I just flipped over the pages of “Ready Player One”, nostalgia apart and focusing in the story telling, is a great piece of marketable product: epic story interrupted by romance that goes bad just to bounce back after the final victory… it always works out with POP fans, and we all are.

But what about the virtual reality world provided by Oasis, is that an option in reality? well, it is the close term future, like 5 years close or so.

As of now MMO(R)PGs are pretty thematic and heavily restricted by development costs, that is why they grow very slow, furthermore the user base usually goes down instead of up. If you look at the “almighty” War of Warcraft it is releasing small improvements yearly at most and the increases are going down as the user base is no longer what it used to be.

Why MMOPG tend to go down? for two reasons: they usually appeal to a specific public which is limited and also playing is not a grateful long term experience: there is no health improvement playing MMOPG, no sexual experiences (collegehumor made a hilarious video on this) and no long term rewards that you can apply in everyday life.

Usually stories about bad experiences playing MMOPGs build a bad agenda against the given game, and everything builds up to finally kill the product. Most of Quora questions are on how many MMOPGs die lately, a couple of questions are very good.

Some developers argue that games in mobile devices are MMOPG game themselves, that China market is going up and that web based games are also MMOPG… but forget those pesky details: mobile games are mini-games using GPS, China is obviously were the US and Europe were years ago and web games are not what we are dreaming about.

OASIS, the system depicted in “Ready player one” IS the final thing: an open system allowing VR immersion with “enough” interaction to be really something you can do the whole day: exercising and having good, productive, social interaction.

Now, how far are we from immersive online gaming that can really be at least a 4-5 hour daily activity?… only one company can not achieve it on the short term… or better said an open project would have more options to grow appropriately.

We can conclude that once a good VR gear-set is available with a good API interface it will be a matter of time before OASIS pops up on the Internet and starts gaining ground… of course physics laws will still apply and we wont see million of avatars in the same context due to concurrency limitations, but the general concept will eventually happen and virtual currencies will be on the stock markets just like the euro or the dollars.

My bet is on it coming as of 2020 and never going down, not in my lifetime I guess (as long as there is electricity in the world).

Now some genius will come and say this is the singularity… like if back engineering the brain was a processing power problem, lol.