How Immersive Virtual Worlds Can Transform People for the Better: Excerpt, <em>Making a Metaverse That Matters</em>

Why does the Metaverse matter? Because at its best, it enables millions of people around the world to serendipitously form diverse, creative, economically sustainable communities in the same shared, immersive space — one that's largely free from the toxicity of traditional social media and barriers of the real world which divide us.

In this excerpt from Making a Metaverse That Matters — audio version 50% off until June 7 on Audiobooks — I write about the powerful effect of "you are there" immersion:

Fran and the Immersive Virtual World

One day Fran, a senior citizen in Southern California, noticed it had become difficult for her to stand from a sitting position, or maintain her balance while upright — the first indications of Parkinson’s Disease, a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that afflicts millions around the world.

Fran was also an active Second Life user at the time, enjoying it as a fun way to socialize with her daughter, Barbara. Sometimes for fun, she’d have her avatar practice tai chi, a nice visual reference while meditating herself.

Then Fran noticed an odd thing: she seemed to be gaining significant recovery of physical movement — apparently, as a direct consequence of her activity in Second Life.

“As I watched [my avatar],” she told me back in 2013, “I could actually feel the movements within my body as if I were actually doing tai chi in my physical life (which is not possible for me).”

Using a virtual world, in other words, seemed to abate her Parkinson’s symptoms.

Fran’s story first came to me through Tom Boellstorff, Professor of Anthropology at UC Irvine. Author of Coming of Age in Second Life (the echo of Margaret Mead’s famed study of Samoan culture is intentional), he’s among the most well-respected academics studying the social implications of virtual worlds. Tom met Fran and Barbara offline, recorded video of Fran's physical recovery, then went to receive a National Science Foundation grant (with his colleague Dr. Donna Z. Davis), to study virtual worlds and people with disabilities.

Though Boellstorff and Davis are anthropologists by training and not medical experts, they have a theory around the nature of Fran’s recovery, and hope it can be researched further.

“We believe that Fran's experience may be similar to results in other current research being conducted with individuals with brain disorders or injury,” Dr. Davis told me back then. “Where, by watching yourself — or your avatar — you are essentially retraining the mind to function,”

While the implications of this have yet to be studied to their furthest potential, they are likely to be profound — especially in the face of a rapidly aging population around the globe. From what we can tell, they are made possible because they happened in an immersive virtual world.

Immersion is the sense of feeling so situated within a 3D virtual world, your awareness of the physical world beyond your digital screen mostly melts away. Immersion powers the success of videogame consoles, PC games, and even 3D titles on mobile, especially titles in the category called “AAA” — big budget, action-oriented games with highly vivid 3D graphics, in games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Grant Theft Auto Online. Each has sold tens of millions of copies each, earning revenue that puts them in competition with Hollywood’s most successful movies.

Immersion is also what first brought me, through many lateral moves, into the metaverse industry. I specifically credit the astoundingly influential PC game Thief: The Dark Project (1998) for achieving a sense of immersiveness that felt like a fundamental shift. The story of an anti-hero cat burglar in a nameless, steampunk city, you progressed in it through careful awareness of the world, learning to stealthily blend into its shadows. Thief and its many successors convinced me that immersion could elevate interactive experiences beyond mere arcade games into something more profound.

The growing popularity of immersive online virtual worlds, first seen with swords & sorcery MMOs like EverQuest (1999) and World of Warcraft (2003), expanded my excitement; now, other people were part of a virtual world which you simultaneously shared together. Typically, these worlds are fanciful but recognizable simulations of our offline world, with mountains and oceans and cities and the like, visually appealing and varied enough that many people would want to explore and interact within them together.

"For me the foundational thing is that virtual worlds are shared spaces,” as Tom Boellstorf puts it. “They are places online and that's what makes them different from email or Twitter. And you even see this in English with prepositions, where people say you go on Facebook, but you go in Roblox or in Second Life or whatever." And it’s how Fran happened to come across an inviting meadow with a community meditation space for practicing tai chi in Second Life, which ended up changing her life.

Fran is hardly alone. Drawn to this “you are there” quality, a large contingent of people enjoy digital immersion, whether in single player games, or shared multiplayer spaces. Steam, a top online distributor of immersive PC games, has about 125 million active users; over 300 million households own a relatively recent video game console model boasting immersive graphics and audio capability. Hundreds of millions play 3D games on mobile; one title alone, the mobile version of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), attracts over 50 million daily users at peak.

By my estimate, the audience for immersive experiences is about 1 in 4 people with Internet access worldwide.

Photo courtesy Tom Boellstorff