“Here, you feel like you have a definite part in it.” The plan, according to Decentraland’s founders, was always for its users to take ownership of the world, building and doing what they please.īy contrast, Dave Carr, a spokesman for the Decentraland Foundation, said, “Fortnite is a centralized experience,” meaning that it functions top-down, with major decisions coming from its developer, Epic Games. What separates Decentraland from its predecessors like Second Life, a virtual world owned and operated by a private company called Linden Labs, is that it is indeed fairly decentralized. Michael Bouhanna, who ran the sale, estimated that 90 percent of the galleries’ 3,200 visitors had little sense of what Sotheby’s is or does, but said the exercise was useful for helping existing customers conceptualize NFTs, which the auction house is already selling. Sotheby’s, which acquired a small plot in Decentraland’s arts district and constructed a replica of its London galleries, recently closed its first show in the metaverse. This month, Republic Realm, which calls itself a “digital real estate firm,” purchased an NFT of a 259-parcel virtual estate in Decentraland for more than 1.2 million MANA, or, at contemporaneous exchange rates, more than $900,000. Speculators seem less confused after all, Decentraland is first and foremost an experiment in scarce digital property. Between events, users are mostly left to wander and wonder: What now? The sense that Decentraland is a work in progress pervades the sparsely populated grid of half-developed plots and themed zones. There are casinos where you can gamble in MANA, with croupiers who are paid in MANA to show up for work. Speaking to CNET in May, Mark Zuckerberg shared his own Facebook-centric view: “We want to get as many people as possible to be able to experience virtual reality and be able to jump into the metaverse and to have these social experiences within that,” he said, referring to the company’s experimental virtual reality environment, Horizon, which he hopes people will explore using Facebook’s Oculus headsets.ĭenizens of Decentraland are constantly creating scenes and experiences for other users, like concerts and art exhibits. “Instead, it will slowly emerge over time as different products, services and capabilities integrate and meld together.” There “will be no clean ‘Before Metaverse’ and ‘After Metaverse,’” he writes. Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist and prolific essayist, describes the metaverse not as a virtual world or a space, but as “a sort of successor state to the mobile internet” - a framework for an extremely connected life. If you’ve attended a work meeting or a party using a digital avatar, you’re treading into the neighborhood of metaversality.įounders, investors, futurists and executives have all tried to stake their claim in the metaverse, expounding on its potential for social connection, experimentation, entertainment and, crucially, profit. Virtual and augmented reality are, at a minimum, metaverse adjacent. If you own a non-fungible token or even just some crypto, you’re part of the metaversal experience. Video games like Roblox and Fortnite and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, in which players can build their own worlds, have metaverse tendencies, as does most social media. Together, these new technologies hint at what the internet will become next. But more often metaverses are a bit dystopian - virtual refuges from a fallen world.Īs a buzzword, the metaverse refers to a variety of virtual experiences, environments and assets that gained momentum during the online-everything shift of the pandemic. In fiction, a utopian metaverse may be portrayed as a new frontier where social norms and value systems can be written anew, freed from cultural and economic sclerosis. The term comes from digital antiquity: Coined by the writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel, “Snow Crash,” then reimagined as the Oasis in the Ernest Cline novel “Ready Player One,” it refers to a fully realized digital world that exists beyond the analog one in which we live. Remember hearing about “the internet”? Get ready for “the metaverse.” Then we live our lives within that thing forever. A lot of people talk a lot about a lot of loosely related things, and then those things merge into a single semi-comprehensible thing. In some rare cases, the terminology sticks. Jargon appears out of nowhere, underexplained and overused: the internet of things, the sharing economy, the cloud. The biggest ideas in tech often lurch into the lexicon before they are truly coherent.