It’s Sunday night at the Soapstone Comedy Club. MissDelRey takes to the stage in a skintight red dress and gladiator sandals. Her co-host is dressed a bit like one of the Blues Brothers. Her skin is turquoise. The first act is called “write me a letter”—members of the audience each offer up a single word that together forms a side-splitting sentence. This week’s prompt: a formal complaint. Someone called Bethany offers up “areola.” “Can we say that here?” asks the host. The audience titters.
For the record, at no point do the finished sentences ever bear any relevance to the chosen theme. At one point, it amalgamates to “taste my guacamole.”
It’s not quite the caliber of comedy you’d find at the Top Secret Comedy Club. Then again, this isn’t happening in a Soho basement. This is the crème de la crème of comedy in Meta Horizon Worlds. MissDelRey and her slew of funny mates aren’t bantering in the flesh, but at home, headsets strapped on, inhabiting zanily-dressed avatars in a virtual comedy club that exists entirely inside a Meta server.
Or at least it will until June, given last week’s announcement that Meta Horizon Worlds is going to be shuttered.
Back in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg harangued CBS presenter Gayle King into joining him for a short, jittery stint in the platform’s first iteration, Horizon Workrooms. Positioned as a Blade Runner-esque alternative to remote working, he demonstrated how his disembodied torso could scrawl on a whiteboard. It didn’t take off. Then came a version of Horizon Worlds that’s closer to the one we have today. The ad for that came in the form of nerds larking about in a spaceship—a kind of utopia for people who look like the collector from Toy Story and that mate you once had who always wanted to dress up as a huge fuck-off robot. Then the Metaverse selfie: Zuckerberg’s egg-like avatar grinning in front of a crude recreation of the Eiffel Tower. Memes galore.
In 2022, it was estimated that Horizon Worlds had 500,000 monthly users. By this year, that figure apparently dipped below 1,000. So, Horizon Worlds was quietly scrapped.
Well, partially. After the closure was met by outrage from Horizon Worlds’ small cohort of users, Meta did a U-turn. They’ll keep Horizon Worlds in VR “for the foreseeable future,” though there’ll be limited support and users will be unable to create new games.
But what about the Metaverse lovers left behind? “Is grief the right word to describe what you’re feeling?” I ask MissDelRey. “Absolutely,” she writes. “It feels like the loss of a home.”
Small, scrappy, and overrun by racist kids and virtual sex pests. Horizon Worlds was, from the outside looking in, cherished by almost nobody. Almost.
SpaceycatVR has popped down to Soapstone Comedy a couple of times. Her avatar is pretty unassuming, but if she’s off somewhere special—the Nexus Club nightspot or a tech-house rave—she’ll opt for a bodycon number with a fair few cutouts. IRL, she’s called Holly, and hails from Norway. She’s not just grieving—she’s “incredibly frustrated and angry.” She’s spent the last few days scrambling to “figure out how to export [her] builds from the app.” Those builds, which she likens to “making sandcastles on the beach,” came about thanks to a circle of creative friends she’d never have met otherwise—people who now know the details of each other’s personal lives, who “support each other.” “Honestly, what’s better in life?” she writes. “The greatest gift Horizon Worlds has given us is the connections.”
If it weren’t virtual, it’d be a right old rave-up. Gene, who got in contact via Instagram, is “probably close to over 100 people because of Horizon Worlds.” Casey Finnigan (avatar: a Pierrot clown in a military jacket) can’t quite match that, but he has fond memories. A few months back, at someone’s surprise party, he donned his leprechaun avatar. “I shrunk into a miniature version, and then rode on someone’s hat,” he writes. “Everyone burst out laughing.” You had to be there. Except, of course, none of them were.
“A massive meteor could have smashed straight through Meta Horizon Worlds and nothing of value would be lost,” writes one Reddit user. They’re not entirely wrong. Take Tee, a stay-at-home mom. One evening, while playing a game of Mölkky at an 18+ bar called Bunky’s, a fellow player made a misogynistic joke. “Men suck,” her companion muttered. A moderator called AngryscottsMAN (he’s since changed his username) overheard and used his admin privileges to lift Tee’s avatar off the ground and throw her around the room “like a rag doll.” She was blacklisted from the bar for several days. Tee later learned that another woman in the same world had been cornered by three men who simulated raping her avatar. Elsewhere, children who had snuck into age-restricted worlds ran around screaming slurs, while Trump supporters graffitied “illegals out of the U.S.” on the walls. Moderators wouldn’t take them down. “Meta care about safety?” Tee writes. “Puh-leezeee.”
“Another woman in the same world had been cornered by three men who simulated raping her avatar”
You’ve got to cherry-pick the good bits—turn a blind eye to the worlds themed around Jeffrey Epstein—but for the small few, they’re there. Reddit user dancingonmyown29 was in a long-distance marriage—she in the U.S., he in France. They’d do a Horizon Worlds escape room for date nights. Fairfight14 (avatar: less creative license, looks like an IT technician) isn’t the sort who can walk into a pub and strike up a conversation with a stranger. There isn’t an actual tech-house rave near him either. “You get to travel without traveling,” he tells me, “which isn’t always an option due to the costs.”
Play it before Meta takes it down! #emorgul
Ryan Barclay found Horizon Worlds after deciding that social media had become a “bit stale and fake.” His fondest memory? A stranger recognized him from logging on so consistently and invited him to hang: “It was so easy to chat about my mental health and wellbeing, and we then were able to do some dance moves to some cool music from N-Dubz.” For Martyna, who got in touch via Reddit, it was somewhere to go after being diagnosed with incurable cancer. “I could forget about it all and not feel so lonely,” she writes. “I remember meeting a guy who lost his legs in an accident.”
For most people, it’s a punchline. For them, the whole spectrum of human existence is contained between its digitally-rendered walls. Friendship. Love. Birthdays where a miniature leprechaun rides on someone’s hat. Fairfight14 knew one user—old, kind, the sort everyone gravitated toward—who died. His son knew exactly where to find his friends. He ended up live-streaming the funeral. They all watched it together, headsets on.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has described the partial reversal as keeping the lights on. “Horizon Worlds is going to be more like the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” writes Fairfight14. Still standing, but missing some limbs. “Tis but a scratch.”
Follow Amber on Instagram @amberawlings
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