Raph Koster is cofounder of Playable Worlds
Not many people can say “been there, done that” on the metaverse. But Raph Koster, CEO of Playable Worlds, has been making online worlds for more than a quarter of a century.
He gave a speech about what he’s learned from that experience at our GamesBeat Summit: Into the Metaverse 2 online event today. Koster has worked on online game worlds such as Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Star Wars Galaxies, and he understands the difficulty of interoperability, how people behave, the importance of creating standards, and the need to focus on fun.
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“I’m here to give you some real talk about what it’s actually going to take to get us to a metaverse,” Koster said. “It’s been amazing to see all of the enthusiasm and the excitement for the potential that metaverses offer. There’s been so much attention, so much money flowing into the space, that those of us who’ve been doing it for a while can’t help but hope that people take the time to look back at history, so that that money can be spent wisely.”
Not only does it take a lot money, it also involves a lot of human capital, and a lot of going down blind alleys that have already been explored over the past several decades.
“I’m here to just share some high level lessons, some mistakes that have already been made, in hopes that it saves you from making future mistakes,” he said. “We’ve had online worlds for 44 years, and any vision of the metaverse is built on top of the idea of online worlds, whether you call them online worlds, MUDs (multi-user dungeons), virtual worlds social worlds — it doesn’t matter.”
Raph Koster is CEO of Playable Worlds.
He said we’ve had online worlds since 1978. We’ve had graphics in them since 1985. And we’ve been supporting thousands of players in a world since the late 90s, Koster said. And we have had hundreds of players in a single world since at least 1992. He said the peak of complexity in virtual worlds was between 1992 and 2003.
“A lot of the problems that people think are major core technology challenges to surmount, were actually handled a quite a long time ago,” he said. “Ever since we’ve been simplifying them in order to reach broader and broader markets. So it’s important to bear in mind that the potential that people want to explore has often been explored before. And there’s a lot of things that we could have as takeaways from that time period.”
We’ve built metaverses and multiverses before.
He noted that the game industry has even built multiverses before.
“This is the idea of taking multiple online worlds and cross connecting them with basically hyperlink connections, and having them share enough of an engine framework that players can hop freely between them with one client,” Koster said. “Much like one browser allows you to hop between different web pages. But even to the degree where players can experience this content because the technology underneath allows content to be shared across the worlds.”
At the peak, these older worlds were decentralized worlds, run by volunteers and running on open source software.
“So many of the dreams that people have today for what a decentralized metaverse can look like, actually existed all the way back in 1992,” Koster said. “And it’s important to ask ourselves the question, why is it that that didn’t stick and didn’t take. And of course, to make something into a true metaverse, we need real world connectivity. The first time I personally built a virtual version of real world stores in a mall was in 1994.”
That’s how long the metaverses have had a connection to the real world. He said virtual concerts have had total bidirectional audience interaction for ages.
“The ability to carry avatar identity across different worlds ages, interactivity with classrooms, where users could complete assignments in a virtual world and have grades show up ages. None of these things are truly new,” he said. “And the big lesson here is that the big challenges to surmount are social not technical.”