Who am I in the Metaverse?

10/20/21 • 29 min

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When most of your time spent with others is on digital platforms, is your digital identity a better representation of who you are than your physical identity? As we look forward towards the future, our avatars will play an increasingly important role in how we enter the metaverse and how we represent ourselves there. "The purpose of the avatar inside the metaverse is to really truly look inside ourselves," Kelly Vero says. The avatar can become an exploration of the self, but it can also give us the opportunity to be multiple selves, explore multiple identities, or different facets of identity at once.

In the metaverse, everyone can create a unique identity, no matter how similar or different to your physical appearance and IRL identity. Identity is oftentimes heavily influenced by culture. And the culture of the past 30 years has been informed largely by one thing—the internet.

The internet and the evolution of social media have made way for all types of conversations about identity, self-determination and even gender. So how will the next evolution of the internet—the metaverse—inform our identity in the future? That's the question we'll explore in this week's episode of Adweek's Metaverse Marketing podcast.

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Previous Episode

What's Gaming Got To Do With It?

According to 2021 research from Statista: 38% of video game players are ages 18 to 34 and 7% are 65 years and older. In 2021, women accounted for 45% of gamers in the U.S. And lastly, two out of every five people across the world are gamers.

They're not only your kids, but also your aunt, friend, and possibly even your grandma. You need to look no further than gaming to start seeing your first glimpses of the metaverse.

Gaming—and particularly multiplayer games—have paved the way for the metaverse, especially when it comes to infrastructure. So much of internet culture is driven by fun and games, so it makes sense that the next evolution of our digital lives will continue to be shaped by gaming culture. However, gaming as we know it is just the beginning.

While early experiments are linking the blockchain to gaming, there's still no universal standard for an economic system in the metaverse, which makes it messy and hard to pin down. As you'll hear on this episode of Adweek's Metaverse Marketing podcast, once we agree on such a system for transferring money and ownership, a whole new world of opportunity is likely to be unlocked.

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Next Episode

Entertainment at the Core

What if it was possible to walk the halls of Hogwarts, explore the deserts of Tatooine, or be emersed into J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth? Would you want to explore one of these imaginary worlds? "People like the idea of an escapist experience, whether that be on TV, in a video game, or on some kind of shared virtual space,” says Anshel Sag, Principal Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “I think that helping people to momentarily escape reality is really what entertainment's purpose is."

The metaverse presents itself as a realm of infinite possibilities and opportunities to make those dreams a reality, but how we get there is still being established.

In episode two of Adweek’s Metaverse Marketing podcast, we explored how collaboration and co-creation are important aspects of digital citizenship in the metaverse. In episode four, we discussed how gaming is building its rules and infrastructure. Today we're looking at gaming's close cousin, entertainment, and how it's the glue holding everything together.

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