Understanding the Metaverse: A Syllabus for Normal People
Last week I decided to pull together some links to help me understand and learn about the metaverse, a topic I know very little about.
What’s the metaverse?
While our geek overlords haven’t settled on a universal definition for it, I found a few (SEO-juicy) definitions that do the job.
The IEEE Virtual World Standard Working Group classifies the metaverse under the “virtual environments” umbrella and defines it as:
“A synthetic environment consisting of virtual spaces containing objects, inhabitants, and their relationships, which exists in virtually-defined time. A Virtual environment can also provide a platform for "Serious Games", "Simulations", or "Video Games". Virtual Worlds are intended for its users to inhabit and interact, and the term today has become largely synonymous with interactive 3D virtual environments, where the users take the form of avatars visible to others graphically.”
The Metaverse Guy Matthew Ball thinks it’s,
“An expansive network of persistent, real-time rendered 3D worlds and simulations that support continuity of identity, objects, history, payments, and entitlements, and can be experienced synchronously by an effectively unlimited number of users, each with an individual sense of presence.”
My friend Daniel provides my favourite definition (mostly cuz it’s the shortest one):
“An always-on, shared set of virtual experiences that are seamlessly connected.”
If these definitions intimidate you, you’re not alone. So I asked some smart folks on Twitter and the Write of Passage community for their favourite, high-level metaverse reading material.
This way, us non-technical normies can read up, understand the Twitter hullaballoo around Facebook’s sci-fi announcement, and get on with our lives. (At least until we have to “reskill” and learn another new piece of tech for work. Again.)
Unlike my usual curated recommendations though, I haven’t really dug deep into most of these resources, particularly the books. At most I skimmed Tim Sweeney and Matthew Ball’s bodies of work. So, a few notes before we get into the links:
I only wrote descriptions for the recommendations I’d read. Otherwise I left the description for books or articles I have yet to read, blank.
Titles for books and other long form works are in italics. Titles for everything else are in “quotation marks”.
If you’ve only ever seen “metaverse” floating around on Twitter and aren’t sure why you should care, I bolded the gateway drug, metaverse 101 recommendations for ya.
A short message before we dive in: If you’re into the metaverse, you’ll probably enjoy my weekly newsletter. Subscribe below to get more posts on web3, creativity, and the creator economy, or check out previous editions to “try before you buy”.
And with that, it’s Into The Woods™️.
Books
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline — Arguably the geekiest, most accessible work on the metaverse. I’ve read the book twice, listened to the audiobook once, and watched the Spielberg-directed movie at least twice (I’ve lost count). Highly recommend.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson — The book that gifted pop culture with the terms “metaverse” and “avatar”, Snow Crash fuses Sumerian and Babylonian references into a cyberpunk world set in the future.
Here, people rule themselves, businesses lord over people, and the virtual reality-based Metaverse is sovereign over all. Sounds nuts? Read it and you’d be surprised how eerily accurate this novel gets to our current society, despite being published in 1992.Neuromancer by William Gibson — The first in the Sprawl trilogy, I got multiple recommendations for this book.
For more book and short story recommendations, check out Michael Dean’s book list entitled ”Simulation Fiction”.
Articles
“The Metaverse: What It Is, Where to Find it, Who Will Build It, and Fortnite” by Matthew Ball — This helped me understand the birthing pains that signal the dawn of the metaverse.
After this snack, go for the whole buffet: read the rest of Ball’s essays on the metaverse and Epic Games the company willing it into existence. (Warning: I’m not kidding about the “buffet” part; these are both exhaustive multi-part series-es.)”Guide to the Metaverse in 15 minutes” by Daniel Sisson — My friend Daniel covers the 5W + H questions on the metaverse. I extracted a number of links from Daniel’s research and sources in this essay for this syllabus — thank you!
“A Day In The Metaverse” by Cathy Hackl — An article that imagines what a world where AR, VR, and the metaverse collide.
"Into The Void: Where Crypto Meets The Metaverse” by Piers Kicks
People
Punk6529 — An anonymous Twitter account that mostly tweets about NFTs, including an NFT Twitter glossary and a first-timer’s guide to buying NFTs. Here’s what they have to say about the metaverse:
"But in the metaverse" is a running joke on cryptotwitter. I regret to inform you that it is no joke. What we are playing for is whether our children will be fully free or residents in a digital company universe - with the illusion of free, but not really free.”
Check out this master thread collection of their other threads.
Meta, I know. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
Jarod Lonier — An award-winning writer, developer, musician, considered to be one of the founding fathers of virtual reality. His endearingly static website showcases a staggering quantity of academic and mainstream literature written by him and about him. He is a seriously impressive and interesting dude, to put it midly.
(RK: I suspect Neal Stephenson drew inspiration from Jarod’s writings to pen the vivid, detailed descriptions of VR tech in Snow Crash.)Howard Rheingold — A futurist, technology historian, and self-described “explorer of mind amplifiers”, check out his wide-ranging body of work on VR, social media, art, personal knowledge management, and more here. He’s on Twitter, YouTube, and has a Patreon.
Fun fact: He coined a term that modern notetaking aficionados will be familiar with: “tools for thought” .Tim Sweeney — Developer, founder, and CEO of Epic Games, he has some prescient ideas on how the gaming industry should think about the metaverse. A very important voice to pay attention to as we plunge into the age of the metaverse. (RK: He’s the present day James Halliday IMO.)
A few more links because he doesn’t have a website (only Twitter):This Gamemakers interview entitled “The Economy of the Metaverse”.
While he doesn’t mention the metaverse until the last 2 minutes of his talk from DICE 2020, he presents a few of the gaming building blocks the metaverse needs to thrive. (I dig into those main points in this post.)
Facebook’s Reality Labs — particularly this Verge article on Facebook’s push into the metaverse. From Michael Dean:
“It's worth understanding Facebook's perspective, even though they're the corporate bad guy.”
Thank you to Daniel Sisson, Amanda Natividad, Michael Dean, Fern Gouveia, Will Sauer, Sameer Mohan, and t.g. Shenoy. They are the heroes in this thread who pointed this normie in the right direction. (For the last 2 people mentioned — I don’t know you, but thank you all the same time.)