Two Best Practices for Building Virtual Worlds - Excerpt, <em>Making a Metaverse That Matters</em>

Excerpt, Making a Metaverse That Matters, Chapter 14: Metaverse Lessons for the Next 30 Years

Community Creates Value — Not the Other Way Around

The failure of Decentraland and other blockchain-based metaverse platforms, as we saw in Chapter 6, illustrates the limitation of virtual worlds that begin with virtual real estate sales and other speculation. The user base that is attracted to them tend to be there in search of easy riches, and rarely become active participants in the virtual world itself. (This principle may change of course with the advent of Neal Stephenson’s Lamina1, but as of this writing, that’s still unclear.)

By contrast, one rule of thumb for judging whether a metaverse platform is successful is this: You will find a subset of content creators who create not for profit, but for social recognition among the user community — even when it involves work directly related to their real profession.

We have seen that in strong examples of this across many metaverse platforms, from a professional game artist creating a free Portal tribute in ROBLOX to prove the platform's power, to an unemployed developer who created and then open sourced a C# compiler to help VRChat creators, to a technologist with IBM creating transcendent works of immersive art in Second Life simply for the sake of sharing that vision with others.

This social spirit is not simply about idealism. Second Life founding member Hunter Walk, who left Google/YouTube to become an influential venture capitalist, sees this community-centric approach as fundamental to its sustainability as a platform.

As he puts it in a rhetorical question: “Is this a space that feels owned by the people or does it feel owned by companies — where the business model was set before the creative model? My belief is that parts of a successful metaverse will be more open and jazz-like — creative model first, business models second."

A related realization is that getting community correct first and foremost matters most of all,

"If you invest in creating a positive environment up front,” as Linden Lab/Meta veteran Jim Purbrick puts it, “you can get a positive feedback loop. If you don't set that up front and up with a toxic environment, it's super difficult to turn that around later on."

NEXT: How default avatar options shape a metaverse platform's entire culture:

Avatars Shape Culture

We have explored how ultra-realistic human avatars can negatively shape the culture of a metaverse platform, arguably shifting Second Life in its later years from a highly imaginative creative platform to a heavily materialistic, often-toxic consumer-driven experience (with some creativity still persisting on the sidelines). This variety of avatar definitely did not grow Second Life’s user base. And once again, human avatars were only one of many types in Snow Crash, with its virtual world shared by avatars of all species and variety.

What’s also clear is how much non-realistic or heavily stylized avatars have instead succeeded:

ROBLOX and to a lesser extent Fortnite created avatars ideally suited to their target core demographic: The former, simple, blocky avatars evocative of LEGO characters, most appealing to young kids; the latter, semi-realistic human avatars with a semi-realistic, but expressively cartoon aesthetic reminiscent of characters from a Star Wars animated series or the hit video game Team Fortress — IP highly popular with teenage gamers.

While VRChat launched with cartoonish human avatars as its default option, the openness of avatar customization encouraged players to expand the actual spectrum of avatar appearance to include anime characters, furries, and avatars based on popular film and TV cartoon characters. This wide range of creativity went on to influence the kind of content created in VRChat in general, moving far beyond environments where human avatars organically “fit”.

The challenge, as we discussed in Chapter 11, is presenting a selection of default avatar options with aesthetics that are broad and diverse enough to attract nearly all demographic groups, and can grow the community in a positive direction. This remains a goal for the metaverse platforms of the future.

Jenova Chen’s heavily stylized sylph-like avatars for his upcoming metaverse experience offers us one promising avenue.

Beyond that, the creative space remains aggressively wide open. As Nick Yee points out, in the history of virtual world/metaverse platforms over the last few decades, roughly 95% of them have been centered around human/humanoid, one-to-one embodied avatars.

“There's this whole separate evolutionary branch of what are other ways we could be doing work and play and social interaction if we weren't forced into this one user, one avatar and embodied assumption,” as Yee puts it. “What if you could control multiple avatars at the same time? What if multiple people had to control the same avatar?"

The main goal, Yee writes to me, is “to look at the ‘social architecture’ (i.e., the hidden parameters and rules) in virtual worlds (and that includes the design and affordances of avatars) intentionally rather than as arbitrary/accidental outcomes or simply replicating reality. Or put another way, to think about the goals of a specific virtual world and to make sure the social architecture supports those goals.”