Roblox Staff Can't Work Remotely - But VRChat & Linden Lab Personnel Mostly Do

Above: The home office of full-time VRChat employee (and former community member) "Merlin"

Interesting new work policy from leading metaverse platform company Roblox, as reported by Vox's Jay Peters:

Roblox — a company that builds a hugely popular virtual experiences platform, recently introduced its own spin on video chat, and even created an in-Roblox career center — is “transitioning away” from remote work and will be asking “a number of our remote employees to begin working from our headquarters in San Mateo by next summer,” CEO David Baszucki wrote in an email to staff shared publicly on Tuesday…

Baszucki also says that virtual working environments just aren’t as good as in-person ones: “While I’m confident we will get to a point where virtual workspaces are as engaging, collaborative, and productive as physical spaces, we aren’t there yet.” Seems like the company has some work to do to meet its own goal of having Roblox employees “spend more time using Roblox for remote meetings than with video” within the next five years.

Bad news for Roblox employees who hate the work commute to San Mateo. (Even though it's near a bomb ass ramen joint.)

At the same time, I wouldn't interpret this as suggesting metaverse platform companies in general aren't ready to work within the virtual world platforms they create, at least on a part-time basis:

Remember that video interview I did at Linden Lab HQ over the Summer? The main Linden office is large enough to hold 100-200 people, but I was surprised to see maybe 5-10 folks there. I later found out the company has gone almost completely remote beyond regular onsite meetings. (And yes, many of their company meetings are in Second Life itself.)

While writing the book, I discovered VRChat's company culture is even more remote, with work meetings often conducted in the virtual world, and company staff often addressing each other by their avatar names! I believe VRChat doesn't even have a physical HQ.

So why is Roblox going back to the office?

One obvious reason is its platform content creation/sharing tools are not as powerful, and avatars are much less expressive.

But my guess is it's mainly about company size:

Roblox has over 2000 employees, while both Second Life and VRChat have much smaller teams — both in the low hundreds. At Roblox's size, you're likely to have many more staff who aren't die hard virtual world users, or communicate as effectively in that context.

And while "Metaverse as the new Zoom!" has been the pitch going around awhile, I've actually used two-three platforms for company work, so my take in Making is a bit more nuanced:

I’m still not convinced metaverse-based conferencing is sustainable. For occasional meetings between people who work remotely? Quite possibly. But my strong sense is that virtual conferencing on a regular basis will not be feasible or desirable until launching them is as at least as simple and seamless as initializing a Zoom call from within Slack.

I’m also convinced virtual world conferences as they’re currently deployed need to be better designed to scale.

Nick Yee's advice "break reality in productive ways" to overcome prejudice in virtual worlds (see Chapter 9) also translates to this context, offering ways to make metaverse-based meetings better than what we have in the real world.

"We know that there are some people who tend to by virtue of their personality or their appearance or gender category, age, or whatever, tend to dominate the discussion,” as Nick puts it. So what if people's avatars virtually got bigger in a meeting room, the more disproportionately they speak? Then you can literally see someone who is disproportionately dominant in conversation."

A similar approach could encourage attendees to identify and encourage those who don't tend to participate in meetings: "[P]eople who haven't been spoken for awhile, their avatars literally start fading away… the visual cues help balance a conversation."

So far, no metaverse platform is attempting to do anything like this with real world conferencing, instead relying on standard human avatars. But a conferencing solution which only offers human avatar choices will inevitably encourage some level of harassment, toxicity, and other HR problems. In a work context, requiring personnel to take a meeting in a metaverse platform can cause anxiety to some, since it puts them in an unfamiliar medium they’re often not comfortable with. Women in particular can sometimes consider the very request to be uncomfortable.

“I’m already judged by what I wear at work,” as one woman told me. “Now I gotta be judged as an avatar, too?”

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