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

Current book word count: 105,488

Writing

This week I have been working a lot on the “Field Notes” chapters. I have been pushing and prodding at them for a while and while they started out as “one chapter per section,” at some point they fragmented into many smaller chapters. It felt neater to carve them up into separate topics and concepts, but it just wasn’t fun to read. It turned the book into a text book and I didn’t like it.

Now THIS concept

Now THAT concept

“Homework“

So I started consolidating them again and it reads so much nicer. I think. The test-readers will tell me 😋

I also finished the chapter on Webkinz. Maybe.

I then started with something that I have kicked down the road (or rather, down the document) for quite a while: The demarcation of the terms “Metaverse” and “Virtual Worlds.” After all the current (work in progress) subtitle of the book is “A commented history of the Metaverse and Virtuality.” I know that both terms tend to be used interchangeably. But sometimes “Metaverse” is seen as the category term for all virtual worlds. Other times “Virtual Worlds” is used as the category term. And I want to address that in the book, explaining all three perspectives.

The usage of metaverse as the category term for all virtual worlds assumes a form of “multiverse”, where all virtual worlds (regardless of their properties) live inside the metaverse. This is more in line with the metaverse (lower-case-M) being a concept that can include many things and implementations.

At the same time, there is the conflicting tendency to use “Virtual Worlds” as the category term, which includes the Metaverse (capital-M) as just one distinct implementation or type of virtual world that sets it apart from other virtual worlds.

In my opinion, both attempts to categorize one term to subsume the other miss the point. From a contextual point of view, the term “Metaverse” traces back to the cyberpunk movement as a stage for characters to achieve fantastical things in a computer-generated fantasy world. The term “Virtual Worlds” traces back to the implementation of the same thing., with some implementations created in the hope of outright achieving the fictional metaverse, others evolving separately.

Both terms describe the same, but from different angles: As mentioned in the introduction, the term “Metaverse” represents the Gestalt, the mental idea, form, character, and meaning the concept of the metaverse evokes in our collective minds. “Virtual Worlds” are the real-world implementations that the concept refers to. While both are strongly linked, they are semiotically different things.

Writing all that in a clear and concise way is hard and builds on many concepts previously introduced in the book. Hence it’s finally time to pick up the can and go for it.

Reading

The Metaverse: A Critical Introduction by David Burden and Maggi Savin-Baden

I have been looking forward to this one as I have been reading David Burden’s blog for quite a while now. Both he and Maggi have been working in and around the Metaverse for a good 2 decades and I was really interested in their take.

This is not the place for a full review, but the TLDR is that if you are interested in the concept of the metaverse, you should read it.

I am also happy to report that the angle of their book when looking at the metaverse is sufficiently different from mine, so I didn’t need to throw my laptop at the wall and quit writing. 😅