| Home | Designed with specific objectives, narratives, or goals (e.g., entertainment, competition, education). | Expansive and open-ended, enabling a parallel digital existence for socializing, working, creating, and exploring without predefined paths. |
| Persistence | Often has a reset or end point; even open-world games typically conclude after completing main objectives. | Persistent and continuously evolving, even when users log off; changes made by users can have lasting effects. |
| Interaction | Interactions are limited to the game’s mechanics and rules (e.g., competing or cooperating within the game’s framework). | Supports a wide range of interactions, including social networking, commerce, education, and governance, often without game-like constraints. |
| Economy | Features self-contained economies tied to game progression or monetization (e.g., in-game currency or items). | Can have real-world economic implications, with virtual goods, services, and assets holding tangible value outside the digital space. |
| Identity | Players adopt avatars or characters tied to the game’s narrative or mechanics, often reset between sessions. | Users maintain persistent digital identities (e.g., avatars) that carry across different experiences, reflecting real-world selves or new personas. |
| Content | Often limited to mods, custom levels, or skins within a specific game. Subject to the game's rules and tools. | Core feature; users can create entire experiences, worlds, and economies with fewer restrictions and more creative freedom. |
| Interoperability | Assets are typically locked to the specific game and cannot be used elsewhere. | Vision is for assets to be portable across different virtual worlds and platforms, though this is still in development. |
| Ownership | Game developers retain ownership of all assets. Players may have licenses to use them but cannot truly own or transfer them independently. | Blockchain technology enables true ownership of digital assets. Users can buy, sell, and trade assets independently of any central authority. |
