"PAK cik, have you watched Ready Player One, the film?" I was stumped when this young man struck up a conversation while I was waiting for my booster shot at a vaccination centre in Shah Alam recently.
He was trying to explain what the metaverse was all about. "Yes, but I did not finish watching it. I felt the film was for kids, really. Is it about some kids playing virtual reality games?" I asked.
"Watch it again, pak cik. The crux of the film is about mankind's future in the metaverse," he retorted.
Ready Player One (2018) is a story set in a dystopian 2045 that follows young protagonist Wade Watts on his search for an Easter egg in a worldwide virtual reality game, the discovery of which would lead him to inherit the game creator's fortune.
I was able to grasp what the metaverse meant after a long-winded explanation by Amran, a young computer programmer.
The word "metaverse" refers to a fully realised digital world that exists beyond the one in which we live.
Coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel, Snow Crash, the concept was further explored by Ernest Cline in his novel, Ready Player One.
Nevertheless, the metaverse is rather a strange, fuzzy concept. The land is located online, in a set of virtual worlds. The metaverse is a convergence of virtual reality and a digital second life.
Second life, another tech jargon, is an online multimedia platform that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and have a second life in an online virtual world.
Just like the movie and the virtual reality games that millennials play.
While old people like me are having a problem grasping the concept, it seems the time has arrived that our virtual lives play as important role as our physical realities. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the pervasiveness of virtual reality.
We have seen how millennials spend a lot more time interacting with their avatar friends in virtual space, spending money there on outfits and objects for their digital avatars.
Tech experts see the metaverse as real. Prices for plots of the metaverse have soared as much as 500 per cent in the last few months ever since Facebook announced it was going all-in on virtual reality, even changing its corporate name to Meta.
Last month, Microsoft took over gaming studio Activision Blizzard for US$68.7 billion, seeing it as a way to create the building blocks for the metaverse.
Resting after the booster shots, Amran said exciting things were happening when metaverse converges with NFTs, or non-fungible tokens.
NFTs are digital assets stored on the blockchain that certify the authenticity of objects, such as music, artwork and in-game items.
A type of cryptocurrency tokens regarded as digital title deeds, NFTs are the core components of the metaverse.
For example, a 22-year-old Indonesian college student became an Internet sensation after trade in the digital rights to his selfies fetched more than US$1 million on an NFT platform.
Last year, Canadian musician Claire Elise Boucher, a.k.a. Grimes, sold US$6 million worth of digital arts for auction on a trading platform.
Many others are making fortunes from NFTs. But tech companies are rushing in to cash in on the metaverse hype, especially in the gaming industry.
South Korean company Netmarble is launching metaverse and NFT games that would integrate the enjoyment of games, along with intangible assets, through NFTs.
Bang Jun-hyuk, its billionaire founder, believes the gaming industry would grow even bigger.
Netmarble is preparing to launch 20 new games, of which about 70 per cent of them are using blockchain technology.
One of the new games, called "A3: Still Alive", is a play-to-earn game that allows users to monetise intangible in-game assets, such as weapons, with cryptocurrency.
South Korea bans play-to-earn games as regulators fear it could fuel gambling addiction among the youth. It is attracting players overseas.
As I headed home, I wondered whether the metaverse, with all its pull for global participation, be the death of civilisation?
People are absorbed in their avatars with little interaction with real humans.
For me, escapism from our mundane lives has found a new meaning and it's happening in the metaverse.
The writer, a former NST journalist, is a film scriptwriter whose penchant is finding new food haunts