Afterword: Where in the Virtual World the Platforms and People from This Book Are Now
Philip Rosedale continues to advise Linden Lab on the future of Second Life, though lately he's set his sights on a somewhat more ambitious goal: using what he's learned from the economies of metaverse platforms to solve global economic inequality in the real world:
“I want to give people something like the Linden Dollar but just as an iPhone app that they basically can use to buy and sell anything from each other,” as he put it to me in a February 2023 call.
During the COVID-19 lockdown, Rosedale created an economic simulation that showed him a frightening thing: “Even with people in a small community trying to look after each other, you will basically end up with a kind of a natural, almost a thermodynamic problem, where some randomly chosen people will basically just end up getting more and more money.”
He sees that in the state of the real-world economy: “If you recognize that the economic system we have is so broken, the only safe assumption is we're going to have a violent revolution, as has been had many times throughout history.”
Some metaverse platforms might help with inequality, he believes, but then again, others will not: “Roblox is a lottery you're not going to win,” as he puts it, echoing concerns raised in Chapter 4. “You can't go into Roblox and say, ‘I'm gonna make my living in here.’ Maybe you can go into Second Life and say that.”
His new project, called FairShare (www.fairshare.social), aims to solve that by offering people who sign up a universal basic income modeled after one that's helped keep Second Life's economy thriving for 20 years:
“You have some kind of tax that drains money out of the system—a sink, in Linden Lab terms. But then you also have a faucet that puts money into the world. But the money always goes in equally for everybody.”
Unlike other UBI programs, distribution would be done among friend groups through their own digital currency. And Philip Rosedale believes he can massively scale FairShare (still in an early phase when we spoke) to millions:
“It's something where when you signed up, found a group of friends, you suddenly got $50 a day for the rest of your life,” as he puts it. “That would be pretty viral.”
It's one of several ambitious projects he's working on from Linden Lab's Second Life office, which once housed hundreds of employees but is still fairly empty, as the company largely remained remote, post-COVID.
“From this point in my life,” Philip Rosedale tells me, he's going to work on projects like this. All of them “have the property that they're attempting to use technology to do something very good for people, generally focusing on inclusion and connection.”
He is still striving, in other words, to bring his dream from Burning Man decades ago in the desert into a broader reality.
Cory Ondrejka continues in his role at Google as VP of Product Management and Tech Advisor to Google's CEO. From that vantage, he sees a major leap in metaverse technology ahead: “As crypto fades, generative AI takes off, and wearables keep plodding along,” he tells me. “I think we're only a few years away from an entirely new generation of virtual worlds taking entirely new approaches to rendering and simulation.”
Meta: In February 2023, The Wall Street Journal published a memo from Meta's vice president of Horizon, outlining that year's goals and strategies for its metaverse platform. After nearly $16 billion spent by Meta's Reality Labs in 2022 alone, they were disarmingly modest:
The company has set 500,000 monthly active users as the unit's goal for the first half of 2023, with one million as the goal for the full year, according to the memo.
500K MAU, as you may recall, is a bit less than the number of users a small startup called Linden Lab attracted to its own metaverse platform. In 2007.
Roblox announced strong quarterly revenue and user growth in February 2023, with its average daily active user rate up to 65 million in January, growing from 58.8 million in December 22. As a result, its stock grew by 25 percent, making it more valuable than traditional AAA game publishers such as Take-Two Interactive and Electronic Arts.
In February 2023, a small team of community developers released the latest version of Frontlines, their attempt to create a Call of Duty–level multiplayer FPS game on Roblox with comparable graphics and gameplay quality. With backing from the company's Game Fund, providing support for indie teams, they succeeded: Frontlines rapidly went viral among gamers and major gamer publications, eliciting responses that were uniformly in this vein: “I can't believe this is Roblox.” In doing so, it also offered a shining example of how Roblox could overcome the Metaverse Age Cliff and even become competitive with gamer platforms like Steam.
Fortnite: At GDC 2023 in March of that year, Epic unveiled the long-awaited Fortnite Creative 2.0, directly integrating Unreal with Fortnite, enabling multi-user, multiplatform live editing along with many other powerful tools. Even more key, Epic announced a revenue sharing deal where community creators would receive 40 percent of items bought in the Fortnite store commensurate with the popularity of their island. With these and other moves, Fortnite Creative became far more of a full-fledged metaverse platform.
Epic's Tim Sweeney capped these announcements with a galvanizing speech in which he rejected Silicon Valley's narrative that failed web3 metaverse platforms, and Meta's stumbles with Horizons and the Quest headset, meant that the concept as a whole was moribund. Pointing out that Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, and other platforms had continued growing, with “over 600 million active users in these virtual worlds,” he said:
“[The Metaverse is] on a growth trajectory that'll put it at billions of users by the end of this decade, so we can set aside the crazy hype cycle around NFTs and VR goggles. These technologies may play a role in the future but they are not required. This revolution is happening right now.”
