This is a weekly update on my progress to document the history, perspectives, and narratives of the metaverse.

Current book word count: 99,914

Writing

Last week I focused on virtual world economics. While I love writing and talking about this, I am struggling how to best weave the topic into the book. It’s easy to go into too much detail about game design, balancing, and concepts like “fairness”. Then into monetarization in general how this might connect the virtual economy to the physical one, and the implications of that. Then into technical concepts. And I guess that would be a book in itself. Personally, I can’t wait for Catalin Alexandru to finally write it. 😋

As with technology, my goal is to explain just enough so that the reader understands why it’s important, and then provide references to go deeper if interested. This is what I struggle with. At one point, I hit the milestone of 100,000 words, only to delete almost the entire chapter again because it was too detailed. I guess that’s part of the process to write dozens of pages just to concede that they don’t go anywhere. Meh.

I might leave this mess for a bit and focus on the other “Field Notes” chapters. I think I should structure them differently and split them up a bit more. That way I have more room to explain basic concepts, reinforce them with milestones, then slowly build towards more complex ones.

Experimenting

I have been playing around with Google’s NotebookLM, which can collate multiple sources and summarize. It also creates “podcasts” out of it, essentially summaries in dialog form that are piped through a voice generator.

I first tried to summarize the entire book, but it became very clear that the length of the input is somewhat limited, my guess is to around 30k words. Next, I tried to upload section by section and that worked somewhat better. That said, it still misrepresented facts and made up conclusions. But assuming that in the future people will use these services to summarize books, it makes sense to me to try and write in such a way that the summary is complete and accurate. Of course while also being a fun read to actual humans.