Why Self-Expression Is Missing In The Metaverse

I’m going to cut to the chase on this one. No carefully crafted preamble that tees up the punchline. I just want to smack you in the face to wake you the fuck up.

The term self-expression has become a bullshit marketing term for brands entering the metaverse to convince you that your avatar needs its clothing line.

The definition of self-expression is the expression of your personality, emotions, or ideas, especially through art, music, or acting. What it is not is distilling everything that makes you you into a bland templated animated human form wearing clothing you would pick off the shelves along the high street.

The physical and real world imposes so many constraints, biases, and opinions on what you should be that the metaverse should be the exact opposite. You should be free to be who you want to be.

This is a broad-brush statement, I’m well aware of the myriad of ethical considerations here but this is a cultural statement about personality and human creativity I want to make here.

I’m going to unfairly pick on Tommy Hilfiger to direct my ire and wrath because they’ve just launched Parallel — a new service partnered with Ready Player Me to create bland, human avatars and adorn them with jeans and whatnot.

I mean, I thought double denim was a crime against fashion back in the 80s but it seems they’re bringing it back for the metaverse.

Parallel lets you Choose a Model from a range of homogenous avatars, clothe them, and then upsell the physical item for delivery (for many over-excited marketers this trend is called ‘phygital’ and God rest her soul all I can hear is Olivia Newton-John singing about it. And now you will never unhear it too. You’re welcome)

“But Theo you miserable bastard, this is what people wanted. This is the future. You can be anything you want to be in the metaverse.”

Really?

And this is the war for the metaverse we’re already losing. We’re losing it because we’re already being told what it should be by the myriad of venture capitalists writing books that shoehorn their thesis into carefully crafted narratives, by brands telling us how we should look, or by the startups creating the tools to allow for individualism as long as you can find the right template.

Remember, you’re unique just like everybody else in the metaverse…

The metaverse represents an unparalleled opportunity for self-expression and is as much a question of human creativity and imagination as it is about technology.

Our physical world is currently dictating what the digital world should look like and operate like — and this is wrong.

Virtual worlds should be as much of an expression of the people designing and living in them as possible. With the creator tools we already have and semi-open platforms like Roblox or Minecraft we can build pretty much anything within them. You could argue that even Minecraft obeys a little too much to the laws of the physical world but it wasn’t built as a metaverse platform so you can forgive it a little.

And so we fall into well-trodden tropes because we don’t want to appear an outlier.

Let’s build a shopping mall and recreate our favorite Walmart down to the last tin of baked beans. Let’s build a condo or penthouse apartment and put minimalist furniture in it. Let’s buy some digital land next to a fancy neighbor and pretend they’re our friends.

Why? Why are we so hell-bent on imitating the real world all over again? It doesn’t even stop at imitating the world, it goes even further to copying the entire experience around it.

You build a shopping mall and then force me to walk around its whole virtual environment like I was actually there. I have to pick up items and spin them around to make me believe I’m having a jolly good time being immersed. Then I put them in a virtual basket, pay at the checkout and get a reminder that the item lives in my digital wallet and I can only use it in the shopping mall I’m walking around in.

You build a virtual continent and then sell patches of land so people can pay for prime virtual real estate, build an imitation palace that has to be slightly bigger and better than the dude who owns next door, and hold a virtual party in it where 3 people turn up and the banter is worse than a conference for introverts.

And to add insult to injury there are no fucking nibbles.

Where’s the self-expression here?

Where’s the castle in the sky?

Where’s the James Bond villainous lair made out of jelly and popcorn?

We literally, each and every one of us, have a blank canvas to play with, and yet, our imagination wanders over to the same corner and picks up a picture book of the High Street for inspiration.

Give me an avatar creator as complex and as rich as this, FFS

Now let’s talk about avatars. Holy fucking shit.

Let’s express ourselves as avatars by scanning a photo so they look exactly like us. I’ll maybe add a blue streak in my hair, you know, just to mix it up a little because it’s an option I can pay for. Fucking rock and roll.

What if I don’t want to look human anymore? What if I want to be a bear wearing a top hat, an angry aspidistra, a fluffy orange cloud, or even just a point of light to represent myself in the metaverse? Nope, sorry, you can be a white human male with a pale Scottish complexion buddy, and like it.

No, don’t cry, you can have at least thousands of options for being a white male, how’s that for self-expressionism?

And this is the biggest crime of all. To use terms like self-expression to describe the process where you have to conform to predetermined templates and wear branded clothing.

