The Metaverse, 2030: A Boring Virtual Future Averted by Inspired Entrepreneurs and Artists

Metaverse, Metahype, Metafun—maybe all three, or even none? As of 2023, there were three billion gamers in the world. Among these, the gaming platform Roblox had nearly 55 million average daily users. Some gamers wanted to help solve real-world challenges, and a game developer could become a well-known futurist by addressing challenges with a global impact. However, instead of focusing on the whole picture, these initiatives concentrated on existential risks and remained “boringly” focused on climate change, financial crises, and other issues. Then, when Facebook rebranded as part of Meta Platforms, Inc., in October 2021, it made clear that we would henceforth need to live with the “metaverse.” Stemming from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, in which the Metaverse was an urban virtual environment with avatars as inhabitants, it was praised as the successor to the Internet. Like an overarching architectural concept with a network of subsystems (or subverses), the Metaverse (Fig. 1) was implemented on several competing or coexisting private/business platforms. The XR (mixed reality) Metaverse community, combining virtual reality and augmented reality, involved fascinating people and was leading to collective intelligence, triggering the collective imagination. Millions of users entered a virtual world for playing, employment, and relationship-making: The online world was a “reality.”