Weekly Journal: Disney x Fortnite: A Glimpse of the First “Playable Theme Park” Metaverse
[6 min read] Your weekend guide to getting ahead on the digital frontier. Disney & Epic Games just dropped their clearest signal yet of what a Disney metaverse might look like, built inside Fortnight.
Welcome to this week’s Weekly Journal 📔, your guide to the latest news & innovation in emerging technology, digital assets, and our exciting path to the Metaverse. This is week 152 of the 520 weeks of newsletters I have committed to, a decade of documenting our physical and digital lives converge. New subscribers are encouraged to check out the history & purpose of this newsletter as well as the archive.
- Ryan
🌐 Digital Assets Market Update
To me, the Metaverse is the convergence of physical & virtual lives. As we work, play and socialise in virtual worlds, we need virtual currencies & assets. These have now reached mainstream finance as a defined asset class:
🔥🗺️Heat map shows the 7 day change in price (red down, green up) and block size is market cap.
🎭 Crypto Fear and Greed Index is an insight into the underlying psychological forces that drive the market’s volatility. Sentiment reveals itself across various channels—from social media activity to Google search trends—and when analysed alongside market data, these signals provide meaningful insight into the prevailing investment climate. The Fear & Greed Index aggregates these inputs, assigning weighted value to each, and distils them into a single, unified score.
🗞️ Metaverse news from this week:
🏰 Disney x Fortnite: A Glimpse of the First “Playable Theme Park” Metaverse
Disney and Epic Games just dropped their clearest signal yet of what a Disney metaverse might look like — and it’s built inside Fortnite. Launched on November 6th, the new Disneyland Game Rush island turns seven iconic theme park attractions into playable minigames, from a Haunted Mansion treasure hunt to a Spider-Man robot-shooter and a climb up Matterhorn Mountain.
The experience is simple, but strategic. It’s Disney IP wrapped in Fortnite’s interoperable infrastructure, blurring the lines between brand activation and persistent world-building. Players can move fluidly between Fortnite and Disney spaces, unlocking cosmetics (like a golden Minnie Mouse hat) that exist only within the Disney island — yet still earn experience that carries across Fortnite’s broader ecosystem.
Epic’s Saxs Persson has previously hinted that Disney’s $1.5 billion investment is aimed at creating “a persistent place where all things Disney can live inside a shared ecosystem.” Game Rush appears to be a prototype for that persistent universe — one that could eventually evolve into a virtual Disneyland, coexisting with Fortnite’s player economy and creator systems.
From a metaverse perspective, this collaboration is more than a licensing deal. It’s an experiment in brand interoperability, cross-IP persistence, and controlled immersion — a blueprint for how corporate metaverses might coexist within open ecosystems.
In other words, this isn’t the metaverse as a new world. It’s the metaverse as a network of interconnected worlds, where Disney doesn’t just stream stories — it hosts them as playable spaces.
🎢 Metaverse Insight: Disney’s “Playable Universe” Strategy
1. The metaverse as franchise, not frontier. While Meta and Apple chase new hardware paradigms, Disney is turning its existing IP universe into a playable one. The metaverse becomes an extension of its storytelling empire, not a replacement for it.
2. Built on someone else’s rails. By using Fortnite’s creator ecosystem, Disney sidesteps the cost of building its own metaverse platform from scratch. This partnership signals a new model: world-building via licensing and interoperability, not walled-garden control.
3. Controlled immersion, not chaos. Disneyland Game Rush is deliberately curated—no blood, no chaos, no open-world anarchy. It’s family-safe immersion, reinforcing Disney’s brand ethos while letting fans participate rather than just consume.
4. A soft launch for “Disneyland Online”. This experiment shows how Disney could layer a persistent, evolving theme park across Fortnite’s infrastructure. Each attraction acts as a modular “world,” eventually forming a full-blown virtual Disneyland within a shared metaverse grid.
5. The next wave: emotional interoperability. Epic’s vision of seamless transitions between worlds—Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, Fortnite—marks the dawn of cross-IP emotional continuity. Players won’t just switch games; they’ll live across franchises under one social identity.
♟️ Anichess: Reinventing Chess for the Web3 Metaverse
Animoca Brands, in partnership with Chess.com and Magnus Carlsen, is reimagining one of the world’s oldest strategy games as a blockchain-powered metaverse experience.
Anichess, led by Chevan Tin, blends classic chess mechanics with magic, NFTs, and tokenized ecosystems—transforming the quiet intensity of chess into a dynamic, multiplayer, creator-driven world.
What began as a 2022 IP deal has evolved into a full-scale platform where spells, traps, and invisible pieces bring uncertainty and creativity to every match. Tin describes it as “Hearthstone meets chess, with a hint of poker.” The game lowers the barrier to entry, allowing casual players to compete with grandmasters through clever spellcraft, while also deterring cheating—one of online chess’s biggest challenges.
The blockchain layer is intentionally subtle. Players start free-to-play through simple email logins, but can later earn and own NFT chessboards, pieces, and cosmetics, unlocking true digital property rights. The upcoming $CHECK token ties together the broader Checkmate Ecosystem, linking future strategy games that share liquidity, governance, and player rewards.
From a metaverse perspective, Anichess represents a shift from “GameFi hype” to web3 infrastructure with cultural gravity. It fuses education, collectibles, and esports into a single platform, aiming to invisibly onboard millions into on-chain play. With integrations across Pudgy Penguins, Moonbirds, and Team Secret Esports, the project’s open-IP approach positions chess as both a canvas for brand collaboration and a teaching tool for digital literacy and financial discipline.
Tin sums up the long-term vision: “We’re not building just a game—we’re building a movement where strategy, creativity, and ownership converge.”
