“Field Notes from the Metaverse” will be a book that documents the history, perspectives, and narratives of the metaverse and virtual worlds.

This is a semi-regular update on my progress to document the history, perspectives, and narratives of the metaverse.Current book word count: 178,994 Reviewing In December 2023, I left Microsoft. One of the projects I embarked on was writing this book about the history, perspectives, and narratives of the metaverse and virtual worlds. I had already…

I have reached the final section. After showing all the history and establishing a model how to analyze and interpret metaverse narratives, I am now applying all this to a large sample size of different metaverse narratives to identify clusters based around a common perspective or assumptions. The result is a landscape of narratives, from…

I started this project in earnest in December 2023. At that point I had copied over all relevant blog articles, presentations and notes into a Word document, organized into a very rough outline. Since then I have added, rewritten, edited and restructured the contents many times, keeping a steady progress. Looking at the pure word…

I just cracked the 150k! To be honest, I don’t have a word budget for the book. It will have as much words as it needs. And I absolutely expect the editors to throw a good chunk out to make it more streamlined. In fact, they are already doing it. On the side I have…

49 of 75 chapters are ready for editing. That may not sound like good progress from the 41 chapters I reported two weeks ago, but I’m very happy with it. The last chapters were all chapters in the section about how mobile phones and other physical tokens created new interfaces into virtuality. And to be…

I am happily typing away and 41 of 75 chapters are ready for editing. This included a couple of chapters that needed significant restructuring. I already knew that I had been sloppy writing the chapters on the Web area, but I really didn’t do a great job on those. I guess my biggest issue is…

I am in the process of going through every chapter, unifying the tone and style of the book, and making sure that there is a logical flow from chapter to chapter and section to section. This is my last pass before handing it over to the editors, and so far 31 of 75 chapters are…

It has been a year since I decided to embark on this silly side quest. And so far, playing a full-time author has been awesome. As I dug deep into the history of the metaverse and virtual worlds, I encountered a lot of interesting stories buried in old newsgroups, articles long taken down, and in books…

The book already talked a lot about D&D, but only in the surrounding chapters. I talked about how D&D as a trend opened up the space for exploring metaphorical worlds, as well as the shift to personally step into these metaphors. In the field notes chapters I also talked about the impact that D&D had…