Kelly Stonelake is a 15 year veteran of Facebook/Meta, who recently filed a lawsuit against the company, alleging a series of highly serious charges around sexual assault, denied promotions, and a culture of discrimination.
While her lawsuit has been covered elsewhere, her last role at Meta included Director of Product Marketing of Horizon Worlds, which deserves special focus here. As I wrote back in March, a former Meta developer speaking on condition of anonymity described a workforce for Horizon who were mostly disinterested in virtual worlds or even VR.
Kelly Stonelake, speaking on the record with me, is able to shed more light on what went wrong with Horizon Worlds -- once touted as Meta’s early entry into the Metaverse, which the company even promoted with a Super Bowl commercial.
Seen that way, her insights also addresses a criticism I've come across often in recent years: If the Metaverse is supposed to be so important, why couldn't Meta, one of the wealthiest companies in history, succeed in creating it?
Because, Stonelake suggests, few people at Meta ever actually cared deeply about the product that was meant to help build it.
As I blogged last week, VRChat the company just unveiled an official in-world avatar marketplace where creators can sell their avies. This is a pretty huge move by VRChat, which has been deliberately slow to expand its UGC player economy. There's already thousands of VRChat creators selling avatars on third party platforms.
"I just applied for [the program to join the marketplace]," they tell me. "I do agree with a lot of the points they make about how rough it can be to sell source files on Gumroad and having to walk people through the import workflow... if this really will offer a click-buy-wear solution, rather than needing newbies to work through Unity and Blender to get characters up and running, it'll be great."
A longtime VRChat player / content creator has a mixed opinion:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Starlight is a Second Life artist whose pictures in Second Life are astonishing in their beauty. This headshot is stunning. She projects such strength and power. Authentic don’t mess with me power, like she probably kicks ass and takes names over breakfast. I mean, if someone gave me that look, I would listen.
You can see more of her work at an exhibit in-world at the Ganadara Gallery on the Elmira Sim. Here is the teleport [Click to teleport]
The Seed [player] community is the closest thing we have to people in Rawls’ hypothetical Original Position. Players have a very rough idea what the world will be; some probably have vague plans for what they want to do there, once the game is open. But none yet know what strategic and leadership talents they’ll need to succeed, let alone dominate or successfully survive.
So I was somewhat surprised to see that an early Seed player community, given the chance to choose their political organization, chose... a benevolent dictatorship.
Watch above, with one player insisting, "It's not as evil as people think it is." Well OK then!
Mundi Vondi, CEO of Seed developer Klang Games, tells me that this isn't necessarily because players want dictatorship per se, except perhaps in this early stage of gameplay:
Nick Pauley aka "Dancepool" shares the moves he did in the opening scene of "Deadpool x Wolverine" movie. The dance is based off of the 2000 MTV video music-award winning choreography "Bye Bye Bye" by NSYNC's choreographer Darrin Henson. This dance went viral on social media, and now in Second Life, we are bringing you the actual Dancepool himself so your avatars can embody the real deal!
Or to put it another way: Meta merc with a mouth meets the Metaverse. (Compare and contrast with the movie version below.)
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Rimgal Kirax came back to Second Life last year after a thirteen-year hiatus. He blogs on Flickr with complete credits and SLurls. However his blog is not the ordinary kind of Flickr microblog. As he wrote on his About page, “There is no limit to creation on SL, and it's so sad just taking model pics while all our dreams can come true on SL.”
And so he creates scenes that will make you smile, perhaps even laugh out loud, perhaps guffaw with pleasure. I mean, take a look at “Old Bathroom Full of Life” with the somewhat decrepit fixtures, the COVID-sized pile of toilet tissue, and a room full of critters. I mean, look at that cat fascinated by the scale, probably watching the numbers go back and forth before settling. Rimgal is fishing in a tub full of ducks - live ducks. It’s all so much fun.
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I first spotted it on Flickr years ago, and it's been my Peak Metaverse mental image ever since. So I finally just did. Ride the whale, that is, while chilling out to a phonograph down below playing old timey 1920s music.
Matt Daly's early first-person explorations of Star's Reach, the sandbox MMO from Raph Koster and his company Playable Worlds, have been so intriguing (as featured here last week), I asked him to expand them in this guest post! - WJA
The whole reason many of us work in Games and Virtual Worlds is because of early experiences with wonder.
I grew up deep in the Quake 2 modder community (Loki’s Minions whereya at). As newly minted teens, my childhood BFF and I weren’t hanging at the mall as much as leading guilds, going to war, and fletching arrows or whatever in Telnet MUDS and M59.
Considering we had just been literally playing in literal sandboxes only a few years before (as literal children), this came quite naturally to us.