VRChat continues adding updates and new features for its developer community, and in March of 2023 announced the imminent release of a VRChat app for Android mobile devices later in the year, with a VRChat for iPhone coming soon after.
Somewhat ironically, VRChat's entrance into mobile was made possible by Meta: “Since the Meta Quest runs Android,” as the company explained on its blog, “any world or avatar that works on Quest loads just fine on Android mobile.” So even if Meta's ambitions to build the Metaverse had fizzled, it still empowered those of VRChat.
Lamina1 in early 2023 announced that its first phase was live for testing to the public—the first step for launching its revenue solution for creators on multiple metaverse platforms. Former Magic Leap executive Rebecca Barkin was appointed CEO, with Neal Stephenson continuing to be Lamina1's chairman—and presumably he will continue in that role to develop his THEEE Metaverse project—the placeholder name for Stephenson's own plans to build the Metaverse from Snow Crash, just as he had reportedly tried to do as far back as the mid-90s.
Second Life continues adding features and updates to serve its existing community, most recently with the beta launch of physically based rendering (or PBR), a feature that would largely bring Second Life's notoriously out-of-date graphics closer to a modern standard. Most notable, in March 2023 Linden Lab finally and officially announced “with joy and trepidation” (as a Linden staffer put it) the imminent release of an iOS/Android app for Second Life running on Unity—bringing the venerable virtual world kicking and screaming into the modern era.
This was not the only project to update Second Life to Unity. In January 2023, when I was briefly in Second Life to do a quick errand for this book, a longtime developer who remembered me from my Linden Lab days casually IMed to say she was launching a somewhat ambitious project dubbed Crystal Frost, a new third-party Second Life viewer that runs on Unity:
“Having a modern graphics engine that's multithreaded, easier modability, implementing ray tracing and proper VR is super easy,” the dev, known as “Berry Bunny” in Second Life, explained to me. “I have ideas about how to implement VR and make it feel like VRChat.”
Just as notable (and on brand for the platform), I first learned about Crystal Frost through a casual, serendipitous encounter in-world—and it’s an innovation put forward by a Second Life community creator, not the company itself.
A Metaverse that matters is one that helps transform the people in it for the better. So this book should end with the people we met at the very start, in the Introduction:
Gizem Mishi continues to head her Blueberry brand. In 2021, after Second Life was acquired, Mishi saw buzz around user-generated content flowering in multiple platforms. “I realized, okay, it's time to scale this company,” she tells me.
Through 2022, exactly 10 years after Mishi stumbled as a college girl in Istanbul into Second Life, Blueberry began expanding its brand into Roblox and other platforms. House of Blueberry, Inc. now has over 12 employees and has been featured in Vogue, Women's Wear Daily, and beyond.
“All of our management team is made of women, and I want this side of the metaverse to be shaped by women,” Mishi tells me. “It's very important for me that it be represented by women. We set the standards, we set the tone, and we become almost like the Disney of the Metaverse. I think we're in a good position to do that.”
Nick Yee continues to co-lead his analytics firm, Quantic Foundry (quanticfoundry.com), giving top game industry clients deeply researched insights into what motivates people to play and enjoy games and virtual worlds. Lately he's been experimenting with AI image generators like Midjourney to create highly stylized and glamorous avatars based on users’ real-life photos. Nick believes this application of AI could transform the Proteus effect, the phenomenon he co-discovered in which our avatars influence how we see ourselves, ideally for the better:
“It opens the door to much more fine-tuned and tailored interventions once avatar customizations can be dialed/modified more precisely,” as he puts it to me. “E.g., stepping-stone avatars to slowly guide someone through a longer arc of development/transformation, like iterative Invisalign trays.” He is referring to the clear mouth braces that people wear to gradually perfect their teeth. “Although,” Nick acknowledges, “that might be the least sexy metaphor possible.”
FIGURE A.1 Fran Swenson/Fran Serenade
Photo by Tom Boellstorff
Fran Swenson, known by thousands around the world through her avatar “Fran Serenade,” died at the age of 91 in 2019. In her last few years, Fran helped pioneer the use of virtual worlds for physical therapy—a tremendous potential achievement that could benefit millions in decades to come.
A memorial service was held for her in the Savoy Ballroom of Second Life, where Fran enjoyed watching her avatar twirl. Many attended from around the globe, including Tom Boellstorff, the UC Irvine anthropologist who first told me Fran's story:
“It was fitting to remember Fran in Second Life, since she brought so much strength and joy to so many there,” Tom tells me. “I met Fran many times in the physical world, but she always felt she was just as real in-world, and her ability to bring people together in Second Life was as real as it gets. Behind that gentle laugh was a fierce will to love and support without judgment. For that I, like so many others, will be forever thankful.”
