Spoilers for Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars ahead.
The Metaverse (the idea of a fully virtual, interactable representation of the Internet and its myriad services) may be coming into the spotlight thanks to efforts from tech giants like Facebook, but the concept has been around for far longer than one might expect. From fictional examples like those in media like Snow Crash and Ready Player One to small-scale simulators like Second Life and VR Chat, the allure of traversing a digital world is hard to deny. One film particularly honed in on that allure while presenting a Metaverse that felt especially realistic—in part because it was released on the cusp of the Internet’s shift to a platform where the Metaverse was a tangible possibility.
It makes sense, then, that this distinctive interpretation comes from someone with prior experience with digital worlds of a different stripe.
Writer-director Mamoru Hosoda, whose claims to fame include The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Oscar-nominated Mirai, and (most pertinent here) episodes and specials for the 1999 anime series and would-be Pokémon competitor Digimon Adventure, explored the concept of the Metaverse in his 2009 film Summer Wars. Its wondrous digital land of Oz has the most obvious hallmarks one might expect to see in an everything-is-online society, such as an avatar-centric hub world and a heavy emphasis on commercialism. The film’s opening sequence proudly showcases how easy it is to buy anything and everything, from food to stocks to even housing, all at the tap of a button. Entertainment is at users’ fingertips, including an early interpretation of an eSports scene (or, well, as much of a scene as one kid punching everything with his rabbit avatar can be). The film also explores the idea of virtual workspaces, in the form of characters working from anywhere in the world via an avatar and a connected device. These devices can range from one’s cell phone to a high-end desktop PC, to even video game consoles—as per the trends in 2009, the example used is a pseudo-Nintendo DS console.
This all might sound familiar to our own current social media landscape. Food and goods can be bought and shipped out near instantaneously; real estate is but a click away—on multiple “storefronts,” even. Electronics are becoming more interconnected, where the same piece of tech that lets you watch movies can also let you comment on those movies in real time, or where you can play games while looking for any piece of information you could ever hope to dream of.
Unlike our world, however, Oz is also shown to be the absolute root of civil infrastructure worldwide, though the film mostly focuses on its effects on Japanese day-to-day life. Citizens can pay local fees and taxes through Oz. Doctors use the service to monitor and talk with high-risk patients, wherever they might be. The system is tied to emergency services, water pipelines, electrical grids, traffic systems; if it can be automated, Oz probably has a hand in it. While the Internet has evolved enough to allow for some of these advancements in our reality, in Summer Wars, they’re not just societal perks that some countries have, and others don’t (though that’s not unheard of even today): they’re a fact of life.
On the surface, this might seem like a boon. Having all of these services under one roof makes life easier for both the citizens using them and the people managing them. However, as the film kicks off, cracks begin to show in the veneer of the perfect online utopia—cracks that come in the form of the main character Kenji literally cracking the Oz security code, a more extreme version of the all-too-familiar phishing emails and fake hyperlinks that plague the Internet today. Once Kenji’s Oz account is hacked by an AI known only as Love Machine, the world (or, at least, Japan) grinds to a screeching halt. Traffic lights go haywire, GPS services start reporting incorrect data, water mains burst open and flood the streets. Emergency services are sent scrambling as false alarms wreak havoc across the country. Even a faraway space satellite becomes a deadly threat as it’s presumably manned by a single Oz accountholder.
We’ve seen this scenario play out small-scale in real life—at least, in comparison to the apocalyptic threats faced in Summer Wars. Websites being knocked down when their hosting service experiences issues has become a near-regular occurrence over the course of the past decade, especially with the pandemic leading to more active Internet usage across the world. Some of this is a matter of unfortunate circumstances, with servers being naturally overloaded or human error leading to a cascading wave of difficulties. However, bad faith actors have become far more prominent in recent years with intent to do as Love Machine would: wreak havoc, either for fun or profit.
Hacking has become an industry capable of taking on corporations and governments alike; rather, it always has been, and is now a far more active and lucrative endeavor as the world places more information and vital services online. The film raises concerns about those who employ these types of actors, or who invest in technology that could bring the world to its knees. It’s mentioned a few times throughout the film that the U.S. government paid morally ambiguous designer Wabisuke for Love Machine, and it’s later revealed that they set it loose on the Internet as a test run. It’s never outright stated what they would want Love Machine for, but the implication is that it was intended for use against the country’s enemies. While we’ve yet to see anything on the scale of Love Machine in real life, with the rise of government-sanctioned cyberterrorism across the world, it’s not inconceivable to imagine plans or experiments in the same vein occurring as we go about our daily lives.
The film is predicated on the world at large investing in this new, all-encompassing technology to allow for the plot to play out. We haven’t reached that point in any Metaverse in real life yet—but that doesn’t mean we won’t. With social media platforms and similar services vying to be the first true Metaverse, we could likely see agreements with local or national governments that allow for, say, electrical grid management or a remote-controlled satellite. We could see (and in some cases are already seeing) corporations try to bring their products and services into a new era of direct customer engagement, or entertainment platforms falling in line under one umbrella. Summer Wars offers a vital lesson for anyone attempting to make this dream a reality: have checks in place, and make sure you have some form of backup in the event of something going horrifically wrong, to prevent any potential Love Machines from destroying all that you build.
Well, that, and to learn how to play the classic Japanese card game Koi-Koi, just in case a rogue AI challenges you to a match with the fate of the world on the line. You never know what could happen these days.