On the Threshold of the Metaverse: Lessons and Experience of Video Games for a New Environment

As a research task, the authors attempted to analyze the history of video games and the development of the gaming industry from the point of view of the formation of a number of prerequisites for the emergence of metaverses. Study covers the period from the late 1940s to the late 2010s, that is, until the moment when the term “metaverse” became an essential part of the discursive field. The methodology is based on a historical-genetic approach, which allows us to identify the causal links between the significant stages of the gaming industry development, technological environment and metaverses. The relevance of this research is due to several factors. First, over the past two years there has been a sharp increase in the amount of publications devoted to metaverses. Secondly, there is a lack of scientific research publications in Russian that would consider the phenomenon of metaverses and their genesis in the context of the development of other areas (video games, NFTs, AI, etc.). Thirdly, there is a notable frequent connection between metaverses and video games in the rhetoric of speakers around the world. However, both phenomena still remain independent, but in the future, presumably, will evolve in parallel. Tracing the development of the gaming industry in dynamics, the authors argue for the key role of video games (as a set of software and hardware, communication strategies, content and semantic components, etc.) in the emergence and development of metaverses.

Metaverse, virtual reality, augmented reality, immersive environment, digital avatar, video game, cloud gaming, user experience, Second Life, COVID-19