What are your favorite Metaverse/Virtual world-themed Movies & TV Shows (That Are Not Ready Player One?)

I was just doing a podcast interview about the book, happily getting into the weeds about the Metaverse and its history, when the host asked me a question that caused me to go blank:

“So what are some movies and TV shows about the Metaverse you recommend to listeners?”

By brain seriously went empty for what felt like three minutes before I finally mentioned a recent example (which I won’t reveal until the podcast comes out).

Ready Player One would have been the most obvious example to mention right there; but while I liked the Spielberg adaptation just fine, it now leaves a bad aftertaste. (Which probably contributed to my brain freeze.) The movie doesn’t add much to the original concept from Snow Crash, for one  — other than basically presenting it as a fun, single shard multi-player video game. Worse, depicting the virtual world as only being accessible through VR has created a unfeasible and frankly undesirable vision that’s inadvertently caused enormous damage to the concept’s evolution. 

None of that’s the fault of original author Ernest Cline, of course, and not taking away anything away from the novel’s success! If anything, I’m faulting executives who only read and recommended his novel. 

As I write in Making a Metaverse That Matters, the book was made required reading for new employees at Oculus before and after its acquisition by Facebook — even if that meant ignoring earlier, more important readings:

Soon after launch, Horizon Worlds was barraged by a slew of bad press when a female journalist reported being sexually assaulted in the virtual world, with male avatars aggressively grinding up against her own avatar almost immediately after she logged into the world. 

The violation was horrible, but completely predictable. Understanding and preparing for avatar-to-avatar harassment, especially directed at female avatars, has been a recurring virtual world challenge for decades.  

Was no one on the team experienced enough to anticipate it? 

As I soon learned, however, Meta was warned this would happen, many times — it was a recurring theme in internal talks given by Jim Purbrick. But somehow, his warnings, recommendations, and best practice summaries were not centered. 

“I was literally banging the drum at Oculus Connect two years in a row,” Jim Purbrick told me with evident frustration. “I also told every new Oculus employee I met to read My Tiny Life in addition to Ready Player One, but the message didn’t reach every part of the organization, sadly.” 

My Tiny Life is Julian Dibbell’s classic account of virtual world sexual assault from the 1990s; Yes, the problem has been well-known and documented for that long.

Anyway, always look for new content to watch, and interesting reader recommendations to highlight!