New World Notes

Join Me for GamesBeat's Online Metaverse Forum This Wednesday -- Free Registration Still Open!

Register for free here to attend my virtual talk at GamesBeat 2023 this Wednesday (May 24) at 1:00 PM PT, where I'll be part of The Metaverse Forum panel:

As the concept of gaming, immersive worlds, and the metaverse continue to evolve, it's becoming increasingly clear that there are a number of significant challenges that need to be addressed if this vision is to become a reality. In this panel, experts from across the industry will come together to discuss these challenges and explore potential solutions.

Attend My GamesBeat Online Talk for Free Next Week -- And Get My Discount Code to Attend GamesBeat In Los Angeles!

Next week I'm speaking about Making a Metaverse That Matters (and related topics) for the first time, at the GamesBeat conferences' virtual event -- go here to register for a free pass. 

And if you can be in the Los Angeles area next week, you can attend GamesBeat's in-person conference on March 22-23 at the Marina del Rey Marriott, with a special discount from the GameBeat folks -- here's how:

Sneak Book Cover Preview for Making a Metaverse That Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to A Virtual World Worth Fighting For

Excited to tease my book cover for "Making a Metaverse That Matters" from Wiley, out next month! Here's how to pre-order:

• On Amazon here
• Or on Barnes & Noble here
• Or on Bookshop.org benefiting indie bookstores here

This isn't the full book cover by the way, because it also has some very flattering blurbs from various tech luminaries. My favorite line: "I only wish Mark Zuckerberg could have read it before changing the name of his company." More soon!

Making a Metaverse That Matters: Pre-Order Links & Info for My Book Here!

Excited to start promoting my book, coming out this June on Second Life's 20th anniversary!

Please pre-order my book on Amazon here

Or on Barnes & Noble here

Or on Bookshop.org benefiting indie bookstores here

I'll try to keep the plugging down to a dull roar for the sanity of regular New World Notes readers. Pre-orders are super important to helping encourage getting the book in stores, so I'd be grateful if you consider putting an order in.

Some logistical background and answers to fairly frequent questions:

Yes, an e-book / Kindle version will be available starting in June.

Yes, it will be available for international Amazon customers, also starting in June.

If you're currently in the media, yes, I can send you a review copy now. Hit me up on Twitter or on LinkedIn.

Yes, there's a discount for bulk orders and I'm fairly available to do speaking/signing appearances over the next few months, especially in the greater LA area.

Some book highlights include:

Watch: I'm on Yahoo Finance Talking About Defining the Metaverse & Meta's Failed Assumptions About It

Yahoo Finance has a new story, "Metaverse: ‘Assuming you need a VR headset is just repeating Meta’s assumptions,’ author says" that I'm somewhat biased about liking, because well, I'm the author. It's taken from a panel from a few hours ago (watch a clip above), where we get into the definition of the Metaverse, its use cases, and related topics.

"The last 2 years of Metaverse hype has been driven by people who didn't really read Snow Crash," I argue. "But the real metaverse developers have been using Snow Crash as a direct reference for the last 30 years."

In preparation for this segment, the Yahoo producers sent me some questions beforehand, some of which we covered but much that we didn't:

Here's Why Metaverse Hype Shrinks -- While Actual Metaverse Usage Grows

Above: From my January compilation of 800+ metaverse job openings

Mitch Wagner has a good article on Fierce Electronics that helps separate metaverse hype from metaverse reality, and naturally I have much to say on that topic:

So the metaverse is dead, right? Wrong. The hype bubble has collapsed. But the metaverse is growing.

“Metaverse platforms are growing slowly but steadily, and hiring commensurately,” says Wagner James Au...  Metaverse platforms grew by 15 million users year-over-year in the first quarter of 2023, to 520 million monthly active users (MAUs), according to a report from the analyst firm Metaversed. That includes 149 platforms either live or in development, mostly browser- based but with some using virtual reality VR goggles.

And that’s just the prominent platforms with strong usage in the US and Europe, Au notes. It doesn’t include mobile-based Garena Free Fire, mostly played in Southeast Asia and South America, and enjoyed by about 10% of the population of the whole planet—700 million quarterly active users.

520 million MAU is a conservative estimate, by the way, even without including Free Fire and other non-localized platforms. For my upcoming book, I count well over 550 million MAU.

Ironically enough, what we're seeing now is a mirror image of what occurred in 2008-2010, after a couple years of media hype promoting Second Life as the next big Internet platform:

My New Metaverse Book Has a Cover & New Title -- Please Pre-Order!

Excited to reveal the cover of my upcoming book cover and its new title: Making a Metaverse That Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to A Virtual World Worth Fighting For. Set to publish next June -- Second Life's 20th anniversary -- I hope you consider pre-ordering now. (Lovely stocking stuffer for the holidays?)

• Pre-order on Amazon here.
• Pre-order on Barnes & Noble here.

