The Sandbox
If you want to play the role of God, you can’t overlook the fish. This is the implied message of a woman named Kelsei, aka “Pandapops,” who, over a video live-stream, gives a class on how to create digital worlds. Imagine an empty grid. Then the grid is filled with an aquarium, water and spooky fish. One of the fish has creepy eyes. One has a weird little tail. One looks like an alien.
Pandapops is upbeat and friendly, with a British accent and bright blue hair. “I really wanted the aquarium to look like there’s depth to it,” she explains.
For the next two hours she meticulously creates and tweaks her digital assets: She adds splash effects to the aquarium, she grows a flower and paints it an eerie shade of blue, she completes her “witch’s cottage.” (The asset’s meta-description: “Witch’s cottage: humble home for any aspiring woodland witch.”)
The work is strangely fascinating, like a 2021 version of watching Bob Ross paint. Soon the virtual world begins to expand. Pandapops finishes her aquarium, drops it into a tavern, then plunks the tavern itself into a village she has created, nestling it between a patch of trees.
The village is alive with people, and now it becomes clear that she’s designing a game. “This guy doesn’t give us quests yet, but he will,” Pandapops said of the barkeep, who, like all of the tiny avatars, look a bit like characters from the Lego movies. “That’s a bounty hunter,” she said. And soon we see our protagonist, the proverbial “player one,” who jogs through a courtyard with a cute little sword.
Pandapops is not a professional game designer. She’s not an employee of Epic, Sony or Electronic Arts. She’s using a program called VoxelEdits to create a game for The Sandbox, the newest blockchain-enabled metaverse, which launches its “public alpha” in late September.
And she’s not alone. Even before the launch of the metaverse, there have been over 100,000 downloads of Sandbox’s Game Maker engine (currently in beta), according to Sebastien Borget, the company’s co-founder and COO. “Our Game Maker requires no code, and you can make games without any experience,” Borget said. “That’s what we’ve been building for over three years.”
They’ve actually been building for 10 years. Sandbox, which originally launched in 2011 as a normal and non-blockchain start-up, represents the shift from traditional gaming to crypto-gaming. Sandbox started as a mobile app. Borget said that while the app was downloaded 40 million times, “the success of the game came from the users.” These users created 70 million assets. None of them earned a nickel, which is typically the case with traditional games like Minecraft and Roblox. After Borget learned of CryptoKitties, CryptoPunks and the user-owned wizardry of NFTs, he flipped the model of Sandbox to a decentralized blockchain metaverse, which would “turn players into creators” and then “help players and creators monetize all the content they make.”
Let’s back up. For the non-blockchain obsessed, the metaverse is still something of an obscure and opaque concept. That could soon change. The New York Times is running metaverse explainers; traditional brands like Sotheby’s and Coca Cola are dipping into the metaverse; and perhaps most consequentially, Mark Zuckerberg has hitched Facebook’s future to this virtual star, telling employees over the summer that the company’s overarching goal is to “help bring the metaverse to life.”
Which begs the question, what is the metaverse, exactly? Is it just one platform, or the sum total of all? Ask 10 different people at a crypto conference, and you’ll get 10 different definitions. “We should not expect a single, all-illuminating definition of the ‘Metaverse,’” writes venture capitalist Matthew Ball. “The Metaverse is best understood as ‘a quasi-successor state to the mobile internet’. This is because the Metaverse will not fundamentally replace the internet, but instead build upon and iteratively transform it.”
This is why the stakes are so high. Maybe today and tomorrow, the metaverse is just an online virtual world – like Decentraland, Crypto Voxel and The Sandbox – where you play a quick game, browse NFTs in an art gallery or have an online meet-up. This is the metaverse’s infancy. But in five or 10 or 20 years, perhaps the metaverse replaces much of what you do online, or even offline. Instead of a Zoom with your parents who live across the country, you join them for a metaverse game of tennis. Or instead of consuming the news on Twitter, maybe you’re dropped into a metaverse simulation of what’s happening in Afghanistan.
What path will we take to arrive at this metaverse future? Through the centralized, big tech route of Facebook? Or through a new decentralized model? As NFT artist “6529.eth” framed the question in a viral Twitter thread, “What we are playing for is whether our children will be fully free or residents in a digital company universe – with the illusion of free, but not really free.”
I first visited Decentraland a year ago. While I was intrigued by the world’s potential, it felt a touch under-populated. “I’ll be honest with you, we released a product before it was really ready,” said Sam Hamilton, who’s the community and events lead at Decentraland Foundation. “So we rolled our sleeves up.” The team pumped out more content, more events – art exhibits, conferences, music festivals, “quests” – and the crowds rolled in. Monthly users jumped from 7,000 to 70,000.
A few things help explain that growth: the boom in NFTs, the surge of play-to-earn crypto games and maybe even the pandemic. “COVID is a terrible, terrible thing, and we’ve all suffered greatly,” said Voxel Bunny, lead artist at Sandbox. (They use a pseudonym for anonymity.) “At the same time, going online is the norm. The metaverse feels even more approachable and appealing.”
The metaverse can be a home for art. And we now live in a world where celebrities like Steph Curry, Grimes, Paris Hilton, Jack Dorsey and Shawn Mendes are buying or minting NFTs. Suddenly the metaverse has newfound relevance, or even urgency. How do you showcase your art? How do you flaunt your Ape NFT? Decentraland’s Art District is one of the world’s standout features, creating a more immersive way to admire NFTs than to just stare at your phone. Artists are pouncing on the opportunity. The NFT collection “World of Women” – featuring 10,000 women, with an emphasis on diversity and inclusion – plans to buy a chunk of land in Sandbox, and then build a museum to hang paintings and animations.
