Ready Player 2? Everything a Parent Needs to Know about Web3 and the Metaverse

By Zach Hirsch

What should you do when your kids are spending hours immersed in Fortnite or seemingly in another world with their Oculus on, playing Beat Saber? The answer is simple: join them!

Today’s internet has already revolutionized the world of work, games, and social interactions. Web3, the next iteration, will offer a much more immersive way to meet, play, and earn a living in the near future. Today’s games, along with the NFT’s and avatars your kids have been talking about, are a gateway to the future Metaverse and coming Meta-Economy.

My Background

To introduce myself briefly, I’m Zach Hirsch, @instagram ipickwins, a Web3 entrepreneur, social influencer, and podcaster. I’m also only two years out of high school, and a member of Generation Z.

My journey into the virtual world started by playing VRChat seven years ago. This gave me a taste of what it’s like to build both a world and identity online, while contributing to the experience of others in the same community.

I first came across the term ‘Metaverse’ when I read Neal Stephenson’s classic book, Snowcrash. After seeing the 2018 Spielberg movie, Ready Player One, I was all in. The Travis Scott Fortnite concert in April 2020 proved to me that the Metaverse would someday be a reality. I knew it was my destiny to help build it, and started looking for others to build it with.

I met my co-founder, Danny Mozlin, the CEO of Mozverse, and found he had a different story. Danny is a noted kid inventor who conducted AR and VR experiments in middle school. By age ten, Danny was spending hours playing Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, the first gaming console that allowed you to immerse yourself into your own universe. Our two paths may have been different, but we were both undeniably headed towards the future in Web3, and your current gamer, NFT collector, or 3D artist might be headed there as well.

A Crash Course

Unlike some trends that come and go, Web3 and the Metaverse are here to stay, eventually affecting everything we do in the future. As a parent, encouraging your kids’ immersive activities is the first step to helping them participate in this new tech revolution.

While your kids might think it’s cringe when you try to decode their lingo, in this case it’s important to understand the language of Web3. Here are my definitions of the most basic terms that are often thrown around.

Web3: “Web1” refers to the early days of the internet, when it was essentially just a bunch of web pages for you to read. “Web2” came about when companies like Facebook and YouTube made it possible for regular users to publish blogs and release videos. “Web3” takes things one step further. Now, you can create and own the content you create, with an immutable record of it stored on the Blockchain. Web3 also allows for a much more immersive experience than previous generations.

Blockchain: The blockchain is a record of transactions that everyone can agree on because it’s decentralized. Why does this matter? It’s immutable meaning you have transactional finality that leads to real transparency.

Tokens: Tokens are how value is exchanged between different participants on the blockchain,and they can take many forms. They can be a currency like Bitcoin, or they can be a way to store value. When a token is linked to a specific object or person, it is called a non-fungible token or NFT. In other words, ‘digital property’.

NFTs: A non-fungible token can represent ownership of anything (including in the physical world, but the lawyers are still working on that one—stay tuned). Currently, NFTs mainly represent ownership of virtual objects or entities, such as avatars, clothing, accessories, equipment, or even digital land.

Avatars

An avatar is a digital representation of who you are, in either a virtual world or gaming experience, where your avatar’s actions are based on the decisions that you make. The avatar concept was first introduced in Neal Stephenson’s revolutionary book, Snow Crash, which, as I mentioned earlier, also first introduced the concept of the Metaverse. 30 years later, companies like mine are now actively improving avatars, to be hyper-realistic. A Hyper-Realistic Avatar is an avatar that is a literal and virtual manifestation of the user. This innovative technology has become especially important and prominent in the Immersive Entertainment space.

The Metaverse: You’ll see a few different definitions of the Metaverse, but here’s mine: the Metaverse is a series of interconnected, highly immersive, virtual worlds. These virtual worlds, while independent, are connected through the common use of technologies (i.e., AR [augmented reality], VR [virtual reality], XR [Extended Reality], Blockchain, NFTs), and share the same foundational principles of interoperability and decentralization.

Immersive Entertainment

Immersive entertainment occurs when a platform transports a user to a digital representation of a real or virtual world where the user can interact with an event, such as a concert, in a variety of ways that leave the user feeling highly connected to the performance. Immersive entertainment offers endless new experiences, free from real-world constraints of distance, physical hazards, and even gravity.

Immersive experiences are created by combining AR, VR, and hyper-fidelity audio.

Believe it or not, your kids may have already built their first virtual world in a place like Minecraft or Roblox. Immersive entertainment also provides us with places to meet and share experiences, such as the Travis Scott gig (27 million Fortnight players in attendance), at a scale that was previously technically and financially impossible.

