Lead image from the 2018 movie Ready Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg and based on the book of the same name written by Ernest Cline.

Ready Player One tells a story set in a virtual world called “The Oasis”. This was pretty much what I have wanted since I could conceive such a concept.

And I really, really want this fantasy realised.

The movie’s opening minutes set up the Oasis as the ultimate virtual world, as the camera pans from Minecraft to outlandish golf courses to space-Vegas before ending in on Planet Doom, a planet playing host to a seemingly endless Deathmatch. It’s there where we see one of the movie’s main characters score kills with the Assault Rifle from Halo and a side character wearing Starcraft’s Terran Marine armour in over-the-top USA livery.

The movie might have been self-indulgent and a little vapid but it showed the potential that a Metaverse might have.

The Oasis is full of highly diverse experiences ranging from competitive shooting to racing and even to hang-gliding through some crazy-looking experiences. With the entire foundation for a game already made, it makes sense that some people set off to create specific, enjoyable activities that would be too costly to develop in isolation.

It’s full of social spaces specifically designed for players to hang about in. Not many games have that built in. The closest analogue for this, in my experience, is Limsa Lominsa in Final Fantasy XIV.

The city’s central Aetheryte Plaza is generally full of people dancing, chatting and playing music. In essence, interacting with each other with the social tools available to them.

The Oasis has its own Zero-G disco, casinos and even libraries for players to make use of. Ready Player One’s depiction of in-game social interaction does rely on technology we haven’t invented yet, which makes it hard to compare otherwise.

The last thing that the Oasis does is to blur the line between player and developer. While the movie doesn’t really go into specifics, currency in the game can be converted for use in the real world. One character in the movie builds a replica of the Iron Giant to sell to other players. Another makes a living off selling items looted from players he’s killed. It created its own economy that affects the real world. The same thing probably won’t happen in reality but it is a nice idea.

The Oasis seems like the stuff of fantasy and, like faster-than-light travel, may never truly exist. Where could one find the combination of all that content, social interaction and incentive for creation in the real world?

The Current standard in gaming’s Metaverses

We’ve got all of that, actually. In Roblox.

I had played a fair bit of Roblox over the last few months to write some articles about the fascinating platform (you can read about my discoveries here) and what I found was that Roblox itself is something of a crude Metaverse.

The platform is designed as a host for user-generated content with the vast majority of the game’s content being made by players for other players to enjoy.

Players can dress themselves up however they want thanks to a robust clothing Catalogue stocked with items made by players and can end up looking like a fairy princess or a US Marine or anything in between. They can then take these avatars into games based on our reality like a restaurant tycoon game or into an anime crossover game more unhinged than Jump Force.

Just like the Oasis, there are separate experiences that cater to specific types of players, a huge range of activities to enjoy, and even some social spaces to explore.

It’s really great except for two things. The first is that it is Roblox which means intense monetisation targeted at users.

As unbelievable as it sounds, gacha games feel less predatory than Roblox.

Most games aggressively peddle premium membership and offer rewards for spending real-world cash for in-game power.

It is this model that has made Roblox as accessible as it is, however. Roblox has a few ways to let its creators earn money from their content from simply selling items in their experiences or from having premium players turn up. This model pays out so well, a pair of teenagers earn six figures a year and paid off their parent’s mortgage from their earnings.

The second is that Roblox is old and practically creaks every time a button is pressed. Most textures looked dated a decade ago and animations are practically non-existent. This isn’t really a shortcoming that Roblox can easily overcome. It came out in 2006, after all.

To make it worse, not many of Roblox’s experiences have the same level of polish and depth as a conventional game. Even the best Roblox experiences feel like pale imitations of actual games with copies of mechanics seeming to exist solely to check a box and without an entire game to make full use of them. The Rainbow Six-inspired shooting framework applied to a game centered around avoiding Anime mascots in Area 51 comes to mind here.

What lies in the Future of the Gaming Metaverse?

Getting a shinier, fresher platform to host a Gaming Multiverse relies on finding the money to make the framework and attracting more people to make the content necessary for a metaverse. There’ve been two new attempts to create such a thing.

The first attempt is The Sandbox, a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) and blockchain-based platform that has already seen support from franchises like The Walking Dead and organisations like the South China Morning Post.

It uses a lot of buzzwords but The Sandbox claims its system will help creators monetise their content through its own cryptocurrency and by using NFTs to control the supply. In essence, each asset created in the Sandbox is a finite resource that only exists in a limited quantity, unlike the infinite copies created in Roblox.

With luck, The Sandbox might be able to unseat Roblox as the poster child of metaverses.

NFTs could well realise the user-driven economy alluded to in Ready Player One with talented creators selling unique copies of their work to other users. Its standardised creation tools could enable players to carry over equipment and items from one experience to another. There is a chance that it could be the voxel-based Gaming Metaverse of the present.

The second attempt is Facebook’s newly announced foray into developing a metaverse. This attempt has just been announced and there isn’t as much known about it compared to the Sandbox but it has Facebook’s mountains of cash behind it so it probably won’t be that far off.

I can’t wait for a more digitised future as more and more of my childhood fantasies are slowly coming into being. Whether it might be The Sandbox’s model or whatever Facebook comes up with or any other competitor, I want in.

This article is part of The Gaming Metaverse Writing Contest hosted by HackerNoon in partnership with The Sandbox.

Submit your #gaming-metaverse story today for your chance to win up to $2000 in SAND tokens.