Why the Metaverse Needs an Operating System - Part 2

I didn’t intend to write another post about building a metaverse operating system until someone made a comment about Wreck It Ralph 2. That comment had nothing to do with that post, in fact, it was more about how they wanted the idea of the metaverse to look like the cityscape in that movie.

But it wasn’t until today when I was deep in conversation on a call about brands in the metaverse that the image of Wreck It Ralph, the original movie, popped into my head.

You see, it’s all well and good building the pipes and infrastructure for all these different meta-experiences, virtual worlds, and augmented lifestyles but there isn’t anywhere for people/ users/ residents to go to start their second life.

In another previous post, I lamented how every attempt so far to build a so-called metaverse is nothing but another poorly designed video game.

The issue is simple: we are setting up the expectation that we have to do something in these virtual worlds. That we must have compelling reasons other than to just chill and hang out. That’s why most examples have turned out to be video games.

But what if that was enough for many of us?

The original PlayStation Home was exactly that for example — a place to hang out with fellow gamers.

Playstation Home ran for a decade and allowed users to create a custom avatar tied to the user’s account. Each avatar was given a personal apartment that users could decorate with free, bought, or won items. Users could travel throughout the Home world, which was frequently updated by Sony and its partners.

Users could use items to further customize their avatars or apartments.

In all, Home felt like, well, home. It was a chill place. So, what if we wanted spaces of solace and solitude to escape from the rat race and do nothing with others in the same way?

I’ve also heard talk about the need for a ‘metaverse browser’, this kind of makes a bit more sense — and this is where Wreck It Ralph comes into play because it has its own version of Playstation Home or lobby — Game Central Station.

Game Central Station was the main hub in the movie where all the video game characters congregate while not in their games. It resembled a gigantic underground subway station on the interior, but on the exterior, it is the power strip for most of the arcade games that are featured in the movie. Connecting Game Central Station and the arcades was a transit system consisting of trains stylized to represent their respective games.

The idea that if you wanted to enter the metaverse you’d do it from a central place where you could just hang out and chill makes a lot of sense the same way you enter the internet from a browser or search engine. Many MMO-type games feature some kind of lobby or launcher where you and many others can just run around or chat without much to do before diving in — even Fortnite, constantly touted by the ignorant tech journos as “the metaverse” has not only a lobby area to choose the type of game or avatar you want to use but also that period of time where the players entering the server for a game all arse about for a few seconds before diving into the game itself.

But Theo, you just said a dirty word in there — central, we don’t like centralization because it’s not open or very Web3.

Au contraire mon ami, here’s why the operating system becomes even more critical — it’s decentralized and therefore so will the main lobby. Nobody wants another Chrome/ Edge/ Brave/ Firefox browser war but if it was recognized that there was one place to hang out and start from that wasn’t controlled by anyone because everyone owned it then we might get somewhere, and how else to make the right move in this direction than to have an open and decentralized operating system specifically for this reason?

Neal Stephenson’s idea of “metaverse” in Snow Crash appeared to its users as an urban environment, developed along a single hundred-meter-wide road, the Street, that ran around the entire circumference of a featureless, black, perfectly spherical planet.

In this regard, the Street is in fact Game Central Station in Wreck It Ralph, Playstation Home on the PS3, and the operating system proposed here. I haven’t seen anything in Lamina1, Stephenson’s new venture to build Thee Metaverse (not a typo), discuss anything along these lines so either I’m barking up the wrong virtual tree, or everyone is so blinded because they want to build their version of the metaverse they’re missing the obvious.

A metaverse operating system is the connective tissue between all these disparate attempts to build interoperable and interconnected worlds but having a single entry point from which to enter, engage, and then slide into whatever experience or destination alone or with friends feels not only a natural evolution of the web towards the spatial web but also a more human and social experience that everyone owns and shares.

And isn’t that more about what the metaverse is trying to be rather than some technological marvel?

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