Nathan V.

As hundreds of recently laid-off Reality Lab staff look for new jobs, it's wild to read a recent Road to VR article (link in comments) in which Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth blames "lack of focus" for their failed metaverse efforts -- when you can see a way more pressing problem, pictured in the article itself: Cartoonish humanoid avatars made to resemble the user IRL (Zuckerberg in this case). This one design choice was crucial to Meta's failure! The very most popular metaverse platforms, Minecraft and Roblox, are intentionally low-fi, immersive through their physics and responsiveness. Their blocky, whimsical avatars are similarly abstract and customizable. The same can be said for the furry and anime-themed avatars of metaverse platforms VRChat, and the hand puppet-like avatars of Rec Room -- both of which are so popular on Meta’s own Quest 2 headset, it caused the company at one point to raise the price of its HMD. This preference for non-realistic avatars relates to the core user base for metaverse platforms: People in their teens and pre-teens, who are generally still uncomfortable and unsure about their own real life identity and appearance. That problem is even more acute for teen girls and young women, still negotiating the social expectations and judgements around their real life appearance. Presenting them with a lifelike avatar to customize -- let alone an avatar that resembles who they are in real life -- is effectively asking them to shoulder even more social expectations and judgements, just in the virtual world. Zuckerberg and Bosworth, with no prior experience in game development or virtual worlds, apparently believed the Facebook model of real identities online should apply to the Metaverse.  For newcomers like them, this is a common assumption, enforced by mainstream press coverage of Metaverse events involving real real-life celebrities — for instance, Travis Scott in Fortnite, or Lil Nas X in Roblox. In rare instances like that, it does make sense for the avatar to resemble their real life owner. But this is actually the exception. Overwhelmingly, metaverse platform users do not prefer avatars based on their real real-life appearance — even when the internal tools to customize them that way exist. Virtual worlds enable the power to experiment with identity and creativity, relatively *free* from the assumptions and judgements of the offline world. (Including, sad to say, those judgements on social media.) It's why virtual worlds tend to have disproportionately large LGBT populations, and other people choosing different races, ethnicities, and genders different from who they are IRL. (Or choosing a non-human avatar.) I doubt Meta has learned this. But hopefully some of those who've been laid from Meta can apply this in the next generation of virtual worlds.

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