  The metaverse and digital, virtual environments have been part of recent
history as places in which people can socialize, work and spend time playing
games. However, the infancy of the development of these digital, virtual
environments brings some challenges that are still not fully depicted. With
this article, we seek to identify and map the currently available knowledge and
scientific effort to discover what principles, guidelines, laws, policies, and
practices are currently in place to allow for the design of digital, virtual
environments, and the metaverse. Through a scoping review, we aimed to
systematically survey the existing literature and discern gaps in knowledge
within the domain of metaverse research from sociological, anthropological,
cultural, and experiential perspectives. The objective of this review was
twofold: (1) to examine the focus of the literature studying the metaverse from
various angles and (2) to formulate a research agenda for the design and
development of ethical digital, virtual environments. With this paper, we
identified several works and articles detailing experiments and research on the
design of digital, virtual environments and metaverses. We found an increased
number of publications in the year 2022. This finding, together with the fact
that only a few articles were focused on the domain of ethics, culture and
society shows that there is still a vast amount of work to be done to create
awareness, principles and policies that could help to design safe, secure and
inclusive digital, virtual environments and metaverses.
