The metaverse is not just a marketplace for speculators or a buzzword that boosts companies’ stock prices. It’s a space where people can express themselves and connect with others in new ways – and we still have a chance to shape its future.
At least, that’s the view taken by R/GA’s global chief creative officer, Tiffany Rolfe, and its global chief strategy officer, Tom Morton, who joined Contagious co-founder Paul Kemp-Robertson at the Contagious villa in Cannes on 22 June to discuss the more human side of web3.
Kemp-Robertson began with a challenge, asking to be convinced that there’s more to the metaverse than buzzwords and hype.
‘There's some very different paths you can follow if you really want to understand the metaverse,’ said Morton. ‘There's this path of following the money, which takes you to scams and get-rich-quick. There's a path of following the technology, which is fascinating but can be a rabbit hole. Or there’s a path of following people [...] there's millions of people who are doing very meaningful things and getting very meaningful benefits from being in these pervasive 3D environments.’
‘What we're seeing is that even things that are happening in people's physical worlds are being enabled by these virtual worlds,’ added Rolfe, who gave the example of people interviewing for jobs in metaverse spaces and finding themselves better able to express themselves than in real life.
‘This idea that sometimes you actually have to leave your physical self to feel your best self [...] is a really interesting notion,’ said Rolfe. ‘It isn't just about virtual versus physical, but how those things can interplay.’
Asked why normal people should care about the Metaverse, Morton responded with some statistics from a survey they had carried out. He said 70% of people taking part in Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) ‘think that they’re part of a meaningful community’, and more than half of people spending time in virtual worlds say they’re becoming more confident and making friends.
‘These kinds of behaviors, they're just too important and too valuable to look away from,’ added Morton.
Digging into how identity will work in the Metaverse, Rolfe made the comparison to how it works on the internet now, showing her various social media profiles, which she said provided only a limited representation of her. But with web3, she said, there is the potential to create identities that traverse platforms ‘and can show something about myself that maybe my physical outward appearance can't.’
The conversation became even more conceptual when Kemp-Robertson asked what ‘humanness’ meant in the context of web3.
‘There's two basic paths for identities you can take in virtual spaces,’ said Morton. ‘You can make sure that you're representing every flavor and dimension of human beings [...] That's one path. The other one is looking at how people can express themselves in ways which are true to them, but different from their physical self.’
One of the most astounding results from R/GA’s survey, said Morton, was that 68% of people said that their metaverse avatars represented a side of them, but not necessarily their physical self.
‘I think that really teaches a lesson about the identities that people really want to pursue,’ added Morton.
Discussing the role of community within the metaverse spaces, Morton said that while web2 encourages lighter forms of expression, such as sharing and liking content, web3 encourages deeper engagement.
‘Because most metaverse communities have some kind of governance model to them [...] you actually have a stake in this thing; you have a slight control over how it's run,’ said Morton. ‘And that changes how people show up: it makes people more positive and more sincere.’
This shift in the power of communities will be ‘a huge thing for brands’, said Rolfe, who predicted that brands and marketers would have to become comfortable with treating communities as ‘a partner and co-owner’, rather than an audience.
But while the metaverse has enormous positive potential, there will also likely be an almost infinite number of ways that it could descend into chaos. Asked if brands must develop a specific moral code for operating with the metaverse, Morton responded: ‘The basic tenets of this space are that people are going to show up wanting to be different things, and people are going to show up wanting to do different things, often together. And the basic moral code based on that [is] how are we going to help people do that?’
Bringing the discussion to a close, Kemp-Robertson asked Rolfe what kind of stories we should expect to see and hear in the metaverse in the future.
‘I don’t know yet,’ said Rolfe. But she added that she was around for the development of web1 and web2, and she recognised this as a crucial stage in the development of web3 – a time of exploration and unlocking potential. ‘It's really exciting, and we'll experiment and there's going to be a lot of bad ideas [...] and then we're going to get to some really good stuff and we'll figure out what this is all really about.’
