Technologies
The Man Who Named the Metaverse Is Optimistic Despite Waning Hype
Sci-fi author Neal Stephenson says the metaverse’s foundations are maturing. New mixed reality headsets from Meta and Apple could help his case.

It’s OK to be confused about the metaverse. Pessimists can point to Meta’s difficulties over the last year convincing us we’ll all inhabit this immersive 3D realm. Optimists can point to Meta’s new $499 Quest 3 virtual and mixed reality headset, announced Thursday, and a competing headset Apple is expected to reveal in just a few days as evidence that tech giants are still backing the idea of an immersive digital realm.
Put Neal Stephenson, whose 1992 dystopian sci-fi novel Snow Crash introduced the term «metaverse,» in the optimist camp.
«Just in the last couple of years, it feels like a bunch of things have snapped into place — the prerequisites that we need to have on hand in order to really start building a metaverse,» Stephenson said Wednesday in a talk at Augmented Reality Expo.
Stephenson’s vested interest just isn’t from his novel. He’s worked at several startups since the 1990s, including augmented reality headset maker Magic Leap, but his current effort, Lamina1, is working on metaverse plumbing it hopes will lead to an open foundation easy for developers to build upon and for people to visit.
It’ll be a tough sell. The 2021 metaverse buzz has diminished greatly. Facebook renamed itself Meta, but investors have slammed its ambition to capitalize on the metaverse. And Web3 movement, which aimed to build «decentralized» metaverse tools that would reward those creating salable goods in the metaverse, has suffered persistent problems. That includes scams, security vulnerabilities and «rug pulls» in which project organizers hype a cryptocurrency then cash out, leaving investors with valueless assets.
Creative Strategies analyst Olivier Blanchard is a skeptic and the mainstream adoption of computer-generated virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) that blends computer imagery with the real world, and the umbrella term encompassing both, mixed reality (XR).
«Once the AI gold rush cools off and Apple has finally given it some sense of direction, it is going to need to decide what it wants to be when it grows up if it has any hope of ever attracting mainstream consumers,» Blanchard said. «Metaverse and XR companies are going to have to clearly communicate to users how their solutions will actually make their lives better rather than just more expensive and complicated.»
But maybe the metaverse won’t be as tough a sell soon.
Apple’s expected headset, years in the works and likely to emerge at the company’s WWDC developer conference, could help convince developers to build mixed reality apps. Apple successfully wooed mobile developers to write millions of apps for iPhones and iPads. And Meta’s Quest 3 XR headset has video pass-through mode that will give it AR abilities.
The metaverse has a long way to go before matching the widespread adoption of today’s web or the metaverse in Snow Crash.
Snow Crash is a rollicking novel that uses humor and adventure to take the edge off its dystopian vision. The metaverse plays a central role in the book, but Stephenson places the blame for the dystopia on human society more broadly. With the metaverse, Stephenson wanted to present a technology realm that accommodated a broad span of human activity.
«Our initial exposure to the metaverse is a kind of very vast market, a lowest common denominator to include … the worst of television,» Stephenson said. «But later on, as we get farther into the book, we see that people have used it to make beautiful works of art. There are some people … who lavished a lot of time and attention on making homes in the metaverse that are exquisite works of art, both visually and in this sonic environment.»
That metaverse was all about VR, but Stephenson takes a broader definition today, «a three-dimensional, virtual, shared environment,» which includes AR, too. Although Snow Crash is famous for its metaverse, there also are «gargoyle» characters in the book’s real world, uber-techies hidden behind AR goggles who are constantly tapped into data feeds.
Stephenson said he was impressed with progress with VR, AR and XR, in particular with game engine tools like Unity and Unreal Engine that are widely used for 3D graphics and gaming. But so far, there’s not enough reason to hang out in the metaverse.

Ori Inbar, a leader of augmented, mixed, and extended reality technology, speaks at the AWE 2023 next to a virtual version of himself.
