Hey kids! Do you want to see a dead retail environment? Go to a shopping mall in the United States of America of slightly smaller size and gaze at such glories as unfilled store fronts, soul-crushing desperate kiosks, and the saddest shoppers shuffling around the barely maintained walkways. Or you could get that same dead mall vibe by logging onto Decentraland, as detailed in the latest video from Dan Olson’s Folding Ideas channel, in which he takes a remarkably deep dive into the many, many ways that the supposed metaverse playground is kind of… well… terrible?
Over the course of the video Olson tours the various games and plots built within the area, the plots that have since been deleted and never replaced, the astonishing number of houses filled with identical official Nintendo art (really), and the general management woes of the platform. It’s an interesting look into the ways that Decentraland, for all its talk of being the future, actually evokes images of outdated technology and failure to even incorporate the elements that Second Life has managed to keep working for the past two decades. Fun stuff.
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