Today we are going to talk about the metaverse. I know we're really late in starting to talk about this but there has simply been too much to unpack. Ever since Facebook's announcement in July brought the term into mainstream attention, there has been no turning back. You might have noticed a sharp increase in news articles covering all the latest NFT drops, new kinds of video game economies, Snoop Dogg's virtual concert etc. We even did a piece on DAOs sometime back and it has till date been one of our more popular posts. Understanding the fundamentals of the metaverse and it's characteristics can really help us put all these seemingly unrelated developments into perspective.
Let's start with some history. The term metaverse was first coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 book Snow Crash where he describes characters entering a virtual world using VR headsets. The concept has evolved ever since and really started to mature since Matthew Ball's 10 part series on the metaverse. It is a very good primer for anyone looking to jump in on all the action. In his first piece, he describes the key characteristics of the metaverse as follows:
The Metaverse, we think, will...
Be persistent – which is to say, it never “resets” or “pauses” or “ends”, it just continues indefinitely
Be synchronous and live – even though pre-scheduled and self-contained events will happen, just as they do in “real life”, the Metaverse will be a living experience that exists consistently for everyone and in real-time
Be without any cap to concurrent users, while also providing each user with an individual sense of “presence” – everyone can be a part of the Metaverse and participate in a specific event/place/activity together, at the same time and with individual agency
Be a fully functioning economy – individuals and businesses will be able to create, own, invest, sell, and be rewarded for an incredibly wide range of “work” that produces “value” that is recognized by others
Be an experience that spans both the digital and physical worlds, private and public networks/experiences, and open and closed platforms
Offer unprecedented interoperability of data, digital items/assets, content, and so on across each of these experiences – your “Counter-Strike” gun skin, for example, could also be used to decorate a gun in Fortnite, or be gifted to a friend on/through Facebook. Similarly, a car designed for Rocket League (or even for Porsche’s website) could be brought over to work in Roblox. Today, the digital world basically acts as though it were a mall where every store used its own currency, required proprietary ID cards, had proprietary units of measurement for things like shoes or calories, and different dress codes, etc.
Be populated by “content” and “experiences” created and operated by an incredibly wide range of contributors, some of whom are independent individuals, while others might be informally organized groups or commercially-focused enterprises
There's a lot to get into here but people much smarter than me have already done a good job in breaking down different aspects of the metaverse. Today will be considering only one of the above mentioned characteristics: Interoperability, which is my absolute favourite. We are not going to get into the technicalities of the infrastructure that's going to enable this interoperability. I am concerned that there is a lot of dialog on the technical aspects of the metaverse while not enough has been said about how people would want to interact within it. We are going to take a step back and look at some considerations that can humanize this interoperability. We are going to look at how interoperability enables real life crossovers and then understand why we love crossovers.
We love crossovers
I could present here a detailed analysis and the psychology behind crossovers to prove to you that we really love a well written crossover but this audience reaction to the ‘Avengers Assemble’ scene from Avengers Endgame speaks much louder. Any marvel fan or any movie lover for that matter would find it difficult to watch this scene peacefully seated in one place. It is also interesting to note how somehow the event has still not lost its magic as clearly illustrated by the number of views and comments even though this video is a poorly edited version. While the Avengers is a cherry picked example, crossovers have been along for a very long time and have existed across cultures. You can find crossovers ranging from the power rangers to Indian soap operas to music mashups to even the cross functional teams in your workplace. Crossovers have the potential to create a feeling of greater purpose, a collage of people’s capabilities, a sense of belonging and most importantly it expands the universe of your existing community.
The future of community
Reflecting upon my own experience joining a DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation) a few weeks back, I was puzzled as to why I lost the feeling of being fully engaged with my Discord server. For those of you wondering what I'm talking about, I recently participated in a bid for a cryptopunk NFT. I bid for this particular punk with ~100 others and we won the bid. What followed was a series of very exciting events wherein we formed a discord server, changed out twitter profile pictures and started interacting with each other. We were an extremely diverse group. Some were investors, some were product managers and some were just plain internet nerds. This was in part what was really exciting about the whole process: the fact that this NFT brought together a group of complete strangers who would otherwise never work together in a company or any other collaborative structure. This excitement started to slowly fade away as there wasn't much happening on the group / it got difficult to track events within the group. I concluded that it was because of the vague nature of this NFT space where everyone's still learning and are not sure themselves, which results in poor division of labor and role clarity among the members.
Gina Bianchini, the CEO of Mighty Networks (a community building / hosting platform) shares a very interesting perspective on making communities work. She shares the journey of their product and explains that her team found some of the early users of the communities requested the company to create online courses. This led her to understand that communities do not succeed or are not interesting if it’s only a bunch of like minded people chatting with each other. It works only if there's a sense of movement. People want to join communities not only to talk about what they already know but would like to develop themselves over a time horizon. People in communities want to know who the experts and the newcomers are and interact with them accordingly. I love how she takes the idea of belonging to the next level:
I think belonging feels static. So belonging feels like, "Oh, I belong in this place. And therefore I will belong in this place forever." And what I've actually observed about the most successful communities is that they actually have movement to them. It's a journey. . . . . . . we wake up in the morning and we're like, "Oh yeah, we belong." The way to solve the cold start problem over and over and over again is by giving a community a goal. We talk about it as the big purpose. What is the motivation for your community? And it's got to have movement to it. We bring together. Who do you bring together to? What are we going to do together?
Creating psychological safety
Gone are the days when only Facebook and Twitter could create network effects. Never has it been easier in the history of time to create and be a part of a community. Organisations need to pay special attention to this trend because if they do not create a sense of belonging and movement within their teams, someone else would do it for them. Psychological safety is an excellent place to start for legacy organisations looking to build a community out of their teams. LeaderFactor’s framework for psychological safety can come in handy for this.
Inclusion safety talks about the feeling of belonging as a base criteria and looks to make the members feel included. Learner safety then asks the question ‘Am I growing?’. Contributor safety and challenger safety ensure that members can confidently contribute their ideas and challenge the status quo.
All said and done we are still in the very early stages of the evolution of the metaverse. Here’s what google trends has to say about the term:
As you can see, it is still too early to tell talk about all the potential directions this could take. The spike that you see towards the end is from Facebook’s announcement. We can also see the interest by region for the term and it is no surprise that the concept is most popular in the tech capital of India. This is a very interesting time to be alive and the development of the metaverse cannot be seen as the sole responsibility of the tech community alone. The parallels between the development of the internet in its early stages vs. where are right now with the metaverse are as clear as day. So see you on the other side :)