Article
What it means to own your stuff.
We read an article/ad yesterday morning for a kids show debuting exclusively on a platform that needs a crypto wallet to access. Alongside things that do not generally make for a good story [1], one of the quotes from one of the finance bros behind it was something along the lines of "we don't expect kids to trade, but we want them to be able to buy digital assets on our metaverse platform".
Which, uh, kind of underscores the point that a regular database would be significantly better for the target audience than anything involving a blockchain. A blockchain was not needed for kids to earn achievement badges on the old Cartoon Network website before the forces of late stage capitalism replaced it with an empty shell of a streaming service ad. And similarly, you do not need that if you are just buying a thing for a singular platform.
But that ad did get us thinking about all of this stuff again. About "the metaverse", but also the nature of what digital ownership can mean in terms of user freedom and control, all without ever involving any sort of blockchain.
The Metaverse (singular)
"The Metaverse" is a term of art originating in Neal Stephenson's 1992 book Snow Crash... which we will openly admit to not having read.
As a term of art, it is impossible to get one consensus definition for it; it can be as simple as any shared digital space within which people communicate, with anything beyond that open to question and individual interpretation.
For example, some will say that some level of immersion and/or 3D space is necessary, which would rule out social media, Discord and some of the virtual worlds of the 90s such as Habbo Hotel or Furcadia - but there are 3D worlds from that era that would still qualify. Some take that a step further; that a VR headset should at the very least be strongly recommended, ruling out Fortnite and Decentraland [2], both of which are heavily pushed as metaverses by their respective creators.
And that reveals the problem. Most occurrences of a metaverse in fiction have one of them, with one controlling body, be it government or mega corporation.
the situation
A number of companies have something they have described as a metaverse.
Few talk to external services - the dream of "instead of going to your bank's website to access your balance, you will navigate your avatar to a 3D representation of your bank and speak to the cashier with an ❗ over their head" long being dead since the peak of Second Life.
Crucially, none of them talk to each other either. It's not clear if some of them could - Fortnite's large collection of licensed IP was exclusively licensed to them, as an example.
But it means once those games die, whatever was bought in them dies too. The platform is always where it ends, and this applies as much to the crypto games as well despite their proponents' fantasy of "you can take your special gun from Call of Duty and bring it into Spyro" - who would implement importing items from a failed game, and who would buy the worthless items from such a failure?
actual ownership
And that is where I think VRChat differs from most virtual worlds that have come before it.
The vast majority of the transactions for VRChat assets are not with VRChat as the platform holder; they are with independent creators and artists, on their own storefronts - whether something they've set up themselves or something like itch.io.
On purchase, the avatar does not just appear in your menu. Most purchases give a Unity package, a simple archive format that Unity can extract.
And within that package, along with Unity and VRChat specific things, are textures and models that can be read by any graphics package or 3D modelling software, edited to your exact need.
This process does create friction - particularly for the large number of VRChat users on Android-based devices, who may not have access to a machine capable of uploading.
As creations by those learning their craft, many avatars are also unoptimized, and that creates more problems when VR has tight frame budgets.
But it also means that after customizing or remixing, what you have is yours. [3] The original could be taken down and you would still have the ability to upload your custom version. Most avatars have no form of DRM - but even the ones that do, that only applies to the VRChat specific configuration.
And because what you have is the raw assets, that makes it portable. A single avatar sold as for use in VRChat can, with work, be used in Beat Saber, Synth Riders, Pawperty Damage, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, whatever that UE5 social VR game was, Resonite, Boneworks, Garry's Mod, vTubing apps, THUGPro, and more. Some of these will be more work than others, but if VRChat suddenly no longer exists as a platform, there are options.
It is somewhat of a tautology to say that game development assets can be used for game development, but it's true.
Further reading
- If you want to learn more about the metaverses of the 90s and 00s, you might enjoy Preserving Worlds
- We've yet to finish them due to not having time, but we've enjoyed what we've read of Post-Self, for a queer therian take on virtual worlds layered over reality.
Footnotes
"Vote on where this roadtrip visits next, maybe it'll be your hometown!!!" ↩︎
Note that our opinions on Decentraland come from 2023's The Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse, so maybe they've fixed it by now but probably not. ↩︎
This also means you're responsible for backing things up, so consider this a reminder to do that. ↩︎