Note / In which I learn nothing from Matthew Ball, Consummate Metaverse Bro

In Part VIII (aka 8) of his "The Metaverse Primer," brooding futurist Matthew Ball daydreams about "content experiences" in the metaverse:

• With this in mind, we need to look beyond today’s core Metaverse content experiences. Virtual movie theaters, movie theaters, virtual concerts, virtual reality battle royales, XR theme parks — they’re all cool. But they’re all fairly incremental.

• As transformative as Travis Scott’s concert was, it wasn’t live motion-captured, it didn’t truly involve the audience, and it only reached fifty people at a time.

• What happens when this changes?

• What happens when, rather than make a titan-sized Travis Scott sitting on an outer space planet, he terraforms the planet as a god-like titan?

• Or if he’s a motion-capture version of the planet!?

• It will take time for the entertainment industry to figure out what a Metaverse radio show, TV series, porn site, or OnlyFans looks like.

• And much of this, as was the case with Fortnite, will depend on technological advances.

• But the first companies, artists, and stories to do so will find themselves situated beside the likes of Captain America, Luke Skywalker, and Taylor Swift.

TL;DR: "Bro, you think that's sick? You ain't seen shit yet!"

Is there a lesson to be gleaned from the ramblings of post-post-post-doc about what he thought about when rewatching The Matrix while high? Other than that he promises everlasting glory to the people who first solve metaverse entertainment, not really.

If anything, fellow first-generation metaverse writers (FGMW), it sounds like Herr Ball is trying to tell us to pick up and go home until the grownups with their big brains and super-duper computers are ready for the clowns to come in.

He seems to have no idea what he's talking about in this little section of a much larger essay in which he very much seems to know what he's talking about. He can't say what it is or what it isn't because — for the purposes of his essay — Matthew Ball is picturing a Platonic ideal metaverse.

But that's a metaverse in which we, the FGMW, will be elder statesmen. What needs to be done now is to track down the slices and slivers of metaverse that exist today and start telling stories ASAP.

Join me tomorrow as I try again to figure out what a current-day metaverse writer might be expected to do and how I might learn how to do it.

To learn more about how fiction and dramatic writers are inventing future forms, subscribe to Writers in the Metaverse.