One Virtual World

Today’s WordPress writing prompt asks who you might give a million dollars to, if you had a million dollars to give away.

I wouldn’t give it to an individual, and I wouldn’t give it to an organisation or charity, because I see far too many top-heavy charities where a sizeable portion of the donations pay the salaries of the charity staff, rather than making it anywhere near the intended participants.

I also have problems with charities that prey on the vulnerable – exploiting people and their families during end of life, or while recently bereaved. I once had an acquaintance approach me about building a website to take advantage of people in those circumstances, and was predictably horrified – especially as the person in question liked to portray themselves as a paragon of virtue.

I wouldn’t setup a bursary, or anything like that either – paying for somebody to go to college just encourages the college to increase their fees. It probably doesn’t help that I’m from a country with very good state education. I think education should be available to all – paid for by all. Helping the 1% doesn’t help anybody else. And yes, I do have a chip in my shoulder about elitism.

So.

How best to spend a million dollars?

Fund the setup of a grass-roots non-profit foundation to set out the design of virtual worlds that everybody can access and use for free, and anybody can host and extend for free. We’re really talking about establishing the protocols and standards needed – so that clients can be built that adhere to those protocols, which will allow anybody, anywhere to join and move between virtual world(s) and interact with one another without friction.

The various attempts thus far at world building have always been lead by commercial interests – the likes of Second Life, There, Horizon Worlds, and so on. They are re-treading the path walked by the earliest social networks – who all tried to build monolithic commercial offerings – AOL, CiX, Compuserve, Prestel, the Microsoft Network – they all failed because they were walled gardens, and people aren’t stupid.

I’ve often looked at Minecraft, and wondered what it could have been, if the founders had looked just a little further than the game they wanted to play. Imagine if it had been a massively multiplayer world – they were only a couple of steps away from it, with such a simple world building mechanic – and yet they missed the chance.

It was obvious that Mark Zuckerberg had read Ready Player One when he acquired first Occulus, and then started work on Horizon Worlds. That those efforts have failed falls squarely on the problems faced by all commercial organisations – they don’t like other people playing with their toys, and they have to get a return on the investment at some point.

Before anybody comments – I know VRML exists – it doesn’t go far enough.

What we need is a similar leap to that made by Tim Berners Lee back in the early 1990s. We need an agreed method of both describing, and interacting with a virtual world – and we need for those methods to be protected, and not subject to commercial interests.

Social networks are only just beginning to accept that people don’t want silos – and are half-heartedly integrating federation features into their platforms – but they are still trying to encourage users to “live” on their platform, and integrate with others. At their core, their stripes haven’t changed.

It’s madness that we have X, Threads, Facebook, Instagram, Substack, Medium, TikTok, Snapchat, and more – all essentially doing the same thing – letting people talk to one-another – all slowly copying each other’s feature-sets in order to perhaps steal users from each other – rather than opening their borders to each other, and letting anybody, anywhere talk to anybody, anywhere else.

Thankfully email was a standard right from the start. So was instant messaging, if you’re interested – but then it fragmented in the same way the browsers did years ago – but never came together again. Google tried to get the other major platforms to adopt common messaging protocols – none of them would play nicely.

So yes. Anyway.

That’s how I would spend a million dollars – I would use it to help solve one of the biggest unsolved problems of the internet – I would establish a foundation to design and protect the mechanisms through which universally compatible and accessible virtual worlds could be defined and implemented.