After his stint as AM Radio in Second Life, Jeff Berg learned to model data in 3D and transitioned from IBM to an architecture firm, leading development of a software application that helps urban planners understand the environmental impacts of their designs in an online collaborative 3D environment. So the artist who created nostalgic metaverse experiences meant to evoke our relationship to nature went on to enable designers to do that better, but for cities of cement and steel.
The leap from metaverse imagination to real-world design was direct, Berg tells me:
“I literally went from the creation of virtual spaces to the real world using skills I had gained as AM Radio.” He does that now at ARUP, an internationally renowned firm that creates sustainable designs for clients like NASA. “I'd still be working on traditional browser experiences had I not had the chance to be AM Radio.”
He sees echoes of his artistic creations as AM Radio in his work today:
“For example, helping, even in a small way, an entity such as NASA to study the psychoacoustic impacts of drone designs on society helps ensure that the real places that inspired The Far Away continue to exist,” he tells me. “And I mean a less tangible use of the word ‘exist,’ but persist with the intangible qualities that inspire others to explore the mysterious gestalt in our interactions with our environment and the places we build in it that haunt human perception.”
Berg tells me he'd love to go back to creating transcendent experiences in a metaverse platform. But he adds, “I think there are so many things that need to be just right for such a wonderful moment to even happen. Maybe that's the most important ability of the Metaverse. It's to provide a place where such an amazing and rich moment could ever happen.”
Then there's a brief pause in his answer to my question.
“I've just come back to writing it, leaning again towards my desk, towards this digital glow. While I was paused, I heard my daughter's footsteps through the open window in the hallway. I leaned back in my chair in my little apartment to see better down the hall to admire the flow in her hair as she arrived home. Suddenly I understood the wind in the trees more than I did a moment before.”
This moment prompts Jeff Berg to picture his beloved avatar with a cane and top hat, often seen in a rustic cabin, looking out at the digital snow:
“Now I think of AM Radio leaning back in his own chair, to see a serene view, one of his own, and then as he leans forward at his simple desk in his little apartment, he knows that wonderful moment is gone.”
In the spring of 2018, at the age of 96, Mr. Charles Bristol played his last gig in the Metaverse. After their virtual shows together, Charles often slept at the home of Russ “Etherian” Roberts, his drummer. Russ would drive the old gentleman around on errands, and then back to his dilapidated home.
“Charles lived in a poverty I never understood,” Russ tells me now, as we stand near a soundstage in Second Life. “I grew up in New York City as a teenager and had never seen anything like that.”
By then, they'd been jamming together in the virtual world on Sundays once a month for about 10 years. Through that time, as Russ remembers, Mr. Bristol seemed to believe that the audience displayed on the screen in front of him was real, as if on a video feed. He had cataracts the size of raisins in both eyes, and peering at the foggy world ahead, Charles told Russ he saw in it the lake near his home:
“Charles, this is a game,” Russ would try to tell him. “It's not real.”
But for Mr. Bristol it was real enough. Peering at the screen, he'd often fall in love with the pretty lady avatars from everywhere in the world, who came to dance to the blues riffs that he played.
Then one day, Charles Bristol did not show up for their regular Metaverse gig.
After a search around town, Russ found him in a hospital, recovering from pneumonia—but also diagnosed with stage four dementia.
Charles was transferred to a nursing home. Russ visited his friend weekly, insisting that the staff care for him well, even as Charles himself faded in and out of lucidity.
Until one visit, Charles was no longer there.
Mr. Charles Edward Bristol died on September 12, 2018. His family arranged his “Home Going Celebration,” at Harland Church of God, for September 22. By design, that would have been his 97th birthday.
Well over 150 attended, including Russ, who was (as he casually noticed after arriving) the only white person in the entire church. Russ doesn't recall ever telling Mr. Bristol's family about the gigs they played together in a digital world called Second Life, but the picture on the memorial flier hints at that connection.
On it, Charles Bristol wears a Panama hat and a showman's stylish shirt, triumphantly holding up two of his prize guitars. One was a gift from Von Johin, a fellow blues guitarist who also found success playing in Second Life.
The other guitar, electric and lacquer black, is one in the “Lucille” style made famous by blues legend B.B. King, a gift from another admirer. But Russ Roberts made it more special still.
After sending out advance emails to his entourage, Russ arranged to have B.B. King himself sign Charles Bristol's guitar and even have a short chat after one of his concerts. (This was very shortly before the music icon himself passed away, in 2015.)
Russ remembers watching at a distance the two bluesmen talking. We do not know what they said, but I wonder if Mr. Bristol mentioned these strange and otherworldly gigs he'd been playing for the last decade. I wonder what Mr. King would have said, he who had transformed so much of modern music and had gigged across the world. What would B.B. King have said about this new venue where people around the globe could quickly come to digitally twirl, enjoying the music that he played?
And then Mr. King signed the guitar that Charles would go on to play for his audience in Second Life.
As it happens, it is the very same guitar I heard when I randomly logged into Second Life in 2008. And realized that there was still so much of the story of the Metaverse left to be told.
That story is still unfolding now.