I'm a big fan of
Sword Art Online, which I initially compared to
The Matrix in which it represented the Japanese point of view which tends to replace master narratives with smaller stories... e.g. in the matrix VR is a threat to all humanity, in SAO VR is something Ralph Nader warned you about.
Later I saw Ready Player One which is a better comparison and was written at about the same time.
In SAO, though, the incredible thing is that the SAO victims go back into VR (it's less dangerous because the deadly Nerve Gear is replaced by the safer Amusphere.) At the end of the first story arc, Kirito (the hero) and most of the survivors escape the death game, but Asuna (his girlfriend) is still stuck inside and he has to rescue her. In later story arcs Kirito investigates crimes in VR, gets lost in another world, etc.
It seems to me that the captains of this industry should be taking science fiction a little more seriously. If Zuckerberg had seen Ready Player One it seems he could do a better job of explaining the Metaverse. In the sense that Sword Art Online was touted (in the SAO universe) as a quantum leap over previous games, I was hoping Google would use Stadia as a platform to develop high complexity games that support 20+ users on a monster server but they used their opportunity to develop... Nothing at all.