We didn’t need or care about revenue models or acquisition funnels. All of that sterile product science would come later in our careers and begin to hide some of the original wonder. But, spoiler: hyper-efficiency, liquid content and AI are creating an allergic reaction amongst player communities that’s bringing wonder back, baby (you won’t believe what happens next! 😲)
When Ultima Online launched in 1997, while we worked on haranguing my dad into buying us a 56k connection, BFF and I would sit at my kitchen table and pore over the cloth map of Brittania (right) that came with the UO guidebook. Our master plan (when we had proper internet and could actually play the game) was to overthrow the isle of Magincia, based only on a couple paragraphs about animal taming (which included dragons). Obviously we inevitably hit the reality of constraints that would prevent two children from taking over an entire island in a game millions would play.
The wonder, however, remained. It's followed me almost 30 years later to a pre-alpha MMO called Stars Reach, where I found a team and community who are leaning into the sloppy, undeniably human imperfection of an actual literal sandbox in search of their wonder.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Mathilde De Cyriac shared this great group shot “les beaufs à la maison de retraite” (The Rednecks at the Retirement Home). I love these collaborations because it is so much fun to see how people looking at what is essentially the same thing come away with such different versions. It’s a useful reminder that we don’t all see the world in the same way and may often describe what we see very differently.
Within a day of Second Life’s new Creator Partnership Program being announced, over 300 people signed up with proposals (as the description goes) “to co-create content and experiences that delight both new and existing residents”. It's the brainchild of Marketing VP Brett Linden and Steeltoe Linden, Manager of Product & UX Design, and Brett tells me the program “represents a major pivot in how the company collaborates with the SL community”.
“Honestly, it really came out of a conversation that we had with Brad,” he explains to me in a Zoom call last Friday, “and I think that we have just recognized it's long overdue… there's a desire, I think, from the community, to try to find ways to work with us.”
Among the first fruits of that effort that SLers probably noticed is the Avatar Welcome Pack (pictured above), featuring high quality mesh heads, bodies, and clothing from some of the community’s top fashion brands.
My own immediate reaction there, I’ll admit, was skepticism: Not only do ultra-realistic human avatars come with a number of negatives (as I explain here), how will new users even be able to figure out how to put them on?
That challenge, it turns out, has been fixed. After the call, Steeltoe shared a screenshot of the simplified user interface he helped create. It's the one that new users signing up via Project Zero streaming will see, to easily choose their first look from this Welcome Pack:
Gachas, a vending machine game of chance to win valuable virtual goods, were banned by Linden Lab from Second Life in 2021 "due to a changing regulatory climate", but now, apparently, the winds of change have brought gachas back:
The decision to prohibit Gacha in 2021 was following regulatory guidelines emerging globally at the time. We have continued to evaluate what steps we can take to support creative freedom while also ensuring compliance with evolving legal frameworks, which led to the recent changes announced in 2024.
Since then, the regulatory landscape surrounding Gacha systems has further shifted to the point where Gacha can be confidently reintroduced under current prevailing guidance.
No specifics on how that "landscape" has changed -- and Linden Lab won't comment on the record, when I asked -- but I'm looking for recent court rulings in pending litigation against other companies with similar online gambling / loot box cases that might have had something do with it. For instance, maybe a recent ruling in Antar v. BetMGM had something to do with it:
It made me think of the ending of “Planet of the Apes” even though I don’t think she will be screaming, “You maniacs, you finally did it.” Sea levels are rising and it need not be the kind of epic disaster in the movie, but I do wonder why the Buddha has been toppled and deep in the water. There’s a story I want to know.
For more great pictures of and teleport link to Buddha Garden, click here:
As I wrote back in March, a former Meta developer speaking on condition of anonymity described a workforce for Horizon who were mostly disinterested in virtual worlds or even VR.
Kelly Stonelake, speaking on the record with me, is able to shed more light on what went wrong with Horizon Worlds -- once touted as Meta’s early entry into the Metaverse, which the company even promoted with a Super Bowl commercial.
I'm once again signing books at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach next month (June 10-12), and am excited to say that's where I'm also introducing a new 2025 edition of the afterword. Hope to you see there!
If you are interested in coming, here's a special 10% off discount code:
Enter SPKR25D during sign-up. Save money on entrance fees for more fish tacos.
A sharped-eyed Redditor recently noticed VRChat's tab for “Granted Avatars” had been changed to “Purchased Avatars”. Which, yes, means VRChat the company is actively working on an in-platform creator economy for avatars (I can confirm after talking with insiders). That the user interface has been changed suggests it's coming soon (i.e. this quarter or next), but I haven't been able to get a specific launch date.
In any case, this does mean talented VRChat avatar creators like "lackofbindings" (who created the avatar above) will soon-ish be able to sell their works on the platform, instead of doing so on Gumroad and other third party sites.
Speaking of VRChat, Wired has finally a huge feature on the virtual world's burgeoning rave dance club seen, something that's fascinated me for years. Excerpt:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Stina McGillivary has a knack for spotting the unique and unusual on her Second Life journeys. I mean do all visitors to Buddha Garden notice this little mouse when the totality of the sim is so overwhelming? A lot of people who go sightseeing, here in SL or in RL, walk through the sites, making sure to look at everything. A few people, however, are less concerned with looking at everything and are interested in a more intense kind of seeing. She sees both the macro and the micro. She beholds the sim.
