From Microverse to Metaverse: Modelling the Future through Today's Virtual Worlds

The metaverse is frequently portrayed as a future utopia, but it is also an effort by private corporations to dominate the real world's code. The ability to create a persistent, all-encompassing environment in the hands of companies that established and maintain the surveillance capitalism model means that all activity in that world can be metricized and commodified. This makes the metaverse worthy of critical examination. Digital places that combine various aspects of digital culture already exist, and digital worlds for socializing do, too. These discrete private "microverses" are spaces that can model the tensions that would be inherent in the metaverse.

Format: Hardback
Length: 152 pages
Publication date: 12 October 2022
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited

While the metaverse is frequently presented as a future utopia, the vision of the metaverse represents an attempt by private corporations to control the code of the real. In the hands of companies that established and maintain the surveillance capitalism model, the ability to build a persistent, all-encompassing environment means that all activity in that world can be metricized and commodified, making the metaverse worthy of critical examination.

Significant parts of life are already conducted in a digital place that combines various aspects of digital culture. Likewise, digital worlds for socializing already exist, and in a form akin to the VR metaverse, just as VR worlds based on play now coexist with online worlds of user-generated content. These discreet private "microverses," as we refer to them, are spaces that can model the tensions that would be inherent in the metaverse.

From Microverse to Metaverse: Modelling the Future through Today's Virtual Worlds examines the place attachments, world-feeling, and dwelling of several "microverses" to assess the possibilities of the metaverse as a realistic proposition. Critically analyzing the phenomenological feeling of place, the political economy of emerging tech, the mechanisms of identity and self, along with the behavioral constraints involved, the authors map what a metaverse might be like, whether it can happen, and just why some companies seem so determined to make it happen.

Weight: 301g
Dimension: 229 x 152 x 12 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781804550229