Property Rights = Emergent Worldbuilding

By Charlie Edwards

Following Part 2, this section will cover how the different approaches to metaverse worldbuilding (open or closed) will affect their success and inhabitants.

This essay has been adapted from a more extensive series on why the open metaverse is inevitable, essential, and closer than you might think.

Emergent World-Building: Cathedral vs Bazaar

How to frame the two approaches?

Great cities weren’t built in a day, and neither will buzzing virtual environments (but it will be a LOT faster).

If you want to read about some comparative lessons from meatspace city planners, please see here.

TLDR: In all those years, urban planners have come to a handy conclusion: that they cannot plan a perfect city. But they can establish just enough order to channel an old lesson learned across a number of disciplines. If suitable initial conditions are found, the emergent whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And that this continuously emergent system will become antifragile over time, not in spite of all the challenges it has faced but because of them. Sound familiar?

Cathedral <> Bazaar in Virtual World Design:

Does software design = metaverse design?

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.” — John Gall

Cathedral Bazaar

But virtual worlds will not strictly mirror cities, as they are (predominantly) software. They do not all need to provide public goods (so they needn’t be similarly efficient), the cost and time of production are much lower and shorter, and the design space is infinite (so they needn’t be so picky). Although much of the city design theory is relevant in virtual worlds, including the concept of the Cathedral and the Bazaar, as well as other closed/open metaverse characteristics touched on thus far, can assist in displaying the differences in approach.

Top-Down Design: Cathedral (shiny and cold). Chaos averse.

1. Openness: overly prescriptive (deterministic), permissioned, and iterations are usually proprietary and less collaborative.
2. Design: problems are hypothetically identified, and solutions are pre-constructed (fighting chaos). More rigid (path dependent) and fragile (over time). Faster (initially) and more efficient (effective resource management). Immersive (photorealistic and hedonistic).
3. Governance and ownership: treat users as customers (more extractive), ownership concentrated, clearer defined Ts&Cs (centralised).

Emergent Design: Bazaar (dusty and homey). Chaos conducive.

1. Openness: bottom-up, more questions than answers (indeterministic + forkable). More collaborative: wisdom of crowds, Galls Law, Joys Law + incentives (for sustainability of contributions).
2. Design: released early and often. Problems are incrementally identified (chaotic), and solutions are iterated over time (antifragile). Immersive (autonomous and eudaimonic).
3. Governance and ownership: treat people on a spectrum as co-owners/developers/governors (decentralised), property rights = increased incentives for development, barriers against exploitation and rights to exit.

Whilst the metaverse as a whole is an emergent phenomenon, there are differences in approach at the virtual world level. We have already touched on the difference between these approaches regarding counterparty risks, persistence, censorship, governance, and monetary policy.

But these are not just software or cities; they will not be lived in permanently nor compete on their ability to ship consistent technical upgrades; they primarily compete on their ability to provide fulfilling experiences.

In this specific arena, top-down vs. emergent can have mixed results in practice and vary drastically depending on the type of experience created.

1. Basic Needs Fulfilment.
2. Graveyards.
3. Evolutions and Hybrids.

See elsewhere for the difference between the two approaches regarding creative spark and direction, hardware and happiness, and holidays or hometowns.

Basic Needs:

Regarding the basic psychological needs, top-down and emergent designs can produce mixed results:

1. Competence: variety is essential to get people engaged, but so is the clarity of goals or cohesiveness of the experience. As a general rule, the less clear, the less fulfilling (we like to do a lot of stuff, but we want to know the general aim). Due to their incremental approach, emergent worlds may often feel unfocused around the clarity of the experiential mission. Conversely, top-down designs will have a stronger, more explicit and likely compelling purpose of experience (at least initially).
2. Autonomy: directly related to the scope of opportunities for action. Generally, the more you can do, the more fulfilling it is. Both will likely allow customisation at a personal level (we will discuss avatars in more detail later), creation (UGC) and exploration of the world, but to different extents. Emergent worlds have the upper hand regarding the scope of positive opportunities (governance, narrative, direction, real-world effects through cryptonetworks, etc.) and limiting negative constraints (excessive manipulation from top-down).
3. Relatedness: a mixed bag. Due to existing network effects, more prominent top-down players will initially command significantly larger audiences. More impactful in events that thrive on scale, such as virtual concerts (see social proof). But they also tend to manipulate relatedness as a business model. Emergent worlds will likely be smaller in scale, organised into highly aligned communities with enhanced methods for trustless collaboration and shared responsibility where belonging and connectedness may favour quality over quantity.

