In a modernist hotel lobby on the outskirts of Barcelona I sit face to face with the President. He’s pretty casual as far as presidents go, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, wearing sunglasses even though we’re inside. He’s got a tattoo up the underside of his forearm which reads ‘Neverdie’. It’s his alias, but more of a name to him now than Jon Jacobs ever will be. He is President of Virtual Reality. It has nothing to do with Oculus Rift or VR goggles, and it’s not some silly title in a game. President of Virtual Reality means president of allvirtual realities – World of Warcraft, Eve Online, Destiny, the lot.
Who voted for him? Entropia Universe players, mostly. There, Neverdie is a celebrity, the man who sold a nightclub on an asteroid for a staggering $635,000. The election was held on Facebook in spring 2016, and Jacobs did a proper campaign trail for it. He even made ridiculous promises like a real politician – “talking a bunch of shit” he calls it – pledging to create billions of jobs by building a teleportation system to transfer characters between virtual worlds.
But two years later his presidency isn’t going well, or at all, really. “I ran for President, did this thing and then everybody in Entropia Universe says, ‘We don’t want one!’ They’re like, ‘You’re not our President – bugger off!’ It was a complete ‘fuck you!’ from the userbase! And then Entropia Universe [creator MindArk] said, ‘Umm no we’re not interested.’ So I became President of Virtual Reality and they basically rejected my entire thing! And there was nothing I could do about it.”
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Who was going to listen to Jacobs without Entropia backing him up? “I was championing – and I am championing – the rights of the people who’ve invested their time in avatars, and I’m trying to help guide the next wave of development so they don’t close their borders.” But try doing that with only a few thousand Facebook votes behind you. “I’m on my own like a loony saying, ‘I’m the President of Virtual Reality!'” At one point he met with Eve Online big cheese Hilmar Veigur Pétursson, to pitch him the dream. I would love to have seen that.
The virtual worlds didn’t want to listen to Jacobs and he was losing his voice trying to convince them. Fed up, he gave up, and the Presidency fell dormant. But Jacobs didn’t let go of his dream. He went away and built it.
Jacobs wandered headfirst into blockchain and cryptocurrency, which was booming, and the idea of decentralised power belonging to people not companies fit him perfectly. He set to work. His Neverdie company began developing a cryptowallet and currency for the huge Ethereum platform. But not just any wallet. A wallet which looks like a character page from a role-playing game, with an avatar paperdoll and listed attributes like dexterity and strength. And everything the wallet displays it reads – and stores invincibly on – the blockchain. It’s your character in your pocket, usable in any game which will allow it.
“How many times in your life can you build an avatar from scratch?” he asks. “You can reinvent yourself to have a new identity and that’s part of the pleasure of it, but the problem is the practicality of the time investment. It has just become impractical. World of Warcraft was a universally immersive game for so many people but it was the last successful MMO. Nobody else could sustain a userbase because everybody was already too invested in their World of Warcraft avatars.
“That’s why we’re not seeing new MMOs at the rate you would hope for. They’re in trouble, all MMO developers are in trouble. They’re in trouble at financing stage, they’re in trouble after two years… Imagine you make a fabulous MMO but people don’t play it because they already spent 10 years on World of Warcraft. It happens!
“We have to tackle the avatar creation system and the way we look at it differently in order for us to go into more than one world.”
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Source: Eurogamer