It’s been 20 years since wedding bells first rang in Second Life. Game developer Square Enix included mechanics for sending out invitations, composing vows, and exchanging rings in 2002’s Final Fantasy XI. Outside of nuptials, online games already provide the most compelling functions associated with the “metaverse”—often, with greater graphic fidelity, more complex social systems, and at a significantly larger scale. As professional cyberspace architects and governors, it is game developers who have iterated on and mastered the two to three actually promising attributes of a metaverse, mostly revolving around socializing in virtual worlds.“Aaron Delwiche, an assistant professor at Trinity University in San Antonio,” reads one 2004 WIRED article, “often gathers students in his Games for the Web class in an unlikely classroom: the metaverse known as Second Life.”
