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49 N. Y. L. Sch. L. Rev. 81 (2004-2005)
Escaping the Gilded Cage: User Created Content and Building the Metaverse

handle is hein.journals/nyls49 and id is 93 raw text is: ESCAPING THE GILDED CAGE: USER CREATED CONTENT AND BUILDING THE METAVERSE CORY ONDREJKA* Ever since science fiction awoke imaginations to the promise of real, shared virtual spaces, technology has been chasing this dream. However, despite the enormous technical advances of the last dec- ade, the concept of a broadly appealing online world has not yet been realized. At the same time, the rise of massively multiplayer online role-playing games has brought millions of players into on- line, persistent state worlds, where they spend tremendous amounts of time and money each year living, trading, fighting and dying. Players learn how to customize and to create within the online spaces, as well as how to extract this value back into the real world. Interestingly, this behavior exists even within worlds that don't ex- plicitly allow user created content and in those that ban economic gains. The pervasive nature of user created content and free mar- kets, while at odds with the desires of online game developers, dem- onstrates the opportunity for a different kind of online world. This Article will show how proper economic and legal decisions can be used to harness the power of player creativity to maximize the vir- tual world's growth in order to build an online space as rich and complex as the real world. I. INTRODUCTION In 1992, Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel Snow Crash introduced readers to the concept of the Metaverse. While other science fiction had described immersive online games' and virtual spaces,2 Stephenson was the first to describe an online environment that was a real place to its users, one where they interacted using the real world as a metaphor and socialized, conducted business, and were entertained: * Vice President of Product Development, Linden Research, Inc., San Francisco. B.S. United States Naval Academy, 1992. Email: cory@secondlife.com. 1. ORSON SCOTT CARD, ENDER'S GAME (1985). 2. WILLIAM GIBSON, NEUROMANCER (1984).