The Psychology of Liminal Spaces
On the transitional zones between “what was” and “what’s next”
I want to talk to you about a psychological phenomenon potentially fundamental to understanding the human experience and every major event in our lives. But first, I want to tell you about a quirky web experience from the 90s called Worlds.com.
Worlds.com was a chatroom-based program first published back in 1995. It was an early attempt at creating an online virtual world where users could talk and interact with each other using avatars. In some ways, this “game” is similar to projects like Second Life or the Metaverse, which you might be more familiar with. But, as you might expect from a project released in the mid-nineties, Worlds.com lacked the technical capabilities of its successors (still struggling with the concept to this day) to pull off its vision. And, since the early 2000s, the online experience has essentially been abandoned.
Here’s the fascinating thing about Worlds.com: it’s still online. Not only is the software available to download, but the servers are still running. So you can experience the virtual world it offers as originally intended. That is, but for the fact there’s no one, and no things, there.
Technically, there still exists a small, dedicated community of Worlds.com users. But…
