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What are these “field notes”, exactly?
In “Structuring my Field Notes“, I wrote: “At the end of each section I will add a chapter that contains the titular fieldnotes. I went through my personal notebooks to gather my thoughts, lessons learned, and insights from the respective time period.” I thought it might be interesting to talk about what personal notes I […]
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Interview with Dr Richard Bartle: The Bartle Types, Games Studies, and Virtual Worlds as Identity Laboratories
Dr Richard A. Bartle is Honorary Professor of Computer Game Design at the University of Essex, UK. He is best known for having co-written the first virtual world MUD (“Multi-User Dungeon”) in 1978, and for his many contributions to all aspects of virtual world design and development. His 1996 paper “Players Who Suit MUDs” established […]
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Field notes weekly #2
This is a weekly update on my progress to document the history, perspectives, and narratives of the metaverse. For more on the contents and structure of the book, please see “Structuring my field notes“.Current book word count: 69,249 Writing This week I have been thinking a lot about the fieldnotes chapters. These are the chapters […]
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Field notes weekly #1
This is a weekly update on my progress to document the history, perspectives, and narratives of the metaverse. For more on the contents and structure of the book, please see “Structuring my field notes“.Current book word count: 68,810 Writing Writing about Cryptocurrencies and Web3 is messy. Before we start: Yes, I am on the record […]
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Interview with Raph Koster: The Declaration of Rights of Avatars
Raph Koster is a professional game designer, frequent writer on issues of interactive design, and the CEO of Playable Worlds, Inc. He was the original creative lead on the seminal online world Ultima Online, which first brought online worlds to the mass market. He was Chief Creative Officer for Sony Online Entertainment (SOE), where he […]
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Interview with Dan Hunter: The 20th Anniversary of “The Laws of the Virtual Worlds”
Dan Hunter is the Executive Dean of the Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London. He was previously the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Law at Queensland University of Technology and the Founding Dean of Swinburne Law School in Australia. He is an international expert in Internet and intellectual property law, AI […]
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I am not going to write about AI very much
AI has always been associated with the metaverse. The earliest cyberpunk novels included autonomous programs that roamed virtual worlds. These ranged from service bots that automated simple tasks, concierges that acted as a speaker for users, to all-out intelligent companions. In terms of actual implementation, virtual worlds have been utilizing different forms of AI for […]
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Structuring my Field Notes
The upcoming book is my attempt to retell the history of the metaverse from my point of view. To do that I went over my many (!) physical notebooks and notepads, as well as my digital ones, that have accumulated over the years. Luckily, I am bad at throwing these things away. I also have […]
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Let’s get started (again)!
When I began writing the original Field Notes from the Metaverse, I thought it would just be a few articles, maybe five or so, that went into some of the history of the metaverse and virtual worlds. Document a couple of milestones, explain a few concepts, wrap it all up with a model, done. And […]