virtual worlds

So, I'm reading this interview about Second Life and the Metaverse, and there's a lot to unpack.

It’s not the platform that matters as much as the community that is built around it.

(Emphasis mine.) Gee, you think?! "The tech wasn't there yet" is the eternal excuse of those who forget about people. Or look at this gem:

You can literally build any possible vision of the future you want, detached from the laws of physics and reality, and you have Meta and others saying, Let’s do virtual meetings!

Oh really? What else were people going to do in a simulated virtual space? Like this article about VRML points out:

In some ways, we surpassed “reality” as the most efficient user interface in the 1990s. Physical embodiment in a VR world is not necessary to write a paper, order a pizza, play music, or share a photo of a cat. There are probably tens of thousands of tasks that can be done more efficiently with a 2D computer interface than with 3D simulated world. There are exceptions of course, but those exceptions still form a niche.

You mean exceptions like virtual rape? Newsflash: Second Life didn't invent that either. It first happened in LambdaMOO, over three decades ago as of this writing. MUDs were already ten-year-old tech by that time. I wrote more about it back in 2010.