made artists a tempting offer: “We can generally make what you dream about come true… you’re literally running around [inside] the music video.”
Tech giants are also on manoeuvres. While Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has not called it a “metaverse”, he is open about his belief that VR and AR will be “the next computing platform” and is spending heavily on research and acquisitions that feed his goal of getting 1bn people in VR. It is heavily marketing its Oculus VR headsets, and its new “social VR” service Horizon is currently in closed beta.
Snapchat is a less obvious contender, given its lack of 3D virtual space. Yet 200m people on average use its AR features every day, layering virtual objects over real people and locations with “lenses” made by users and advertisers. To some observers, this looks like the start of another type of metaverse, “the mirrorworld”, where every physical place is interlinked with a digital double.
Microsoft has a strong footing when it comes to virtual worlds, owning video game Minecraft
Other frequently named companies include Niantic, the developer of Pokemon Go, and Improbable, a London-based firm hoping to build online worlds of unprecedented size.
Microsoft has a strong footing too, owning not just Minecraft and the Xbox, but also the sprawling bureaucratic bureau-verse of Microsoft Office and Teams, where users navigate a huge range of systems with one persistent identity (though it is not clear how this would link together with Minecraft).
While reopening may apply a brake to these ambitions, Farmer sees a more fundamental problem. “Avatars, a functioning economy, synchronous presence – I think those are all unreasonably narrow,” he says. “They’re not the future. They’re the next of the thing that we had before.”
Rather than unified 3D spaces similar to video games, he believes online communities will be less immersive, less consuming, with forms of presence and semi-presence woven into everyday life. Science fiction of the past has frequently predicted Zoom calls. Fewer authors imagined how much time we would spend reading and sending written messages, with response times ranging from seconds to a month or more.
For many in Silicon Valley, the lure of the metaverse comes from a deeper place. English-Lueck says that some AR and VR builders are enticed by the possibility of worlds that are completely subject to human control, where individuals can exert maximum agency. But she also describes a “love of experimentation” and a hope that the metaverse could allow people to try out different kinds of places, identities and societies without life-destroying consequences.
“That’s an extremely appealing idea,” she says. “There aren’t many other technologies that offer the same promise.”
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