Notable game designer Raph Koster was involved in Metaplace and his blog included a lot of making of/behind the scenes articles and discussions from around that

Notable game designer Raph Koster was involved in Metaplace and his blog included a lot of making of/behind the scenes articles and discussions from around that time, including some post-mortem thoughts. > What keeps blocking them from mainstreaming? Most likely it is business model. Getting the spatial model correct is a lot of work, and making it generic enough to be reusable is even harder. (Both Second Life and Metaplace flirted with idea of being platforms that other services could build on.) It's easier to get some financing for it as a "game" (it's also useful to note a bunch of Metaplace ideas came out of experiments in failed MMO Star Wars Galaxy), but it's harder to sell it as a general chat application (much less platform) or especially as an "Enterprise tool" if it looks too much like a toy or a game. On the flipside it's harder to build it as an Enterprise tool first, because the impulse to keep things sparse/spartan/"profesional" also leaves a air of "lifelessness" with not enough things to do outside of/between meetings/during downtime inside of meetings, not enough of a feeling that it is a space to "inhabit" rather than visit briefly because a meeting required it. These business model bootstrap hurdles are a criticism I often bring to a lot of the conversations about why the Cyberpunk "ideal" of a single shared VR space (including the one most recently popularized by Ready Player One) seems so extremely unlikely in the real world. (Aside: Ready Player One especially suffers from a lot of basic game economy mistakes and likely shouldn't have survived very long in its world for very long, much less have taken over nearly everything including education and enterprise so much as it did. My reading of the book was that the game economy directly caused a lot of the collapse and dystopian economy outside of the game, which made the book better than the author seemed to have intended as further reading and other evidence suggests the author was not aware of how terrible the economics of the game were, they were just fun ideas thrown out for verisimilitude.)