This is nothing short of the capitalism that attacks your childhood from the playground, where you’re taunted for wearing cheap supermarket sneakers instead of the Nike or Adidas ones. Only this time it’s virtual playground bullying, the sly digs in Discord or in chat because you’re out driving your avatar with the default set of clothing from the config screen instead of dripping with threads from the over-saturated Snoop Dogg NFT collection.

The metaverse is not going to be a welcoming place for people who desire the ability to be who they want to be in a world where acceptance is begged for.

It gets worse when you overlay the whole ideology of Web3 being about freedom of choice, of being about decentralised control and creative freedom — because currently, this is not what’s happening.

And it’s a shame because the avatar is a pivotal piece of the metaverse puzzle, it’s almost central in shaping what the entire experience should be and how.

In Doug Thompson’s blog he makes a good point — we should be focusing on avatars and how they could potentially drive forwards the conversations we need to have on standards, interoperability, and privacy from one single point.

Your avatar can carry around its terms and conditions. Instead of the responsibility lying with US to agree to the terms and conditions of virtual spaces, the onus should be on the SERVERS. I want servers…I want the spaces in the Metaverse, to agree to MY terms and conditions, and not the other way around.

Decentralisation works up to a point but even here there’s a nightmare waiting. Whilst blockchain and cryptocurrencies will offer the underlying foundation and transactional layer for a metaverse economy, creator IP protection, and user identity is already becoming a wild west.

We have multiple startups launching avatar creation services. Multiple marketplaces to buy NFTs and other goods but nowhere to place them. Multiple wallets for a plethora of altcoins tied to one person’s vision but no real store of value or means of exchange between worlds.

I bought an NFT but have no way to move it between metaverse.

I have this unique item but can’t port it from one avatar to another.

I have multiple NFTs but they’re spread out across different marketplaces and I have no way to bring them together.

We have so many lessons from the likes of Second Life to learn from but nobody is listening.

Everyone wants to own a piece of the action but nobody wants to take responsibility for it. And in the end, the user loses and the metaverse becomes another wasted opportunity and frustration.

Sound familiar?

Doug’s suggestion that Discord is perhaps the closest thing we have to a gateway to the metaverse makes a lot of sense. You can move between servers with ease — only in a metaverse context you need presence and your avatar is that presence in a virtualised environment. On top of that, and following through on the thoughts above and his avatar idea we’re potentially looking at something not unlike a character creation screen from an MMO only more sophisticated.

It’s here you set permissions and launch from. You can have different avatars for the different sets of privacy and identity requirements, you are not bound to one virtual identity — why should you be? The NFTs you own are all accessed here, the various altcoins powering the economies are all here and your avatar carries them with you. The items you create are all here and you can monitor the transactions across the marketplaces here.

This is why interoperability is so important. It’s not just about the movement between metaverse, it’s about giving the users a single point to access the metaverse.

It’s going to be very interesting watching what Ready Player Me does with its new war chest of investment. Right now they have hundreds of platforms, brands, and users signing up daily to use their avatar solution but already they’re falling into the usual trap — to survive you have to align yourself with the ones with the money rather than innovate and forge a new direction.

Oddly ironic then that in the quest for self-expression we might as well hand over the keys to the AI.

What I mean here is, DALL-E and MidJourney are being used to create art from simple text input and that art is already being used in comic books, video games, and sci-fi shorts. It’s no stretch of the imagination then that someone will create a set of tools that conjure up fully rendered avatars and worlds as unique and varied as the text used to generate them for people to use in the metaverse.

We already play in worlds that are procedurally generated and populated with weird and wonderful creatures and landscapes. Who’s to say that Frontier Developments won’t release the COBRA Engine that generated an entire Milky Way like in their seminal title, Elite Dangerous, for others to simply create beautifully generated planets to build upon? Or that No Man’s Sky developers, Hello Games, open sources their procedural tools for the same reasons?

Minecraft lets users generate new and unique worlds already. With a bit more time and investment, these artificially intelligent solutions could give people the means to build worlds for themselves instead of websites.

A wider web of worlds, not a world wide web.

In my  from 2017, I hypothesized that AI would free humanity from mundane chores and usher in a new renaissance and golden age of personal creativity and thought — the freedom and time to learn anything we wanted. In the same way, this is what the metaverse has the potential to represent — an endless canvas to create worlds and ideas that express who we are.

But we can’t — because we’re still being told what it is we should be even in digital form.

It’s a long road ahead, we need some very brave conversations between startups, VCs, larger companies, and the rest of us who want a stake in this future. We can’t let it be driven by the few otherwise we end up where we are today, 30 years later after the first iteration of the web, and regretting why we didn’t get it right.

Also published here.