i am completely immersed in these virtual experiences. part of the reason we re hearing so much about the metaverse is because technology like this now exists. richard bartle was there at the very dawn of multiplayer experiences in 1978. he was one of the brains behind the world s first multiplayer virtual world, the text adventure multi user dungeon, or mud. now a professor of computer game design at university of essex, bartles believes there s a specific set of rules which define the idea of the metaverse. ok, so, the metaverse is essentially a marketing concept. we have universes which are self contained realities, then we have multiverses, which are realities that you can move between, so they re effectively the same reality. and then we have a metaverse, which is all one reality, but it has got a whole bunch of other ones interconnected.