«If we’re going to have a metaverse that’s being used all the time by millions or billions of people, then there have to be experiences in the metaverse that are worth having,» Stephenson said. Lamina1’s goal is to improve the metaverse tooling so developers and other creators can build those experiences. That includes the blockchain and NFT technology that’s lost much of its luster as cryptocurrencies lost much of their value since peaking in 2021.
Lamina1 is working on partnerships to flesh out the metaverse. One is with Mira, which is scanning the real world to create a virtual version, but several others are with game developers.
Stephenson helped to co-found Lumina1 in 2022, but he’s pulled back some. He still serves as chairman, but in 2023, he resumed novel writing, too, he said.
At the Augmented World Expo, AR fans are abundant, including show organizer and AugmentedReality.org Chief Executive Ori Inbar, who shared the stage with a virtual, nearly life-size version of himself appearing in a telepresence box built by ARHT Media. Inbar spent much of his 20 minutes on stage at the show defending the technology, arguing that it’s thriving despite the tech world’s attention moving to AI.
«We won’t rest until everyone uses XR, everywhere, all the time.»
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Technologies
WWE 2K25 Jumps From the Top Rope Onto PlayStation Plus in September
Subscribers will also be able to play a turn-based strategy Persona game.

«The American Nightmare» Cody Rhodes, son of one of the greatest pro wrestlers of all time, «The American Dream» Dusty Rhodes, is the current undisputed WWE champion. And PlayStation Plus subscribers can bring Rhodes down a peg or help establish a new wrestling dynasty with the champion beginning on Sept. 16 in WWE 2K25.
PlayStation Plus is Sony’s version of Xbox Game Pass, and it offers subscribers a large and constantly expanding library of games. There are three PlayStation Plus tiers — Essential ($10 a month), Extra ($15 a month) and Premium ($18 a month) — and each gives subscribers access to games. However, only Extra and Premium tier subscribers can access the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog.
Here are all the games PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers can access starting on Sept. 16. You can also check out the games all PS Plus subscribers can play in September, including Psychonauts 2.
Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.
WWE 2K25
Take control of your favorite superstar from the men’s and women’s divisions in this knockdown, dragout wrestling game. Become one of over 300 wrestlers from today and years past, like Rhea Ripley and Andre the Giant. This entry in the series also introduces intergender wrestling matches, barricade diving and new brawl environments where you can get over or turn heel.
Persona 5 Tactica
Join the Phantom Thieves in this real-time strategy game set in the Persona universe. You and the group wander into a bizarre realm where people are living under tyrannical oppression, and you cross paths with a revolutionary named Erina. Now you’re in cahoots with the rebels as you try to free an oppressed people and find your way back home.
Other games on PS Plus
Those are a few of the games Sony is bringing to PlayStation Plus, and subscribers can play these games as well starting on Sept. 16.
*Premium subscribers only.
For more on PlayStation Plus, here’s what to know about the service and a rundown of PS Plus Extra and Premium games added in August. You can also check out the latest and upcoming games on Xbox Game Pass and Apple Arcade.
Technologies
Little Nightmares 3 Hands-On: a Creepy Co-Op Game Arriving Just in Time for Halloween
The sequel adds cooperative play with all the haunting hallmarks of the earlier games.

After about an hour playing Little Nightmares 3, I’d used a person’s bisected halves to solve a puzzle, gotten a high score in a carnival shooting game and escaped the murderous claws of a deranged baby. As a 2-foot-tall youth trying to survive the morbid dangers of one demented area after another with my co-player, I was terrified and delighted.
I’ve only sampled the first two Little Nightmares games, but in my brief preview of Little Nightmares 3, it felt like a refined version of the series’ premise: small protagonists endangered by a large, grim world filled with traps to evade, puzzles to solve and horrid, lethal enemies to outwit. Take the scale of the animated horror movie 9, mix it with the darkest of stop-motion director Henry Selick’s maudlin settings and let players enjoy the haunting ride, room by perilous room.
This time, players aren’t alone. In Little Nightmares 3, developed by Supermassive Games, two players (or one and an AI companion) choose between characters Low (a bird-masked boy with a bow) and Alone (a girl with a jumpsuit and a wrench), who rely on each other and get out of rooms using their unique tools or just good ol’ fashioned teamwork. Sometimes this means pushing a box for the other to jump on, but other obstacles require rather complex puzzle-solving.