Both have the potential to meet or undermine users’ basic psychological needs; the debate will likely centre primarily around their ability to balance basic needs and structured experience.

Metaverse Graveyards:

Why so many empty worlds?

dinyart

The reduced cost of failure in the metaverse will inevitably mean more experiments and, subsequently, more graveyards than successes.

Manually roaming around barren virtual malls is, of course, incredibly unfulfilling: competence (with what opportunity), autonomy (over what) and relatedness (with whom). But that is part and parcel of the experimentation.

Why various attempts have failed so far is anyone’s guess.

Perhaps because a) many built broad platforms devoid of cohesive narrative or purpose that are less compelling than most other digital or physical experiences. You can create all the infra you want, but (obviously) the infra will be unused if you have no committed flywheel for creators. Especially as emergent virtual worlds will initially be empty, and 99% of content will be [AI]UGC. The value is in the quality of experience, not in providing new infrastructure to provide experiences. Unfortunately for some, there’s no long-term moat for average experiential middleware.

Perhaps b) many advertised property rights as a major feature, not a given. Instead of 1) providing exciting experiences subsided by 2) a natural evolution into ownership, many forgot to do 1. This will continue to be more problematic when ownership is a norm rather than an explicit draw.

That is one of the major reasons why autonomous worlds (e.g. realms) are so compelling, not because they will appeal to the masses, but because they enable so many features that their predecessors couldn’t that committed citizens will love.

But how to get past the dreaded cold start?

If you want to be a successful upstart city, you need a draw.

Alexandria: Built Libraries, lighthouses, and intellectual institutes that increased prestige, which attracted visitors far and wide, boosting culture and trade in a continual flywheel.

Las Vegas: Competitive taxes, celebs and debauchery dragged this city out of the sand and onto the global map.

Same in Pixel-Land?

Due to a proliferation of choice and decreased barriers to exit, the metaverse will host the fiercest competition for attention in history. As such, offering various protections, favourable taxes, and property rights as a feature rather than a given over compelling experiences may not cut it.

Maybe poach a big legacy star (unclear why, over time, they wouldn’t build their own and capture more of the value), cross-promote, seed content, collaborate with other brands, incentivise earlier adopters, or have a unique gimmick. All help.

Alternatively, foster just enough of a tepid start to build a unique and compelling experience. Start small and aligned, then expand (or emerge); the result will likely be contagious. If not, it will still be enough to fulfil those committed inhabitants.

Generally, it is unlikely that any singular virtual world will achieve the scale of users achieved in Web2 platforms due to reduced barriers to exit. If it did, something would be amiss, but that is not to say they cannot scale meaningfully.

Evolutions and Hybrids:

Out the gates, the cathedral is quick, and the bazaar is slow. But top-down becomes repetitive and extractive over time whilst bottom-up scales and improves.

But for purely emergent worlds, it is a case of slow and steady win the race. Centralised > decentralised in terms of efficiency but fulfilment > efficiency in the long term.

But these systems must get through many difficult stages to thrive: perturbation, seed, catalyst, tipping point and threshold — most will not survive. If they do, they will be incredibly sticky (through mutual blood, sweat and tokens).

Again, the different models are not mutually exclusive; the meta[verse]utopia will not exist from excessively maximalist models for each path.

Some top-down worlds will be prescriptive, sleek, photorealistic and hardware-mediated — richer in fidelity and base-level desires but spiritually barren in others. These more hedonistic worlds will prioritise shorter-term happiness: controlled pleasure, predictable satisfaction and passive consumption.

Some emergent worlds will initially be hardware agnostic, have sub-par UX (glitches, bugs and loading times) with lower res graphics, some as a design choice rather than a limitation. These more eudaimonic worlds will prioritise longer-term happiness: self-actualisation, community and connectedness, alongside challenges and growth.

If you got this far, you might be thinking: I don’t wanna exist in no goddam headset wearin’ prescriptive and cold cathedral; I want a cryptographically ensured bazaar with self-determination in an open metaverse… I would agree.

For novel self-actualisation through avatars, quests, tokens and reputation… Next Stop: Property Rights = Novel Self-Actualisation.