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

Current book word count: 92,467

Blog

New theme. You like?

Getting visuals is hard. And for reasons I don’t like to use generative AI. So I got rid of visuals. Added bonus: It allows me to focus on writing.

Writing

The last week or so I have been working on the overall structure of the book. I read through everything to see if there are gaps anywhere, or if some sections feel too padded.

There is one narrative I broadly call “Immersionism” (working title, might not be in the book under that name). Immersionists believe that the metaverse represents a qualitative difference from other ways to experience digital dimensions. While the Web and mobile apps are about “remote controlling” digital dimensions, their belief is that the metaverse will enable “entering” and perceiving them in a natural way.

For immersionists, the goal is to create highly immersive experiences for any purpose (entertainment, education, work, games, concerts, events, etc.) as isolated or shared spaces, connecting people in more accessible, relevant, and valuable ways. Their definition of the metaverse is more a subjective, metaphysical, psychological state: “You know when you are in it.”

Outlining the history of this narrative is a mess right now and needs a serious update. My solution was to add some more chapters around this concept, for example Michael Heim’s book “The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality” and a lot more about the work of Mel Slater and the other “Immersion & Presence” pioneers.

The same is true for the “Virtuality” narrative. For virtualitarians, the metaverse is simply a threshold where virtual dimensions (or rather the digital representation of real things in virtuality) matter so much to the physical world that they become part of it. Reality itself is part of virtuality — and vice versa virtuality is part of reality, at which point the metaverse emerges.

Users will transform any physical space into digital spaces without hard boundaries. They will be able to reach out and manipulate digital dimensions, which will have real-world implications, and be able to manipulate the physical world to change the digital dimensions. Poetically speaking, they believe in an experience comparable to living in a hyper personalized theme park where every experience is catering to each individuals needs, feelings and dreams while connecting them to others around them, either through magical physical things or through purely virtual magic. A world where we can be virtually omni-present magicians, able to see ghost worlds and use their powers to manipulate matter.

This is also not very well explained, even if I have a lot of chapters on it already. For this, I don’t have a good solution yet. Maybe some chapter juggling will lead to a better thruline.

Talking

I had the pleasure to talk to Catalin Alexandru, behavioural game economist with over 16 years of experience designing economies and ecosystems. He has worked as a game designer, analyst and advisor across every business model for the biggest global game companies and brands. I approached him to talk about Web3 specifically.

Alexandru has been deeply involved in the Web3 gaming space for years, working on virtual worlds based on tokenized economies. This led to his seminal article “True Ownership – The Game Economy Trilemma,” in which he outlined structural issues with the concept of “true ownership” in Web3 and offered a model to approach a solution.

While I work on the transcript, have you seen the interview with Jon “NEVERDIE” Jacobs?

Listening

Some Podcasts I have been listening to recently: