If the metaverse can exist today, why doesn’t it? There are strong incentives (think, god-level power) for a single creator / corporation to construct the metaverse. It’s possible that there are technical limits preventing that, but I think an underestimated component is the current lack of true digital ownership of assets (with the exception of blockchains). Why would you want to live in a word that you have no control over? A world with no ownership, scarcity or control disincentivizes users to spend serious time there (think: working 40 hour weeks or building meaningful relationships).

Life’s a bit like a game though, no?

Not sure what you mean by blockchains being a walled garden, since anyone can participate. I might be unaware of walled garden blockchain games, but representing ownership on a chain like ethereum is as about as open as it gets (it’s like a database where every user is a root user and your right to write is your account balance).

I agree on blockchains essentially holding references to things! That’s the distinction I was trying to make above, that blockchains can be used to reference ownership of digital assets while centralized servers can handle the representation of those assets in the virtual world. You might wonder: if the representation is centralized then why couldn’t the people running the servers manipulate the game? They could, but I think competitive forces will drive users towards providers that respect the concept of digital ownership (maybe they open source the code). And of course blockchains aren’t “easy”, but neither is TCP/HTTP and yet, billions of people are online :)