‘Metaverse’ Term Creator Neal Stephenson Not Bullish About Massive Adoption of Virtual Worlds

Neal Stephenson, ostensibly the first to coin the term “metaverse,” issued his opinion about the future of the adoption of virtual worlds. The sci-fi writer and co-founder of Lamina1, a blockchain metaverse company, believes that building experiences that millions of people consider worth having in virtual worlds is quite difficult, hampering the adoption process of the tech.

Neal Stephenson, believed to be the creator of the general concept and term “metaverse” — popularized recently by Meta — believes that mainstream adoption of this tech might be very far away. The writer, who coined the term as part of his novel Snow Crash, published in 1992, stated that the growth of the metaverse will depend on the quality of the experiences offered in the virtual world.

As part of an interview offered to the Financial Times, Stephenson stated:

There won’t be a metaverse that is used by millions of people until it contains experiences that millions of people find worth having, and making those experiences is quite difficult.

The author, who has established a clear relationship between the metaverse and gaming technology, explained that “the games industry is the economic engine and the technological engine that obviously is going to be the foundation of any future metaverse,” citing Doom, the game created by ID Software’s John Carmack, as one of the games that kickstarted the metaverse era.

Stephenson also explained that blockchain and the metaverse have a natural relationship, enabling interconnection between the various worlds as part of a bigger world. The writer says that part of the reason behind the creation of Lamina1, the company he co-founded, was to lay a foundational layer for the creation of digital worlds that have an “engineering level that are a pretty good match with what blockchains are capable of.”

The internal design of a metaverse can be done in a centralized way, but the movement of this data from one metaverse to another, part of a bigger metaverse, can be done using blockchain-based tools. He declared:

I think that to build a metaverse, we’re going to have a situation where people are moving freely from one environment to another… all of that smacks of a decentralized kind of network of interactions and financial transactions that puts me in mind of blockchain and other decentralized finance kinds of constructs.

What do you think about the opinion of Neal Stephenson on the future of metaverse adoption and the relationship it has with blockchain? Tell us in the comment section below.