Why Full-Time Doctors Are Becoming Full-Time Gamers
The typical generation Z kid lives most of his/her free time in a gaming world, a metaverse. The “metaverse” is a convergence of our physical and digital lives that is being brought on by advancements in internet connectivity, AR/VR, and blockchain. It’s just the culmination of all our science fiction fantasies — what ‘Tron’ and ‘Ready Player One’ imagined.
This world is hard for parents to understand because it diverges from the world they grew up in. There is always an “understanding gap” between generations, and this gap is much wider now. It is difficult for some parent to understand that real socialization can happen in a virtual world. It is also difficult to accept that digital objects have value for our kids, much like a physical asset has value for us.
You might buy an expensive D&G t-shirt for $180 and you know it probably cost $5 to be produced. You buy it because it gives you higher status or because you simply like it so much that you do not mind the high margins. It might not make sense from an economic perspective, but we’re human and we act irrationally.
The same thing is happening online for Gen Z, for them online and offline have blended. They don’t understand the difference between the two worlds, there is actually no difference between the two worlds, so they will pay for a digital asset the same kind of premium that we would pay for a physical asset. We’re seeing that with digital swords or skins and other virtual objects. A lot of these digital assets are on blockchain and they are now becoming tradeable across different metaverses. These things are now becoming fungible and connected to real-world currencies. So, we are now seeing doctors in some Asian countries earning more money selling virtual assets in games than they make as being doctors!
Gaming transactions are opening a completely different alternative world that it is difficult to grasp for “older generations”. It is extraordinary that the gaming community has now got so far advanced that you can be in a VR game and you can play another game within the game. You have two different metaverses interacting with each other.
Think about Grand Theft Auto (GTA). GTA offers players the chance to turn on the radio while wandering around town. Sometimes players ignore the crime opportunities around them in favour of driving around listening to those songs or podcast in GTA. The songs on the “virtual” radio have become best-selling hits and people got more revenue stream from the radio in the cars in Grand Theft Auto than they were from traditional radio. The Fernando Show is a talk radio show on West Coast Talk Radio in GTA.
The Metaverse is here; our next great milestone as a networked species awaits us. 7B digital souls with the option to exist almost only online and participate in a virtual economy with societal impact. The metaverse is pervasive, it is a live digital universe that affords individuals a sense of belonging, social presence, and shared spacial awareness along with the ability to take part in an extensive virtual economy with profound societal impact.
Welcome to the future.