This is a fantastic capture. It’s adorably cute, but it’s also really quite beautiful. I love how she gets the spokes of the umbrella to perfectly align with the tree behind it along the right side where the moon shines down. The way the tree and umbrella come together is sort of magical. I just love everything about this picture. p.s even looking for the mouse, I could not see or behold it.
For more of Stina’s fabulous travel shots, click here:
Seeing that Sweeney saved the Metaverse from Apple this week, this ridiculously long interview he just did with Lex Fridman is worth a watch. Seeing as it's four hours and twenty five minutes, you'll probably want to watch in parts. I'll pull out highlights when I can.
Please share your own favorite points they discuss in comments!
Click here to take it. I know people on mobile were having trouble with the embedded version of this survey, so hopefully this direct link is easier. I'll close the survey after this coming weekend (probably).
Stars Reach, Raph Koster's highly ambitious upcoming galaxy sandbox MMORPG, had its successful Kickstarter a few months ago, but longtime virtual world developer Matt Daly writes that a thriving player community has emerged -- even before the crowdfunder. Groups are already evolving and building in fascinating ways:
Stars Reach keeps subverting my preconceived notions of player/community motivation in metaverse / sandbox / MMO spaces.
This is GUNC guild’s little enclave - a communal effort of a bunch of players (guild members and not), terraforming, creating land bridges, planting trees, building (including a GUNCies restaurant), over the course of less than 2 full days… and all of this will be wiped in a week or so.
And they've done many versions of this before, across various planned pre-alpha testing server wipes, for months, before the Kickstarter bandwagon etc, just for the love of building, together.
There isn't even an in-game currency yet, or really much FUNCTIONALLY to do in these built cities yet… so it’s like a little product study trapped in amber, worth observing, because those systems and more will come, and by that point it's a product manager’s job to sort signal from noise, but for now the lack of those systems paints a pretty clear picture.
And it’s not due to the official Discord live chat either, as there are countless builds that have sprung up since the last wipe that have usernames on them I don't even recognize.
It’s been motivating me to document and curate a bit. It’s like the best of the modern artists like Lozano-Hemmer whose work is often designed to decay or disassemble itself.
In a time dominated by product management funnels and bottom line predatory Skinner box monetization models, and on the opposite end metaverse graveyard platforms that have no central thesis, this is pretty refreshing.*
Again, this social building is happening despite (because of?) Stars Reach being in pre-release, and all these user-created builds are regularly wiped from the world servers.
"People still going HARD in the paint building and refining, even though the wave is about to erase their sandcastle," as Matt puts it to me. "It's amazing."
Especially impressive because Raph's world isn't a traditional leveling MMO:
"Games like Rust do periodic wipes. Dune awakening will follow suit I think. Conan has them. But [Stars Reach] doesn't even have the mechanics to buttress that pain -- it's currently just pure building. So its just kind of awesome to see how intrinsically powerful that loop is to certain player types."
Matt tells me Stars Reach user creation is similar to worlds like Rust and Second Life, by the way:
Seemingly everyone in tech is talking about a huge ruling in the long-running Epic Games v. Apple dispute:
[J]udge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers just ruled that, effective immediately, Apple is no longer allowed to collect fees on purchases made outside apps and blocks the company from restricting how developers can point users to where they can make purchases outside of apps. Apple says it will appeal the order.
As part of the ruling, the judge says that Apple cannot: Impose “any commission or any fee on purchases that consumers make outside an app... interfere with consumers’ choice to leave an app with anything beyond “a neutral message apprising users that they are going to a third-party site”.
Epic head Tim Sweeney has called his dispute with Apple (and Google) a battle for the Metaverse, since most metaverse platform users access the virtual world through their smartphone -- but because Apple and Google charge a 30% cut on in-app purchases, and metaverse platform companies are hugely hobbled.
Now, the mobile version of Epic's Fortnite -- and Roblox, and VRChat, and Rec Room, and yes, Linden Lab's Second Life -- can enable in-app purchases without that huge 30% fee, or even encourage users to buy virtual currency from their website.
Reached earlier today, Linden Lab head Brad Oberwager is cautiously optimistic:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Varosh SantanaMiguel’s photostream is like a shot of adrenaline for your eyes. They are full of this wild energy that demands our attention. Take “The Last Rays,” his most recent work, I have to look closer to absorb what I am seeing. In his own words, from the description:
In the shimmering waters, where the last rays of the sun meet the darkness, Lysmaro reigns. His skin is adorned with perfect shades, and his back is crowned with crystalline fins — sharp as blades, yet as beautiful as the stars in the sky.
His staff, topped with a living pearl that pulses like a fragment of a long-lost star, he wields like no other. Surrounded by fish that swirl around him like liquid silver, and songs so hauntingly beautiful they could steal one’s sanity. Accompanied by magical currents, his voice echoes through the seas, both warning and promising in equal measure.
