Exploring the New Playing Field: The Input-output Principle of Meta-sports

Meta-sports, which involve replicating sports in immersive virtual environments, represent a highly developed aspect of the future Metaverse. This study adopts a distributive justice lens to explore how athletes perceive the input-output principle underlying meta-sports platforms and evaluate the fairness of meta-sports competitions. Through a comparative mixed-methods study using nested data from the German Virtual Cycling Bundesliga at two time points, we find that individuals have dynamic information needs when forming transparency perceptions. These perceptions influence how they evaluate the distributive justice of meta-sports. Furthermore, our results suggest that justice perceptions influence an individual’s intention to continue participating, fully mediated by the perceived relevance of the competition. These findings enhance our understanding of Metaverse adoption and emphasize the importance of transparency when replicating physical-world competitions in virtual environments. Based on these results, we propose high-level design principles for future meta-sports platforms and other Metaverse applications relying on similar input-output principles.