One of the key things that made Snow Crash so appealing was that participants in the world also contributed the code that made it work. It was sort of semi-open source, I guess. I wonder if there's a way to make that practically work in a real-life metaverse. The book sort of skips over the obvious governance issues.
I read the book when I was a MUD addict in the 90s, and MUDs had a similar mechanism.
If you became high enough level in many MUDs, you became a "wizard". Wizards weren't players anymore, but they could edit code, creating new areas in the game for players to explore. Changing the code of a running game from within it was pretty cool, and so was the programming language (LPC, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LPC_(programming_language)).
Actually, it was distributed. Your code ran on your system. So long as it spoke the Steet protocol, and you had the real estate, you could run whatever you wanted.
I read it at the time when domain name ownership conflicts were the hottest topic and we all thought that any business based on a dictionary-word dot com domain would have an unbeatable competitive advantage (oh, how wrong we were!).
The idea of early adopters sitting on coveted real estate close to the origin of The Street struck me as a perfect prediction of the domain name rush. In hindsight, we matched the "prediction" to the wrong part of the internet: coveted early adopter real estate is not found in the domain name system, it's in the allocation of IPv4 subnet blocks.
