Niantic, developer of Pokémon Go, has laid out its long-term plan for a “real-world” metaverse based on our global reality – rather than an entirely virtual one of the kind seen in Ready Player One.
In an extended blog post titled “The Metaverse is a Dystopian Nightmare, Let’s Build a Better Reality”, company founder John Hanke has discussed his vision for how technology can be harnessed to build a better version of our world which strengthens in-person interactions – while criticising the idea of technology designed to abandon our reality and instead play inside a computer simulation.
This is all long-term future stuff, so there’s no direct reference to Pokémon Go’s ongoing big debate around pandemic interaction distance changes. (It also arrives alongside news of another Niantic company acquisition – this time of fancy 3D scanning app Scaniverse.) But there are certainly comments here which reinforce Niantic’s long-term ethos for its games – and Pokémon Go in particular – which touch on issues raised in that debate, and perhaps further illuminate Niantic’s own position in it.
“A lot of people these days seem very interested in bringing this near-future vision of a virtual world to life, including some of the biggest names in technology and gaming,” Hanke wrote, namechecking how the works of authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson were being used as inspiration. “But in fact these novels served as warnings about a dystopian future of technology gone wrong.