In a modernist hotel lobby on the outskirts of Barcelona I sit face to face with the President. He’s pretty casual as far as presidents go, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, wearing sunglasses even though we’re inside. He’s got a tattoo up the underside of his forearm which reads ‘Neverdie’. It’s his alias, but more of a name to him now than Jon Jacobs ever will be. He is President of Virtual Reality. It has nothing to do with Oculus Rift or VR goggles, and it’s not some silly title in a game. President of Virtual Reality means president of all virtual realities – World of Warcraft, Eve Online, Destiny, the lot.
Who voted for him? Entropia Universe players, mostly. There, Neverdie is a celebrity, the man who sold a nightclub on an asteroid for a staggering $635,000. The election was held on Facebook in spring 2016, and Jacobs did a proper campaign trail for it. He even made ridiculous promises like a real politician – “talking a bunch of shit” he calls it – pledging to create billions of jobs by building a teleportation system to transfer characters between virtual worlds.
But two years later his presidency isn’t going well, or at all, really. “I ran for President, did this thing and then everybody in Entropia Universe says, ‘We don’t want one!’ They’re like, ‘You’re not our President – bugger off!’ It was a complete ‘fuck you!’ from the userbase! And then Entropia Universe [creator MindArk] said, ‘Umm no we’re not interested.’ So I became President of Virtual Reality and they basically rejected my entire thing! And there was nothing I could do about it.”
Source: Eurogamer Face to face with the President of Virtual Reality