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

Current book word count: 119,237

Experimenting

The Microsoft Word app for mobile has this really neat “Read Aloud” feature that recently got a update with new (and finally good sounding) voices. Last week I loaded in my current draft and listened through it. Some impressions:

1. It’s a pretty long draft already
2. The concept and outline makes sense and is interesting to listen to
3. Some of the content might need to be re-ordered
4. Overall, pretty good!

I took a lot of notes and will continue to listen to the draft section-by-section to do more edits around the flow of information and making sure the concepts are introduced in the correct order.

TLDR: Read Aloud in Word, can recommend, 5/5.

Writing

I am now cleaning up the contextualization chapters. These start off every section and outline world events, as well as societal and cultural trends that are relevant to better understand and appreciate the milestones introduced in the respective section. The challenging thing about these chapters was to decide where everything goes.

Now that the milestones in the sections are more or less set and done, I can better select what trends in society, politics, economy, culture and technology had the most impact leading up to the things I talk to. For example, for the section where I talk about how text-based virtual worlds transitioned to graphical virtual worlds, it makes sense to talk about how PC’s went from business machines to home computers to multimedia machines. And how this then sparked a race within the computer games industry to create the most immersive and “realistic” experiences possible. This leading to the proliferation of high-density storage mediums like hard disks and CD-ROMs. And meanwhile how data networks switched from analog to digital, and how these digital connections were not priced per minute anymore, but as a fixed monthly fee, allowing households to be always connected. And with all that we can understand why Ultima Online had such a big impact at the time. And why with the rising costs of games development, virtual worlds eventually centralized in development and operations.

Reading

“Children in the digital age: Influences of electronic media on development”

A fascinating read from 2002 how children use emerging media. In the chapter “Identity construction on the Internet“, developmental and child psychologist Sandra L. Calvert looked at adolescents that used roleplay within Multi-User Dungeons to try out and construct a coherent, unified identity. Also a fascinating read because many of us are the children the book talked about 20 years ago.