Why “the Metaverse” needs gameplay and gameplay mechanics

Philip Rosedale has a great post on the essential building blocks for building “the metaverse”, and the features he proposes are all solid as far as they go:

The most obvious thing that’s missing from the list — and this is a topic that Philip and I debate about a lot — game mechanics and gameplay! Because the thing is, anything that looks like the beginning of the metaverse, in the sense that it has at least some of the other features Philip mentions above, are games: Minecraft of course, Roblox, and increasingly, Fortnite. In my opinion, the a priori case is just as strong: Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash, the first vision of the Metaverse that is actually first named The Metaverse, very much has gameplay and game mechanics.

Source: nwn.blogs.com