By Stacy Suaya
In 1989, my dad and I were obsessed with “Dragon Warrior I.” One day when he was at work, I fought metal slimes for eight hours to surprise him with the most powerful wearable in the game: Erdrick’s Armor. I’ll never forget how proud he was. Cut to a month ago – I’m now a mom, rubbing the back of my boyfriend’s 7-year-old son, who’s bawling because he can’t wear his favorite skin in Minecraft due to a glitch, and refuses to play in the default “Steve” skin. Gaming tech has grown from 8-Bit to blockchain, and wearables have grown with it – from no market to a market that’s projected to be worth $50 billion by 2030.
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It was Australian Open Week, so Sam Hamilton, the Creative Director of the Decentraland Foundation, explained via Zoom that a lot of avatars were walking around the virtual world with tennis balls as heads. “I see a lot of stuff like that,” he says. “People with heads as TVs or goldfish bowls. There’s definitely an element of fantasy in digital fashion.”
Digital dressing consists of hats, masks, headphones, hairdos, skirts, pants, sneakers and “back bling” i.e. shields, jetpacks and backpacks. And then there are novelty items like wings or hook hands, if sea quests are your thing. They typically exist only in games or digital universes, but sometimes, like in virtual sneaker brand RTFKT’s recent collaboration with artist @fewocious, there’s a physical version too.
The market is booming: As of this writing, the Decentraland Wearables store on OpenSea had 726,100 items for sale; $754,822 worth of volume has been traded. Single-item sales can also be stunning. Even back in the pre-NFT gold rush days, a Golden Ornithomancer Mantle of the Benefactor skin, made for the game “Dota 2,” sold for $1553.
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What’s the draw? “It’s really fun to mess around with the different outfits and accessories, to express yourself, and laugh about it with your friends – like dressing up as a guy from the ‘80s. Avatars are usually what you want to look like,” says Franco Escobar, a 15-year-old gamer who lives in Los Angeles (and for about 24 hours a week, inside the pirate game “Sea of Thieves,” where he admires hats called “Unusuals” that can emit flames and sunbeams).
Digital wearables have utility beyond self-expression: They’re considered more sustainable than traditional fashion (no raw materials to buy, no overstock sitting in warehouses, no polluting, and no animals harmed). They won’t crowd your apartment, you don’t have to wash them, and they’re never uncomfortable. Those four-inch heels won’t give your hammertoes in the metaverse, some digital sneakers will make you run faster in certain games, and the right armor can still get you to the next level.
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