Issue 3
Building sameness in Decentraland
Dear Readers,
Today’s newsletter is an extra-long issue devoted to architecture in Decentraland. As the NFT, web3, and crypto communities expand into VR and AR, I feel virtual architecture will become increasingly important. This critique is intended to show how and why it fails as it currently stands in Decentraland’s example, but also to suggest how some of these core aesthetic problems might be fixed. The built environment is something about which I’m passionate, and hope you will be too.
As always, Substack’s image placement continues to gall me, so please remember to scroll down past images to read the next paragraph. The piece has a signature TOA heart at the end.
Xx
A
ps— If your Decentraland building was reviewed in this article and you want me to return to it in a followup piece in the new year, or if I haven’t seen it yet and you feel it merits review, feel free to contact me directly avmarraccini@gmail.com. You can also use this address to ask me about Tokens of Affection or anything else related.
There isn’t yet much public writing about architecture in web3/NFT and metaverse space. Although Krista Kim’s Mars House made mainstream architectural press headlines last spring, the architecture I intend to focus on today is on the most-hyped metaverse site: Decentraland. Decentraland, a low-poly immersive web-based world, often houses secondary sites of NFT centric galleries, as well as a few small startup games and casinos. Its land prices and internal currency (“mana”) value skyrocketed after Facebook’s capital-M Metaverse announcement. The dystopian cringeworthiness of Facebook’s vision has already been well covered,* so I’ll spare you that here.
I’ve spent time on Decentraland, including its builder app, before, but for this piece, I went in with the specific aim of looking closely at the buildings, their effects on me as a viewer, and their functions.** What follows is an account of what I saw, and what I hope to see in the future instead. I was disappointed; but disappointment, and exasperation, are themselves a form of extreme care. I write this for Tokens of Affection in the hopes that we all— if we end up in the Zuckerberg-adjacent metaverse-based future— have some more tolerable edifices to console ourselves with.
Your avatar first enters Decentraland in a small plaza with a central diving pool. The surrounding foliage is bright and Seussian. Once your headphone lag catches up, you are instantaneously bombarded with about fifteen people saying “hello?!”. Sonic control of space is something both well within Decentraland’s management and also something to which they clearly haven’t devoted that much thought. Crowding users into the plaza makes the site look busier, but it’s also an initial assault on the other senses as their bodies rapidly glitch over each other and they all talk at once. Later on, I was subjected to mall jazz and techno I couldn’t turn off if I wanted to experience the other native audio of the world.*** So, when I dove off the installed board into the ominous suicide drop that leads to the main “conference center” it was with a sense of perhaps too-real relief and finality.
The conference center is as soulless as conference centers tend to be in the real world, so I hopped quickly to the “Museum District”, which houses many of the galleries’ metaverse installations I mostly came to see. I landed in front of the Community Gallery, whose ceiling descenders in blocky white created an impressive waterfall effect. It was pleasing from a distance as form. When I got closer to the building the same thing happened as when I got closer to almost every other building in Decentraland; I could not tell what the white blocks were. They were stacked voxels entirely devoid of texture. Decentraland doesn’t use all voxels, but has them as a build option, which leads to uncanny cheese blocks appearing. What were they, or what were they supposed to connote? I could only think of Aristotle, who in desperation for general word for matter in 5thC Athenian Greek, invents a use of the word for “wood”-- ὕλη (hyle). Everything in Decentraland is undistinguished hyle.
When there are surfaces in Decentraland, there is often no logical use of texture. The SuperRare gallery space attempts this with a lumpy volcanic (?) floor and what is intended to be marble walls. The marble pattern is stretched and re-tiled at such large size that it reads illegibly, though, and the general smoothness of space after space in the Decentraland world becomes haunting. Without the interest of ornament, texture, or implied materiality, the experience of architecture becomes an impoverished parody of itself. Again and again, I found myself walking into literal white cubes, deprived of a simulated sensorium. It made everything—and every gallery experience-- feel the same, varnished smooth into identical blockchain indexicality as built form .
Worse, many of the NFTs appeared either glowing white at a distance and only loaded with a click in an alternative browser window. Some actually displayed instead as a no symbol above the word NFT-- a clear gesture to the Beckett play I was already living in my pink egirl headset. This, and an advertising banner that says, simply, “advertising” in Helvetica, were perhaps the two most joyous things in the Museum District. The basic purpose of the gallery as display for NFT art is not yet fully functional here, or in some cases clashes directly with floorplans designed for avatar manoeuvring that don’t load images correctly.
Theoretically, a boundless metaverse should engender daring new architectural forms, but what actually seems to be happening here is that whoever can shove a basic Blender or Rhino export into few enough facets to load on a Decentraland parcel wins the prize for most interesting build. The Sotheby’s gallery is a replica of its famous London frontage, and works as a cheeky mimetic nod. Sotheby’s credits Voxel Architects in their entryway, and the auction house has hit on a strategy here that can easily be employed elsewhere: HIRE AN ARCHITECT. The low-poly material hauntology of Decentraland can perhaps even be deployed against itself to build something conceptually and visually interesting if someone competent at architectural craft in the digital space is given control of the project. Of course, Second Life has been doing this for twenty years and still looks better, but we’re in early days yet. I choose to sustain hope and will return to Decentraland in a followup piece for this Substack later on next year.
I ended my visit at the Satoshi Casino. Here, a use of pattern made for a neo-deco feel that was largely sustained, if again, far too spare in detail to succeed as deco itself. Melancholic soft jazz played in an undefinable open space. About twenty Pepes inexplicably swayed alone. Eventually, gaming tables loaded in front of them, but I liked it better before. Decentraland almost works better when it fails or glitches, and the uncanny takes center stage. There should be more rooms of swaying frogs with long and troubled histories on the internet, more self-referential signage, more of anything that distinguishes one virtual room from another. Decentraland,as of now, is materially and experientially too smooth; I longed to rough it up a bit. The flâneur can only thrive on variety and difference, whether in Baudelaire’s Paris or in the metaverse. No one will spend too much time anywhere that is always somehow the same.
*Including by, I kid you not, the entire nation of Iceland in a brilliant parody video.
** I live-tweeted some of this in perhaps excruciating detail here.
*** This is because Decentraland’s builder tools don’t appear to allow streaming audio from most sources, including internet radio stations or YouTube.