What Anichess Reveals About the Next Wave of Web3 Gaming
1. Ownership without onboarding friction
Anichess quietly dissolves the old “crypto-first” model. Players enter through web2 pathways—email, free play, social content—then discover ownership later through NFTs and tokens. This reverses the Web3 playbook, making blockchain invisible until it matters.
2. Skill over speculation
By tying progression and rewards to gameplay rather than hype, Anichess embodies a new philosophy: earn through intellect, not luck. It restores gaming’s meritocracy while embedding financial literacy through design—risk management, reward cycles, and effort-to-value correlation.
3. Interoperable IP worlds
Integrations with Pudgy Penguins, Moonbirds, and Team Secret illustrate how cross-IP collaboration can turn single games into ecosystems. The chessboard becomes a modular storytelling surface—an early model for composable metaverse experiences.
4. The $CHECK economy as connective tissue
Rather than isolated game tokens, Anichess’s Checkmate Ecosystem uses $CHECK as a shared resource across multiple titles. This signals a maturing Web3 economy—one token, many worlds, powering liquidity, voting, and reward distribution.
5. Education through engagement
By letting even toddlers earn digital items through play, Anichess could become a stealth tool for onboarding the next generation into digital finance—teaching value creation, discipline, and ownership long before traditional schooling does.
📖 Read of the week: Mustafa Suleyman Warns Against the Creation of Unbounded Autonomous AI Systems”
🗞 By Mustafa Suleyman | Financial Times | 9 November 2025
Microsoft’s AI chief and DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman has issued one of the clearest calls yet for restraint in the race toward artificial superintelligence. In his essay, he argues that humanity now stands at an inflection point: AI systems already outperform us in many cognitive tasks, and the question is no longer if they surpass us—but how we ensure they serve human ends.
Suleyman frames the answer in a single phrase: Humanist Superintelligence (HSI)—advanced AI that remains bounded, controllable, and explicitly in service to people. His warning is sharp: building fully autonomous, self-improving AI without clear limits risks creating an “unbounded entity” that could drift from human values or oversight.
🧭 A Human-Centred Path Forward
Rather than chasing a single all-purpose super-AI, Suleyman urges the industry to focus on domain-specific intelligence:
Medical superintelligence to deliver global diagnostics and affordable expert care.
Educational companions to provide adaptive, personalised learning.
Energy optimisation agents to accelerate clean-tech breakthroughs.
These systems, he says, can drive unprecedented gains in productivity, health, and knowledge—without surrendering human agency.
🪙 Why It Matters to the Metaverse & the Machine Economy
The idea of HSI intersects directly with emerging agentic metaverse economies. As AI agents begin to transact using protocols like x402 and operate within decentralised virtual worlds, Suleyman’s principles serve as a moral anchor:
Keep agents domain-bounded rather than globally autonomous.
Embed accountability and transparency into every transaction and decision.
Design systems that augment human participation instead of replacing it.
The metaverse, like superintelligence, risks fragmentation between open, decentralised ecosystems and closed, corporate silos. HSI offers a philosophical foundation for ensuring that future virtual worlds—and the AI entities within them—enhance human flourishing rather than diminish it.
🌍 The Takeaway
“Superintelligence could be the best invention ever, but only if it sticks to one maxim: humans matter more than tech,” Suleyman writes.
His essay reframes AI not as a race for power but as a civilisational design challenge: ensuring that as our digital creations grow more capable, they remain humanist by default.
🔗 Read the full article in the Financial Times
🎥 Watch of the week:
Raoul Pal welcomes Emad Mostaque, co-founder of Stability AI and author of “The Last Economy,” back to explore how AI is triggering the Economic Singularity. They discuss the potential for a deflationary shock, the rise of digital assets, and the collapse of traditional economic models as humanity transitions from a scarcity-based system to one driven by abundance and machine intelligence. Recorded on October 13, 2025
AI Spotlight 🎨🤖🎵✍🏼: Talking to the Dead - When Memory Meets Machine
In the Metaverse, AI will be critical for creating intelligent virtual environments and avatars that can understand and respond to users with human-like cognition and natural interactions.
A new wave of startups is offering something once confined to science fiction: “deathbots”—AI systems trained on a person’s digital traces to simulate conversations after death. From voice avatars to chatbots built from texts and posts, these tools promise comfort and continuity, but their creators at The Conversation’s Synthetic Pasts project warn they may be changing how we grieve.
Researchers Eva Nieto McAvoy and Jenny Kidd found that the technology sits uneasily between the moving and the macabre. The bots often mimic tone and style but fall short of genuine empathy—cheerfully inserting emojis into conversations about loss, or parroting the user’s own words back to them.
Behind the illusion lies a business model: remembrance as subscription service. The “digital afterlife” industry, now worth billions, trades in biometric and emotional data, turning grief into engagement. Philosopher Carl Öhman calls it part of a new “political economy of death,” where data lives on long after we do.
Yet the phenomenon points to something deeper. AI memorials blur the line between memory and simulation, keeping loved ones ever-present but never quite real. As the study notes, they “misunderstand death itself — replacing the finality of loss with the endless availability of code.”
Still, there’s an unexpected tenderness in their failure. Each stiff response reminds us that memory is human, relational, and beautifully imperfect.
Viewed through an optimistic lens, AI may not resurrect the dead, but it can preserve their voices, stories, and laughter — fragments of humanity stitched into the fabric of the digital age. The real challenge isn’t building ghosts that talk; it’s teaching technology how to listen with empathy.
That’s all for this week! If you have any organisations in mind that could benefit from keynotes about emerging technology, be sure to reach out. Public speaking is one of many services I offer.