Sacred Spaces in Virtual Worlds
In 2018, a pastor named DJ Soto performed a baptism in which the candidate, represented by a purple robot avatar, was lowered into virtual water while family and friends cheered from headsets scattered across the country. His congregation, VR Church, was founded in 2016 and describes itself as existing entirely in the metaverse. It has since planted chapters inside massively multiplayer games and pastored people on every continent, many of whom could not, or would not, walk into a physical building. ...