“Yes, but can I use it to storm the Capitol in VR?”
“Like an alien race coming to terraform the Earth and turn us into meat batteries, first, they came for our friends and families, then our schools, then our town halls and libraries and marketplaces, and then our politicians.” A lot has been said about Facebook’s plans for an allencompassing metaverse, but not much stands up to this from Internet culture writer Ryan Broderick. “They saved and studied billions of our faces and experimented on our children and our parents and figured out exactly how deeply they could worm their way into how we interact with each other. Now that they’ve reached the limitations of both our current technology and our laws, they decided it was time for an upgrade.”
Because of the many controversies on its track record, we cannot expect Facebook to behave with integrity just because it is rebranding itself. That aside, though, the company’s newly instilled commitment to the metaverse feels jarring because no one has been sitting around thinking, ‘You know what? I really like the concept of a metaverse, but I feel like I can only truly buy into it if it is orchestrated by Facebook, a name I can really trust’.
As the metaverse story evolves, Mark Zuckerberg will at least have one advantage as he attempts to control its direction: an enormous audience. As Epic‘s Tim Sweeney said recently, “It’s kind of a race to get to a billion users. Whoever brings on a billion users first would be the presumed leader in setting the standards.” The metaverse exists only in a formative state today, but it feels like we need Sweeney – and the people running Roblox, Minecraft and more – to ensure that videogame companies take leadership positions with what happens next. Fortunately, there are plenty of positive signs, as this issue’s metaverse exploration discusses on p80.
OK, enough of that for now. Let’s turn to punching people really hard in the stomach, and looking just absolutely terrific doing it – ideal when you need to unload a bit of tension. Our hands-on report into the endlessly stylish Sifu from developer Sloclap’s Paris HQ begins on p52.