The video-game industry has metaverse ambitions, too

THE PLANET3D is black, perfectly spherical, does not really exist, and is exactly 65,536km around (being the sixteenth power of two, a number any hacker worth their salt would recognise). A single 100-metre-wide road runs round it. All the real estate on the virtual planet is owned by the Association for Computing Machinery, an academic body.The Association sells parcels of land to enterprising programmers wishing to develop them. Many do: their efforts are responsible for the houses, bars and skyscrapers that line the great road. At any given hour the road bustles with people, or at least, with their avatars. Some are going to work, some are going on dates, many are just milling around in the way that people have done since the invention of streets. A few take their cars—like everything else in that world, really just bundles of computer code—out off the highway and “race [them] in the black desert of the electronic night”.