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

Current book word count: 123,588

Writing

Ok, fine, Dungeons & Dragons gets its own chapter.

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 on the earliest designers and developers of virtual worlds, comparing D&D play styles to the motivation of players in virtual worlds, how they both were affected by “in character” play and so on.

But since I started listening to the chapters as an audio book, I realized that this didn’t flow right. Some of the required background came far too late, and since both D&D and MUDs effectively evolved at the same time, it was hard to follow.

My recent interview with Jay Springett, in which we talked a lot about the influence of D&D on all forms of world building, was the last straw. I finally gave D&D its own chapter, incorporated some information into the chapters about MUD and MUDs, and the field notes chapter now only contains the resulting learnings. As a result, the structure and chapters look very different now, but that’s why I labelled the preview chapters as “Work in Progress“. Listening to the new sections feels so much better now.

Note to self

Don’t try to be clever with chapter titles. Just make them make sense.