Abstract
As much as tech giants like Microsoft and Meta promote the metaverse as a new haven for social connection and enterprise, popular and academic presses credit the development of persistent virtual worlds that underlie the emerging space to digital gamemakers. This paper argues gaming’s centrality to the metaverse, upon which its hardware, controls, distribution platforms, economic models, and even socio-cultural attributes rely. Building on research into early adopters of virtual reality, it examines a “playbor production system” that solidifies hardware and software providers in both immersive media and the metaverse’s ecosystems by capitalizing on gamers’ and enthusiasts’ labor. The paper concludes that such models epitomize endemic concerns in the evolution of virtual worlds, economics, and technologies contingent upon imbalanced power structures between producers, providers, and consumers.