Remember, hang on a second, let me check… three years ago? Back then, our entire executive class was possessed of the same mental malady: a curious fixation on words like “blockchain,” “NFT,” “Web3,” and “Metaverse.”
Those dark days are behind us now—the execs got bored and decided to make RAM cost $1,000 a stick instead—but you still sometimes hear a few of the words. Metaverse, for example, is a word I most recently heard from Brendan Greene (aka PlayerUnknown), whose game Prologue: Go Wayback is a sort of blueprint for ‘the metaverse, but good.’
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Greene compared holding onto the term to his continued presence on X—which has become a very different place under the ownership of Elon Musk—”It’s like, I still use Twitter, because fuck him. I was there before him.”
The vision of the metaverse Greene is working on at PlayerUnknown Productions is not quite Zuckerberg’s dread prophecy of everyone working in a virtual office and pulling products from virtual shelves (capitalists have a limited imagination). It’s a bit weirder, woolier, more freewheeling and open-source.
“I want to create spaces with the openness and unpredictability of real life,” says Greene. “So here our goal is to build that new layer, a foundation on which anyone can create their own virtual world and connect it to a larger whole, where they own what they create.”
