I thought the article was a bit brief. A better one that was recently posted on HN [1] describes exploring university campuses that were built in Second Life and subsequently abandoned.

Some thoughts:

Looking at the pictures in [1], I was reminded that people designed and built all this stuff. Spent months of their lives and used their creativity. I wonder how they feel? Maybe like the designers of the Athens [2] and Sochi [3] Olympic sites.

Also, back in 2003 Cyan Worlds (the developers of Myst) created an online world called Uru Live [4]. They closed it due to lack of demand and (IIRC) scaling problems, but at some point it seems to have been brought back to life by a community effort [5]. So, abandoned worlds don't have to stay that way and the work of their designers doesn't have to be wasted.

The first time I recall encountering the concept of virtual world architecture was in Greg Egan's book Permutation City [6]. Anyone know of anything earlier?

Finally, it would be cool if virtual worlds could be linked by gateways, with some way for player metadata to migrate across the gateways.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10079400

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/sport/gallery/2014/aug/13/abandon...

[3] http://weburbanist.com/2014/09/09/post-olympic-abandonment-s...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst_Online:_Uru_Live

[5] http://mystonline.com/

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City