Immersive games are creative, social, and offer experiences that physical reality can’t compete with. When we combine the hypercreative and social dimensions of immersive entertainment with digital currency and digital property (which are worth real money), we have the building blocks of a new reality that is not constrained by available capital and physics. We have an environment where kids can earn not only part-time money, but enough money to support themselves and others.

In this world, games are far more than a form of simple entertainment. Each game, at its core, provides its users with educational tools that will become invaluable as more and more of the world’s economy increases its reliance on blockchain technology, Web3, and the Metaverse. They can be used for education for sure, but they are themselves an education in how to operate in a new economy that will become increasingly important, and I think eventually dominant.

As digital natives, my generation is perfectly positioned to take full advantage of this new reality. If anyone is going to use this technology to remake the future, it will empower us, and our younger siblings in Generation Alpha.

Opportunities for the Next Generation

Does all of that sound a little crazy? It probably does. Let’s take a step back, and consider where we are.

Think about what the shift from Web2 to Web3 means again. Instead of just creating content, kids can own and monetize it. That is huge.

Young people today are born into a world where it is not only normal to socialize online, but where everyone is their own media enterprise, with access to multiple channels and audiences. The younger generation has never known a world where this is not the norm.

As an influencer with a large following, I get paid to express my opinions in the cur- rent creator economy. Unfortunately, if you don’t have over a million verified followers on a social media platform or a hit podcast, opportunities to really earn are somewhat limited today.

The calculus of the meta economy is fundamentally different. NFTs make it possible to redistribute revenues so that anyone can get paid directly for the value they create— whether this is digital clothes, digital music, digital art, or digital real estate.

There are plenty of examples of this. Take Samuel Jordan, who started out on the online gaming platform Roblox as a teen. Ten years later, he’s killing it, running a successful fashion design business that sells only NFT-based goods (such as virtual earrings and jackets).

There is a reason that Web3 is the perfect environment for young entrepreneurs. In Web3, digital money and digital property make it possible to connect and exchange value directly with those who value your work. Just like in a regular business, you don’t need to become the biggest, just the best at what you do, in order to succeed with your target market.

My Experience

All this is more than just theory for me. I know it can work!

I have been playing video games since I was three years old. In addition to the immersive games I mentioned, I loved sports games, especially Madden. I played so much that when I was twelve years old my father took away my gaming consoles but that didn’t deter me from my passion. I was the #1 Madden Mobile Player in the World at 13 years old when I made the decision to put my efforts into sports analytics, building my social following and helping to build the future Metaverse. My friend Pavan, who I used to play Madden with late into the night, went on to win the Madden Club Series Championship on NFL Network and is one of the highest earners in the history of the game. My guy Jake, who was a Youtube, Vine and Disney star, reinvented himself and now brings the audience he built to professional boxing matches where he’s paid eight figures a fight. Jake’s taken some of those big bags and started his own Venture Capital Fund that’s invested in Web3 technology and infrastructure. Scott Storch is, in my opinion, the

So greatest music producer of all time. He’s made hits for everyone from Dr. Dre and Eminem to Megan The Stallion and Beyonce. Scott’s a musical genius but he’s smart enough to know what he doesn’t know. When he hears some new sound, he’ll ask his son Jalen who’s sixteen years old and also a talented producer before dismissing it and when anyone brings him anything related to Web3, he calls me. I’m currently advising him on a Metaverse Concert featuring Lil Baby.

Thanks to social media, I’ve been able to share my passion with those who share it, and now thanks to the podcast I run with rapper Jadakiss on Worldstar, I get to meet and interact with my favorite icons in the world of sport and hip hop.

I’m also witnessing the real-time fusing of sports, entertainment, and business in the virtual realm that will eventually become the Metaverse—everyone can be right there in it.

That’s why my mission is to grow Mozverse with Danny and help build a bridge to the Metaverse for the next wave of young gamers, inventors, and founders who will in turn build the future Metaverse economy.

The vital role of parents

Most articles about kids and the metaverse tend to focus on near-term things like the potential for VR in education, or tips on how to stay safe online.

These are all super important things, particularly safety. Being a good parent will always mean keeping your kids from being exposed to bad people that unfortunately can inhabit every realm, virtual, or physical.

What I would add though, is that it’s just as important to take a long-term view. The kids of today don’t have the right to vote in the traditional world, but in Web3, they are the upcoming entrepreneurs, engineers, and influencers who will lead us into the future, if they have support and encouragement from early on.

My Dad told me a story a few weeks back about how Gabriella, the nine year old daughter of a friend of his, had over twelve hours of screen time in a day, between Roblox and TikTok, and that didn’t even count any Oculus activities. I said, “Wow, what dedication! I have a feeling she’s going to be a future Web3 influencer.”

So, join your kids Player 2, grab a VR headset, and see for yourself what this future looks like.