The original title, Why the Metaverse Matters, has been tweaked to better fit the times. It already matters to the half billion+ people heavily active in multiple metaverse platforms. The goal now, in my view, is to better explain the vision's origin, how it's been realized in Second Life and other pioneering platforms -- and how it can be cultivated as a beneficial place for one billion+ people more. After writing about that topic for 19 years, I have some opinions there.

Monday Memory: When IBM's Metaverse Campus Was Flooded With a Labor Union Protesters Including a Large Angry Banana

I recently chatted with Samantha Cole of Vice for her article "The Corporate Metaverse Can’t Compete" and am kicking myself for forgetting to mention the wackiest example of emergent social behavior in a corporate-sponsored metaverse experience -- that time IBM's official campus in Second Life was flooded with labor protesters from IBM's Italian branch, including a sign-waving banana:

Most of the activity seemed to be concentrated on the IBM Italia region on the corporate campus-- unsurprising, since the protest is over a paycut impacting Italian  workers of the company.  In any case, they continued streaming in, and the leaders kept count of unique visitors.  At the end, the Uni Global Second Life spokesman told me they'd counted 1850 in all. 

What IBM management thinks of all this is still unclear; I talked to several staffers on campus during the strike, and they declined comment. A senior IBM staffer watched the protest from a distance, but when I asked to take a screenshot, he promptly vanished into the metaverse aether.

IBM's Second Life presence wasn't just a marketing/PR stunt; thousands of employees used it for remote meetings every week; IBM staff were also behind a ultimate unsuccessful attempt to make Second Life interoperable with OpenSim. Instead of engaging with the avatar protesters, which would probably we the wiser path, I later found out from an IBM staffer that they were under strict orders not to engage with them at all.

In any case, the takeaway for companies now: If you do plan to have a metaverse platform presence, prepare for this and even more chaotic user-driven events to happen there.

More from the Sam Cole article:

The Atlantic Asks Me How Much Taylor Swift is Like the Metaverse -- Spoiler: More Than You Might Think!

Above: SL Cosplay Taylor Tribute by Kylie Quinn

"Weirdly, Taylor Swift Is Extremely Close to Creating a True Metaverse" is a totally random interview with Caroline Mimbs Nyce of The Atlantic I just did, and it starts with a left field premise that winds up with some fairly interesting ways of thinking about the topic. Some favorite excerpts:

Nyce: How important is VR in this? Is that “and”—as in “VR and other devices”—really operative there?

Au: No, no, no. That’s another thing that drives me crazy: the assumption that it has to be in VR. In the book, Stephenson even mentions that it’s mostly just the wealthy who use VR headsets, and regular folks just use a regular computer.

Metaverse platforms exist. The biggest one is Roblox, followed by Fortnite. To be a true Metaverse with a capital M, you would need, like, 15 million people or more in the same virtual world at the same time. And we’re not there yet. We’re close.

This is something that's not discussed much, but think it's worth keeping in mind: In Neal Stephenson's original vision of the Metaverse, the Metaverse has an average concurrency twice the population of New York -- i.e. about 15 million people. We're close to that now. (Stephenson himself was surprised when I pointed that out.)

Then I get to compare Taylor Swift's progress on the Metaverse against what Mark Zuckerberg is doing:

Listen: I Talk About Metaverse Art, AM Radio & Cao Fei for ArtNet's Podcast

What Is the Metaverse? And Why Should the Art World Care? is a new-ish episode from The Art Angle, the podcast from acclaimed art world news site ArtNet. I had a great time (despite an allergy flare-up) talking with host Tim Schneider, who interviews me alongside art curator Tina Rivers Ryan and artist Sara Ludy, whose SL-based art I briefly covered here.

Here's some highlights (though of course the whole thing is a good listen):

• 4:25: History of the Metaverse starting with Habitat in the 80s, ActiveWorlds in the 90s; flowing into its origins in Snow Crash, and my working definition based directly on the novel. From that I talk about Snow Crash's early influence on Second Life, to the founding of Second Life and my writing in it, and the first metaverse hype wave in 2006-2008, when major universities and companies put stakes in the virtual world.
• 13:45: I talk about the art world of Second Life, from the Flickr photographer community that Cajsa covers so well, to acclaimed artists Cao Fei (aka China Tracy) and AM Radio (aka Jeffrey Berg)
• 24:00: My take on blockchain-based metaverse platforms, and the categorical mistake I believe they're making.
• 32:20: The valuable social potential of the Metaverse, versus social media. Fellow guest Tina Rivers Ryan points out some serious potential downsides which I also happen to agree with. I've written frequently, for example, about avatar-based racism that is also problematic in the virtual world.
• 40:15: Second Life's influence on current metaverse platforms, especially VRChat.

Cao Fei's first SL art project below, the machinima I.Mirror, along with links for more reading, and highlights from AM Radio's career: