If it has an economy, it can have an UBI in it.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs, or MMOs) like World of Warcraft were never about 3D worlds, avatars or VR, nor were they essentially about massive numbers of simultaneous users. The defining aspect of MMOGs is state persistence and, in particular, the use of state persistence to model an explicit economy.

A virtual world is a game space that, once created, “persists” independently of players joining and leaving the game. And by doing so, it can have a meaningful economy within it. Just like the real world is and does.

In 2016, Steemit heralded the fusion between MMOs and Social Media. More than simply “gamifying” Social Media (i.e. playing Pavlovian sounds and granting useless badges to its users for their activity), Steemit has “economified” it. Steemit helps us see Social Media websites for what they really are: Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs). CVEs are non-competitive MMOs, which implies, among other things, that they don’t feature explicit economies.

You can have thousands of Twitter “followers” and sell them some random crap for their money, but that is settled outside of the game of Twitter — that is a meta-game activity. That is similar to how in-game currency and items in “gamer” MMOs are traded for real money using eBay, Paypal and, these days, probably cryptocurrencies too. Twitter has, metaphorically, an “economy,” but it is mostly worthless for the vast majority of users. The majority of Twitter users are just getting very little return on the value they put into the platform.

So, Twitter itself is a CVE, but Steemit is an MMO. The “in-game currency” in the persistent-state virtual world of Steemit is also a “cryptocurrency,” meaning it is designed to be taken off the game and used to pay for other things. The in-game money of Steemit is also designed to function like real-world money, just like Bitcoin, Ethereum and all other cryptocurrencies were.

MMOs were invented before cryptocurrencies. However, actual MMOs, with heroes, orcs, swords, spaceships and lasers and all that gamer stuff, are also catching up to cryptocurrencies. Expect a “traditional,” regular “gamer” MMO with cryptocurrencies embedded into its persistent economy to shoot up in popularity relatively soon.

Enter UBI. All MMOs, all “game worlds,” with state persistence and explicit economies in their design, including the traditional “gamer” MMOs but also the game world of Steemit, can be designed as Universal Basic Income Virtual Worlds.

An UBI virtual world is an open-participation virtual world where membership is limited to one person per account. And each account receives a fixed, guaranteed income of the in-game currency.

The in-game currency does not need to meet any criteria regarding “real currencies.” World of Warcraft, for example, can be an UBI MMO tomorrow: all that is required is that UBI-paying accounts be limited to one per human user, which is an ideal state sought by a best-effort attempt to implement it.

For WoW to be an UBI MMO, the in-game “gold” in WoW does not need to be promoted to a real currency. It can remain being the “fiat” currency system that it is: serving the game design, not any other external demands; its goal being to make the game fun, and that being its only “guarantee” or social contract, so to speak. In addition, the in-game gold does not need to be upgraded to offer resilience against censorship/shutdown (e.g. by a government) — it can remain being a “centralized” virtual currency, hosted at the game company’s servers. There isn’t even a requirement that the “in-game gold” be designed to interface with other virtual worlds or systems. That is, it can still function exactly like it functions now, requiring people to use a meta-game to trade the in-game gold by real-world money (including cryptocurrencies) outside of the platform.

Why would MMOs or “economized” Social Media websites such as Steemit implement UBIs? The main reason is this: because everyone will do that. First, you had to pay subscriptions for virtual worlds, or buy credits within them. Then, virtual worlds became “free” to use (i.e. you paid with ads and by providing a challenge to other “premium” optional-subscription players, etc) — this is what Medium does now, by the way (sort of). Now, users will demand payment for belonging to your virtual world. That payment can be what Steemit does, which is a payment in a cryptocurrency that interfaces with the outside world, or an in-game currency that does not easily interface with the outside world, but that can be spent in privileges inside your virtual world that allows them to meaningfully customize or program their experience. Think Twitter with “smart contracts” that ban nazis out of sight.

Moreover, even if your virtual world’s in-game “gold,” which is now to be paid as an UBI to all registered human users, is not a “real currency” like in Steemit, it will still be traded in the meta-game, just like gamer-MMO gold and items are — irrespective of that game-gold being a vulnerable “fiat money” system that can disappear overnight.

If you are designing a “cyber-space” that will have human users in them, be them “gamer” virtual worlds with orcs and dragons, or “social media” virtual worlds with nazis and trolls, you should think about using that “persistent state” to support an in-game currency, and build an in-game economy where that currency can be spent. That is how you are going to attract the next wave of users, and beat the competition that is still stuck into the merely “free.”