The redoubtable Jon Radoff from Beamable has been doing a great series of videos called Building the Metaverse on a wide array of topics related to, well, the Metaverse. Today he’s posted up a video where the two of us riff on interoperability, governance, digital ownership, and much much more.
It’s got lots of real talk. Some key bits to whet your appetite: Continue reading »
A lot of people are talking about the “metaverse”, and as a result, a lot of folks are wondering what the heck that word even means.
Frankly, it’s a reasonable question. But as someone who has actually built, launched, and operated a metaverse before, I have answers!
I recently spoke at the Digital Economy Forum, hosted in Korea by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, and organized by the Korea Startup Forum. After the panel, we got the question “what’s the difference between Second Life and a metaverse?”
Here’s the short-form answer:
Online worlds lead to multiverses which lead to metaverses. And just about no one has actual metaverses to offer right now.
My new book Postmortems is now shipping. If you pre-ordered the Kindle version, it should be there for reading now.
You should be able to get it from pretty much any bookstore. I get a little bit extra if you order it through this link on Amazon:
It’s a hefty 700 pages. Early reviews are pretty flattering, and make me happy; I am looking forward to seeing what readers think! If you read it, please leave a review on Amazon; they matter a lot.
Also, if you are an academic who might be interested in using the book in your classes, reach out to the publisher here to request a review copy.
Here’s a sampling of press reviews, in case you aren’t sold on it yet: Continue reading »
My new book Postmortems is now available at various booksellers. The print edition ships on the 26th. Various sites may have the ebook already, some may not just yet.
This is the first volume of a projected three that gather together many of the essays and writings that I have been sharing on this blog over the last several decades. This book focuses specifically on games I have worked on, from LegendMUD up through social games, and is a book of design history, lessons learned, and anecdotes. Richard Garriott was kind enough to write a foreword for the book.
It’s not a memoir or tell-all; the focus is on game design and game history. There’s still nowhere near enough material out there in print covering things like the history and evolution of online worlds (MUDs especially), in-depth dives into decisions made in games by the people who made them, and detailed breakdowns of how they worked. So I hope that this will be useful to scholars and designers, and that players might find it a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes. Just don’t expect salacious stories and secrets.
Those of you who have been reading the blog for a while will find much in there that is familiar; if you have ever wanted the SWG postmortem series in book form, here it is in expanded form. If you have ever wished that the various articles on the UO design were gathered together, here they are, along with new chapters covering things like all the things we tried doing to curb excessive playerkilling. If you ever wondered what happened with Metaplace, this is how you find out, as there’s a new and extensive postmortem. Many blog commenters make cameos in footnotes.
The contents: Continue reading »
I spent a lovely few hours on UOForever yesterday, wandering around and seeing what UO looks like for the first time in fifteen years. Much of that time was spent doing a livestream where I told tales of UO’s development, and showed off pictures out of my design sketchbook from back then, many of them things that no one has seen publicly before.
It was a real trip to wander around Trinsic and point out art of mine that is still in the game, the rippled terrain that I still remember painstankingly making, and seeing objects that still act the way I coded them two decades ago (though of course, UOForever actually reimplemented everything themselves).
Here’s the video:
