Worldbuilding in the Metaverse

The ‘metaverse’ is popping up everywhere nowadays. It’s being embraced by some rather large players, to include Howard Lindzon, who recently changed his twitter handle to “ Metaverse Lindzon “

But what exactly is the metaverse? We’ll go to Wikipedia for a standard definition:

The Metaverse is a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the Internet. The word “metaverse” is made up of the prefix “meta” (meaning beyond) and the stem “verse” (a backformation from “universe”); the term is typically used to describe the concept of a future iteration of the internet, made up of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces linked into a perceived virtual universe.

This has profound implications for our future. It’s exciting, yet sad at the same time. To consider the impact, I listened to a conversation between Jim O’Shaughnessy and Tom Morgan on Infinite Loops.

Tom recently wrote the metaverse is a “winner take all” scenario. Jim disagreed. He thinks the new digital ‘metaverse’ will have a host of things people can do. Jim points to Substack as he watches popular journalists abandon prestigious posts like lead writer for Rolling Stone, or the New Yorker, to embrace the…