Elysium

4. EMPTY SP4C3

Yuno:

For a long time I kept myself apart in Elysium. I analyzed chatrooms, events, watched the players from the side, but avoided close communication. The first months in Elysium were subject to constant updates, so as a location designer, I had to constantly monitor any changes in order to implement them into the creation of new rooms.

It was difficult in the beginning. My main specialization is the design of virtual environments and the development of AI holograms. I'm working with tools, paints and canvases, almost like an artist. In Elysium, everything is much more complicated and interesting - you design the scenery with your own thoughts and visualization. It doesn't happen right away.

Feels very similar to meditation. You are in an empty dark space that you don't even feel, and the main thing here is to focus on the details. You need to imagine as clearly as possible, otherwise the element that you think about will be blurry in the end. This, by the way, is one of the reasons why many of the rooms are hardly used by the players - if the quality is fuzzy, then the realism disappears, and this contradicts the concept of Elysium.

Therefore, at first, all I did was deleting elements that were not fully developed. I experimented a lot, chose different directions, thought carefully about the concept of rooms, but only few things turned out well. Being an absolute perfectionist when it came to work, I couldn't even launch a chat room if even one detail didn't suit me. I saw flaws literally in everything - if the backlight shade is less cold, then the atmosphere of the room is already killed, if the flowers are in the wrong corner, if the air temperature is two degrees cooler, then I completely erased all progress. As a result, I came to the first completed location only after a couple of months of regular practice, working on my own mistakes, searching for my personal style.

People come to Elysium primarily for the special atmosphere, the one that they won't be able to experience in reality.

Despite all the efforts, my locations didn't immediately hit the top of the rankings. I regularly checked it, and later it reached fanaticism: I could update the top chatrooms every three minutes in the hope of seeing mine, but after a while it dawned on me that the competition is huge, because every hour about a hundred rooms are created around the world, and it's almost impossible to reach the top .

At least that's how it seemed to me when I decided to give up on the amount of users in my rooms, and just enjoy the space I created on my own. I could hang out in my chatroom for hours, lying on the floor, smoking a joint, looking at the water in the pool of a small room, while the night city sparkles behind a glass wall. And I was fine, I mean, I felt really good. At that moment, I realized the value of being alone in Elysium. You create your personal world based on the desired images from your head, and just live in it, forgetting about everything around. In those days, I didn't want to talk to anyone. Loneliness is like a drug - once you try it, you get so addicted that it's hard to go back.

I continue to lie on the floor in my imaginary world, which connects me to reality with a thin, barely perceptible choker on my neck, designing and improving what is already there.

They say there are no sounds in Elysium. Everything that we think we hear here, from music to the roar of the wind - all of this is just a competent installation of the metaverse developers, some waves that send us a common association, plunging the users into this collective dream. It's so weird, it's crazy. I have checked this many times. You are in a noisy location of another party, you hear conversations, music, vibrations, but as soon as you think about reality, all sounds subside subtly, plunging you into absolute silence. Elysium is a deafening silence that we cannot comprehend.