pictures from my travels on worlds.com. been having a really nice time on this old “game” from 1995, mostly exploring user-made worlds. while there is still a (very small, very friendly!) active userbase that still make them, many of these worlds are years, if not decades, old at this point. traveling through the ones that have been saved has been very interesting to me, it feels a lot like digital urbex or traversing ruins.
it makes me consider things like link rot a lot more, too. if a 3d
space is assignable to a url, and that url disappears, it’s another
place, like houses you inhabited in youth, you cannot visit again. certainly you can
think and dream about it but it’s slipped somewhere flat and dark that
you cannot retrieve it from. the efforts then to preserve these worlds are key; like saving little windows in time, views into their creators’ lives, perfectly still. what we can’t do in real life, we’ll do online.
it is interesting to think about how much of the internet is made up of ghosts, and this adds a very real visual image to that. plus, it’s totally aesthetic, amirite!
