On Saturday I was a guest of Bernhard Drax (a.k.a. Draxtor Despres in Second Life and Sansar) on his long-running weekly podcast, The Drax Files Radio Hour.
We talk about Douglas Rushkoff’s provocative article, Most VR is Total Bullshit. But Drax and I also discussed many other topics in social VR, including mentions of Sansar, High Fidelity, AltspaceVR, VRChat, Rec Room, Decentraland, and the forthcoming Facebook Horizon. We also talk a fair bit about Facebook in general—and Drax takes me to task for rejoining the Facebook social network!
Honestly, Draxtor Despres has got to be one of the hardest-working people in the metaverse! He tirelessly churns out videos in both Second Life and Sansar, including The Drax Files: World Makers series of profiles of Second Life creators, the popular Atlas Hopping in Sansar series, and a long-running podcast called The Drax Files Radio Hour (co-hosted with Jo Yardley). His most recent work is the Love Made in Second Life series, profiling real-life couples who originally met in SL (here’s a link to episode one).
In the most recent Drax Files Radio Hour show, titled So What About Decentraland? Drax conducts a telephone interview with Nicolas Earnshaw from the Decentraland product team, and he certainly does not shy away from some tough questions! (You can almost hear Nicolas squirm at times.) It’s a rather refreshing change from some of the recent mainstream press coverage of Decentraland, which has tended to rely on things such as this highly-misleading promotional video:
Among other pointed questions, he asks Nicolas how much money Decentraland has made so far (something Nicolas struggles to answer), and how Decentraland plans to move from hosting and controlling their platform on their own servers to a distributed, self-governing structure in the future. (I personally have my doubts that this will happen as seamlessly as predicted. To date, no virtual world has attempted to transfer operating control in this fashion.)
