But I can do awkward parties in real life. I wanted a headier glimpse of our supposedly fantastical future in the metaverse, so we logged onto Adopt Me!, a confection of a game with Candy Land-esque graphics, where users collect and tend for pets, some ordinary, some mythical, spawned from eggs. “I just got offered a fluffy kitten,” Anton said, moments after logging on. “That’s how kid-friendly it is.”
On the surface, the game seemed to offer enough emphasis on early childhood development and affordable health care (you actually get paid to take your pet to the hospital, Anton told me) to please any red-rose progressive.
Understand the Facebook Papers
A tech giant in trouble. The leak of internal documents by a former Facebook employee has provided an intimate look at the operations of the secretive social media company and renewed calls for better regulations of the company’s wide reach into the lives of its users.
The whistle-blower. During an interview with “60 Minutes” that aired Oct. 3, Frances Haugen, a Facebook product manager who left the company in May, revealed that she was responsible for the leak of those internal documents.
Ms. Haugen’s testimony in Congress. On Oct. 5, Ms. Haugen testified before a Senate subcommittee, saying that Facebook was willing to use hateful and harmful content on its site to keep users coming back. Facebook executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, called her accusations untrue.
The Facebook Papers. Ms. Haugen also filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided the documents to Congress in redacted form. A congressional staff member then supplied the documents, known as the Facebook Papers, to several news organizations, including The New York Times.
But at a deeper level, the game seemed to hum with a “Succession”-level spirit of scheming and avarice. As in Mr. Zuckerberg’s metaverse, much of the good stuff is for sale, in this case in the game’s virtual currency, which Anton informed me can be earned by accomplishing tasks in the game, or with real money, which can be siphoned from parents. (Last year, a Roblox-loving 6-year-old in Australia racked up an $8,000 bill from his parents’ bank account.) The real point is not to win or lose, but to covet and acquire.
And there are plenty of come-ons, just like in the real world. Anton explained that his starter egg, which spawned a puppy, was free, but if he wanted a cooler pet, he had to pay up. I could barely keep up with the moves he was making, but soon he informed me that he had dropped more money (about $3.50 in American dollars) to make it a winged Fly Ride Dog which he could soar on, like a Pegasus, through the game’s Whoville-esque village, ringing up cash as he snapped up water for the pet, or a shower.
An honest day’s work, however, only goes so far in Adopt Me! The more exotic the pet, the more the cost. Artificial scarcity drives up prices even further. Anton, for example, simply had to have a limited-edition frost fury, a wingless white dragon that once traded for $800 Robux ($9.99 in actual currency), but is now highly coveted and only available through trade for a hefty haul. Because it’s beautiful? “Because it’s rare,” he said.
This explains why players young and old look for any angle to build up a spectacular menagerie that even the Joneses would want to keep up with. Anton and his friends swap assets with zeal, consulting online value charts like pint-size Wall Street quants.
Read More:An 8-Year-Old Explains the Metaverse
2021-11-06 21:57:38