Meta "worlds" instead of "Horizon Worlds"

Meta plays shell games with words, and "worlds" is the latest racket.

The document I posted last night reviewing Mark Zuckerberg’s strategy from 2015 was an important trail of context to see the way his particular “vision” plays with words in slippery ways to center the use of technology inside his grips.

The latest example can be found in the app used to manage Meta’s VR hardware. Last year, I used this app to watch my 10-year-old son playing in Meta VR via a “watch live” button, and this year I can’t make that button work no matter how many times I press it. Instead of that fundamental feature working — the ability to look in on my child in a VR headset purchased from Meta — Meta appears to be taking this tragic misadventure of copying Fortnite and Roblox into its purest form.

Golden Gloves VR, for example, is a newly released boxing game on Quest headsets but the “world” you see in my screenshot below is not that paid destination. It is a free sampler-like copycat world built in tools managed by Meta from the same people who make the full game “On Quest”.

There seems still to be some version of the future where Mark Zuckerberg thinks enough children might want to play not-Fortnite or not-Roblox or not-Minecraft on their phone as a taster for full virtual reality.

I just don’t see it.

If or when “worlds” with a lowercase w fail, the screws will turn further on extracting value for AI from all other behavior found inside a Meta account.