The Comedy Club at the End of the Metaverse

It’s Sunday, and I’m on stage at the Soapstone Comedy Club in the Metaverse. My VR avatar is wearing a black suit, tie, sunglasses, and an unfortunate fedora, which I chose from the pool of free clothes for your virtual dolls in Meta’s Horizon Worlds. After the show, a guy whose username is Large Fenris comes up to the bar next to me. “Hey, Blues Brothers,” he yells – tough crowd.

Soapstone’s adults-only digital comedy club Metaz has been around since the beginning of Horizon Worlds. It has hosted more than 5,000 events ranging from improv and stand-up to trivia nights and open-mic recitals. It featured partnerships with famous comedians such as Natasha Leggero, Ron Funches and Pete Holmes. It has also served as a hub for the ragtag regulars, who really love the place.

Last week, Meta announced that it would be shutting down Horizon Worlds in VR to focus on its mobile version; Following community reaction it was moved the next day to remain operational indefinitely. Now, the service is on life support. On June 15, Meta plans to cut creation features in VR and stop allowing users to create updates or new content on the platform – no more new worlds or seasonal updates, except for mobile.

“Soapstone is a world created by a third-party creator and is currently available as both a mobile world and a VR world,” a Meta representative wrote in an email to WIRED. “The VR version was built on the Horizon Unity Runtime (HUR), and as our CTO Andrew Bosworth said in his AMA, all HUR worlds will be in VR for the near future.”

For the past year and a half, Soapstone user Miss Del Rey has hosted these Sunday improv shows. She is from Sweden, and her incarnation has bright red hair, a red dress and hat, and knee-high gold boots.

“It came as a shock that they were shutting it down so quickly,” Ms. Del Rey says of the initial VR news. “It’s been mass produced, and now it’s disappearing.”

Soapstone is an adults-only digital comedy club in Meta’s Horizon Worlds.
Photograph: Boon Ashworth

In the first Soapstone Sunday Improv show since the shutdown of Meta, here are the guys joking around with their brightly colored avatars, not sure what will happen next. Soapstone says this will continue into the mobile age, but it’s unclear whether users will follow suit.

“People are afraid of uncertainty,” says Del Rey. “Doing this on VR may not be profitable, but I don’t think Meta understands how important this space is to so many people. I don’t know what my life would be like today without Soapstone.”

For the next hour, Del Rey and her co-host Milsbertak run the volunteers through classic improv games — drawing scenes from a hat or asking a group to tell a story, one word at a time, that quickly leads to adultery. (“My anacondas are small and dirty,” the group decides.)