richard was there at the very dawn of multiplayer experiences in 1978. he was one of the brains behind the words first multiplayer virtual world, the text adventure multi—user dungeon or mud. now a professor of computer game design at the university of essex, he believes there is a specific set of rules which define the idea of the metaverse. ok, so the metaverse is essentially a marketing concept. we have universes which are self—contained realities, then we have multi—verses which are realities that you can move between so they are effectively the same reality. and then we have a metaverse which is all one reality but it has got a whole bunch of other ones interconnected. so, as an example, something like world of warcraft is a universe, you can't take anything into or out of world of warcraft. it is self—contained.