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

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…

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

I added the chapter about True Names by Vernor Vinge as the first milestone in the book. Previously I talked about it in a paragraph as a precursor to cyberpunk, which is true but never felt right. It always felt more important than just a couple of words. And as I completed the chapters on…

I feel a certain amount of kinship with Dan Olsen. We might be the same age, although I doubt it. And I did not go to film school. Better known as Folding Ideas, Dan has published this monumental, gargantuan documentary about the metaverse called “The Future is a Dead Mall – Decentraland and the Metaverse”. There’s…

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,…

Writing is hard. As with projects in general, the 80/20 rule also applies to writing books. It feels like I am 80% there for the book, and I am starting to struggle with the last 20%. I am all over the place, can’t focus on a single chapter or section, and it feels like I…

Last week I focused on virtual world economics. While I love writing and talking about this, I am struggling how to best weave the topic into the book. It’s easy to go into too much detail about game design, balancing, and concepts like “fairness”. Then into monetarization in general how this might connect the virtual…

Coming back to writing after a 5 week vacation break is never easy. Of course I read a lot and made notes during that time, but I took a deliberate break from looking at the script to get some distance and hopefully have a fresh look when returning. This has worked as far as I…