The metaverse concept has become an umbrella term that floats over the big connected multiplayer worlds, including Fortnite, or Minecraft, or Roblox, or VR apps like Rec Room, VRChat and Microsoft's AltspaceVR. The holodeck is a concept that lives beyond VR or AR. Zoom, online games, Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces and every other social app on your phone - everyone's carved out a virtual existence of some sort. We've already redefined the idea of "virtual" in 2020, and for most people it didn't involve a VR headset. Sarah Tew/CNET The world's already living virtually On Thursday Facebook announced it's changing its company name to Meta, to reflect its broad goals in this space but it's a term that can be applied to properties as broad as Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, VR, AR - even Animal Crossing. Over the past few years, the term metaverse has re-emerged in a very big way. How long? CNET wrote about the trend back in 2007. So, too, has the metaverse.Īnd the term "metaverse" has been around for a long time. "Cyberspace" was reappropriated, coined as a stand-in term for all of the internet. The idea rings, once again, among many other places, in Ready Player One's Oasis.īack in 1992, I considered the "metaverse" to be a knockoff of William Gibson's concept of cyberspace. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse," the novel says of the globe-spanning city that everyone pops into in VR. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. He's in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. Alva Ebersole adds to the idea of metatheatrical characters saying that the technique is an examination of characters within the broader scheme of life, in which they create their own desires and actions within society.Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash is about a pizza delivery man by day, VR superhero by night, who lives in an online universe called the Metaverse. The character is aware of his own theatricality. He looks for situations he wants to be a part of, not waiting for life, but replacing reality with imagination when the world is lacking in his desires. Abel also relates the character of Don Quixote as the prototypical, metatheatrical, self-referring character. The technique reflects the world as an extension of human conscience, not accepting prescribed societal norms, but allowing for more imaginative variation, or a possible social change. Many scholars have studied its usage as a literary technique within great works of literature.Ībel described metatheatre as reflecting comedy and tragedy, at the same time, where the audience can laugh at the protagonist while feeling empathetic simultaneously. The term "metatheatre", coined by Lionel Abel, has entered into common critical usage however, there is still much uncertainty over its proper definition and what dramatic techniques might be included in its scope. The words "metatheatre" and "metadrama" combine theatre or drama with the Greek prefix "meta-", which implies "a level beyond" the subject that it qualifies.įreebase Rate this definition: 4.0 / 2 votes Metatheatrical devices may include: direct address to the audience (especially in soliloquies, asides, prologues, and epilogues) expression of an awareness of the presence of the audience (whether they are addressed directly or not) an acknowledgement of the fact that the people performing are actors (and not actually the characters they are playing) an element whose meaning depends on the difference between the represented time and place of the drama (the fictional world) and the time and place of its theatrical presentation (the reality of the theatre event) plays-within-plays (or masques, spectacles, or other forms of performance within the drama) references to acting, theatre, dramatic writing, spectatorship, and the frequently employed metaphor according to which "all the world's a stage" (Theatrum mundi) scenes involving eavesdropping or other situations in which one or several characters observe another or others, such that the former relate to the behaviour of the latter as if it were a staged performance for their benefit. "Breaking the Fourth Wall" is an example of a metatheatrical device. Metatheatre, and the closely related term metadrama, describes the aspects of a play that draw attention to its nature as drama or theatre, or to the circumstances of its performance. Wikipedia Rate this definition: 0.0 / 0 votes
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