In the game, Low and Alone seek to escape the bleak Nowhere and its roulette of dystopian lands. My preview was limited to one of these areas — Carnevale, a demented circus where our small characters had to sneak under the feet of grotesque, ambling workers (or their corpses, tied up or swinging for the sport of their fellows). When we thought we were safe, possessed puppets sprinted after us until we could team up to knock their wooden heads off and crush them. Being noticed by anyone meant our demise, requiring frantic cooperation amid the anxious stakes of rather gruesome deaths.
It’s this tension and the dour setting that sets Little Nightmares 3 apart from other co-op games like the more excitable and dynamic Split Fiction released earlier this year, a rollercoaster flipbook of game genres that made for a breathless if not terribly coherent experience. In contrast, the section of Little Nightmares 3 I played unfolded like a series of grim vignettes that rely on its pleasingly goth trappings as much as working together with your friend (or computer teammate) to progress.
Surviving your little nightmares
While I got only an hour with the game, Little Nightmares 3 seems to iterate on rather than innovate away from its predecessors: Expect more of the same in new, grotesque settings, just with the welcome addition of tightly designed teamwork dynamics. For fans of the series, this is likely a good thing. There’s not much else like Little Nightmares.
The Carnevale stage I played through opened up with rain pelting red-and-white circus tent tops, which I as the masked Low (and someone from Bandai Namco who kindly played as the jumpsuit-wearing Alone) skittered between. Lumbering above us were brutish factory workers seeking escape at the funfair, which very quickly turned sinister as we very shortly saw some hanging tied-up as others took turns beating them like a piñata. We entered one room to find one worker in connected boxes as the subject of a magician’s saw-in-half trick…which was no trick, as we had to separate the halves to climb out of a window. I tried, and failed, to ignore the viscera slopping out of the boxes.
While we hid from the human-size enemies, we had to fight the wooden puppets. Like Geppeto’s most horrid creations, they ambushed us in several rooms, requiring me to knock their heads off with Low’s bow and run away from their decapitated bodies while my teammate rushed forward to crush their heads with Alone’s wrench.
But most of the rooms are about solving puzzles, which could be as simple as moving a box for my teammate to jump up and pull a switch or figure out how a radio plays into a complex solution. While these quiet moments are a nice break from the tense combat or pursuit, they also give time to appreciate the macabre backgrounds: I ran past one room with a circle of empty tall chairs only to come back a few seconds later to find them filled with puppets, unmoving but watching.
And then there are the really, really tense moments. We moved from the carnival to the adjoining candy factory (apparently where all those brutes work) and up to the offices where the boss works, to find him asleep with the TV droning on in the darkness…and his frankly hideous baby nestled next to him. Naturally, we had to make noise, cranking open a grate, awakening the terrifying spawn who ran after us. After many, many failed escapes, my teammate and I discovered we had to scramble for a hiding place after making it past the grate.
This was perhaps the most frustrating part of the preview as we panicked looking for a solution to our deadly woes (as opposed to the slow, methodical gameplay earlier) — but that’s part of the tension, especially when adding a teammate to the mix. Ultimately, it was a hard-won lesson in patience. In the next room, a kitchen, the nightmarish baby banged a bowl on the table until the father walked over to a corpse (presumably his worker) and cut out some meat for his ghoulish child to eat.
In my short time with it, Little Nightmares 3 seems like a cooperative spooky storybook for players and their friends (but not couch buddies, sadly — it’s online co-op only) to experience. How much it lives up to previous games in the series, especially as developer Supermassive Games takes more of the reins from the franchise’s original creators Tarsier Games, is anyone’s guess. (Tarsier’s similar spiritual sequel to Little Nightmares, Reanimal, is coming in 2026.)
But as the air turns crisp and Halloween beckons, it’s the best time of the year for a creepy co-op game like Little Nightmares 3 to land.
Little Nightmares 3 comes out Oct.10, 2025, for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.
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