Making a Metaverse That Matters

CHAPTER 1Crash Course—A Simple History of a Complex Idea

In my virtual office in Waterhead beside a river in Second Life, I have a shrine to Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. It's a holdover from the virtual world's golden era, when the novel's publisher saw fit to produce (with Stephenson's official blessing) an 8-foot-tall monolith in which a readable excerpt of the novel is embedded.

To this day, avatars sometimes pay a pilgrimage, showing their respect for the shrine that symbolizes The Source to All This. Recently checking my Twitter mentions, I noticed that an excitable raccoon from Japan had posted a virtual selfie in front of it.

I vividly remember when I first read Snow Crash in the early ’90s. It touched a yearning I already felt playing now-ancient computer games as a kid in Hawaii. Secure and surrounded by the sea, I found it difficult (and frankly a bit embarrassing) to sit inside and explore fantastic virtual worlds when the golden glow of constantly perfect days kept pouring in.

I'd spend afternoons outside surfing or playing beach volleyball, almost on general principle, impatiently waiting for night to come, when the sun would be outshined by the glow of cathode rays. Early milestone computer games like NetHack depicted a whole vivid alternate reality with simple text characters.

“This,” I recall thinking, as I raced through Snow Crash, “is what we'll have in a decade or two.”

Snow Crash has a unique place in the history of science fiction. Most classics of the ...