Celia Pearce has vivid and fond memories of living in Second Life.

The non-game online virtual world “Second Life” launched in the early 2000s appealed to people, like Pearce, who were looking for what developer Linden Labs calls a “haven of self-expression.”

Pearce, a game design professor at Northeastern who has been studying non-game-related virtual worlds since the mid-1990s, remembers creating her digital avatar, roaming the virtual spaces and homes that others had created and interacting with people who they had created entire communities in “Second Life.”

Twenty years later, Pearce says the Metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar attempt to revolutionize the concept of a virtual world, looks a lot like “Second Life,” in all…