The Rise of the Metaverse
By Alex Kierkegaard / June 17, 2025
In retrospect, it was inevitable. Once we've recognized complexity (aesthetic + mechanical) as the metric of artistic progression, we've also recognized that a rising artform will become increasingly complex and therefore demand more and more of its readers'/viewers'/players' time, thereby competing for people's limited attention with all the competing artworks. At last an artwork was destined to arrive that's so complex that it demands our full attention, forcing us to forego all other art in order to appreciate it. And, in the metaverse genre, these artworks have arrived.
It was a long time coming, but not without predecessors. In the survival-building and FP4X genres of the 2010s, we were in fact almost there. When The Cult got into Rust in the late-2010s, you could tech up to endgame and build practically everything in the game inside a weekend, but already by the early-2020s so much stuff had been added to the game that the same small group of friends could play for a full month straight and barely accomplish it, and today it is impossible unless you have a dozen friends or more and know the game inside-out. FP4Xes such as Life is Feudal and Atlas are even "worse" and require you to pretty much quit REAL-LIFE for months at a time in order to get anywhere with them. You can have fun with them for a weekend or a week—and we've done this multiple times with The Cult with the best of these games—but that will only get you into the prologue, and not even the end of the prologue. These games are so complex and demanding that they compete with your real life, but it doesn't have to be this way. They're just badly designed because they've been designed by programmers who expect you to be online 24/7 because they are. But that way lies madness.
With Star Citizen and my Battlegrounds—the proper metaverse games, one real-time the other turn-based with real-time aspects—all this changes, because Chris Roberts and I are real designers, so our games are perfectly playable without competing with your real life, even though they're far more complex and demanding than the survival-builders and FP4Xes they build upon. But they do compete with all your other games, if not also with all artworks ever. And you do have to quit most if not all of those in order to properly play them.
What happens to the rest of the videogame genres at this point? We can distinguish two broad categories of "left-behind" genres: the let us call them midwit ones at about IQ 100, and the stunted ones at about 80. Midwit games is something like Cyberpunk 2077, and what happens with those is that all their best aspects are integrated into the metaverse games, while stunted is for example 2D games and what happens with those is that they are AGAIN integrated into the metaverses but NOT absorbed/incorporated, because they are so stunted. Instead, they are stuck into for example arcade cabinets which are then placed in appropriate locations as in Shenmue. So it's not like you have to abandon all other genres when you commit to a metaverse game, as you would have to abandon sex with other women when you get married. It's more like you are a polygamist and can marry a dozen women and fuck them all at the same time, or in any order or combination you desire. Players with low attention span complain how long it takes to get anything done in Star Citizen, but that's because so many aspects of life are simulated. Do you want to feel like you're living in a sci-fi universe or not? If you want this, you also want the slowness, because life is slow. However, you will soon be able to stick an arcade machine onto your ship and just play 2D games during the multihour trips across the galaxy! Same goes for midwit game mechanics: you'll have them all in the metaverse, and perfectly feeding each other and your alternate sci-fi life; why would you want to lock yourself inside a half-assed programmer arena on Steam and confine yourself to only ONE or TWO of these mechanics at a time, in half-assed universes with half-assed storylines?
So the metaverse kills all other genres, but not in the sense that it destroys them, but that it perfectly incorporates them (at least if the game is any good, which mine and CR's are), so that you don't have a reason to any longer play the primitive genres. The metaverse games are the CULMINATION and APOTHEOSIS of those genres, like the Aryan race is to the primitive races. The arrival of the metaverse (as of the race that created it) is a joyful event, a milestone accomplishment, and not something to be lamented. You can still fire up an old game if you want, just like you can visit our ancestors in the zoo at any time. But we don't live in zoos anymore, or even in the jungle, and all art lovers from now on will be primarily concerned with metaverse games over and above all other games and artforms. As for which metaverse is superior... Everyone should know the answer to this by this stage in the analysis: The one that superior beings prefer, of course. Now that the genre has been developed and unleashed by straight White males, we will simplify the tools to make it to the point where even other demographics can handle them, and there will be a homosexual metaverse some day, and a female metaverse, and maybe even yellow and brown metaverses, and they will be as simplistic and/or stupid and/or boring and/or ugly as you can imagine. And that's why you won't see any cool people playing them. It'll be pretty easy to tell which metaverse is the best: whichever icycalm and The Cult are playing.
And what a time we will have playing them! Star Citizen has finally reinvented the Pathfinder Adventure Path and has just started launching a new event every month! Paizo, of course, has been doing this for two decades: 100 pages of adventure every month without fail since the mid-2000s, because THAT'S how you build not merely a game but a WORLD. So now Cloud Imperium produces essentially an interactive TV show complete with an A and B story, that players follow and engage with every month, and the project's crowdfunding has skyrocketed as a result. The rest of the industry is so far behind that no one even realizes what's happening. What other game has monthly episodes? Some MMOs have ANNUAL ones, but that is an expansion, and it's as old as shit in gaming. MONTHLY episodes is BRAND-NEW, unless you count Pathfinder played via VTTs as a videogame, which you should. So GMRPGs have had this publishing structure for two decades, but GMRPGs are turn-based. Finally episodic gaming has come to the real-time genre. And it's impossible to ignore. Take this month's coming SC event, Storm Breaker, set in the Pyro system. It's launching midweek, so the moment it lands we're sending out Rangers to reconnoitre. The intel they provide will be received by our Pyro Supreme Commander recoil who will use it to pick the approach, the fleet, the vehicles and gear, and assign roles to everyone. Then on Saturday we go out in force, and we take it from there. And in July there'll be another episode, and in August another, and all the way to year's end and beyond, and everything's connected to each other and to the game's hundreds of pages worth of lore by this point and growing. And you want me to set all this aside so I can play some programmer's half-assed invisible wall/Potemkin game with mechanics from 2005? Get real.
Are you even a gamer if you aren't into metaverses in 2025? Just as little as those who rejected survival-builders/FP4Xes in the 2010s, or open worlds in the 2000s, or 3D in the 1990s, or scrolling 2D in the 1980s, and so on. Because as gaming evolves, so does the definition of a gamer. Or what? You thought it stays the same LMAO? So today you're either jacking into the matrix on the regular, or you aren't playing much at all.