This is a bonus chapter to Fieldnotes from the Metaverse — Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier. The term “Real Money Trade” has been used in the online games industry for decades. Developers quickly realized that any game with an online component will have in-game items, artefacts and characters…

In 2001, Edward Castronova looked at the economies within virtual worlds — and invented the field of virtual economics with his paper “Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier”. Setting the scene The late 1990s were a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of…

This article makes the jump from the 1990s into the early 2000s. In 2006 an interdisciplinary group of people got invited to participate in the first public long-term forecast study to map the Metaverse and created one of the most inclusive models, which is still widely used today. Setting the scene 2006 was…

We move ahead into the early 1990s, where players started testing the social boundaries of virtual worlds, how these boundaries were supposed to be different from reality — and how they ended up being the same. Setting the scene Gaming PCs in the 1990s were evolving rapidly. The first Intel Pentium CPU was…

We continue the series still 1980s, looking at the first digital massive multiplayer role-playing game with the simple, innocent name: “Multi-User Dungeon”, and how it inspired the creation of digital virtual worlds that we know today. Setting the scene During the 1980s computers were still firmly divided in expensive business machines like the…

I want to start this series in the 1980s and early 1990s, specifically with two books that coined the terms “Cyberspace” and “Metaverse”: William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Setting the scene The 1980s were a reality-check for the technology-utopia-optimism of the sixties and seventies. Computers became affordable but our homes…

Note: This page gets updated whenever new content is added to the series. “What is the Metaverse?” is an interesting question. Some groups attach the term to specific technologies, for example Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, Digital Twins or Blockchains. Others talk about specific requirements, like persistence, interoperability, or…

Do you remember a couple of years back when every big organization spent a ton of money to build an “Innovation Lab”? “Labs where teams could utilize the latest creative approaches to product and service design in fun and engaging environments!” Design Thinking! Prototyping! Agile! It didn’t turn out too…

I want to talk about a trend I see where designers and developers expect technology to be used only within their stated intentions. Every usage outside this scenario is not considered at all. This is especially bad in Social Virtual Worlds design. User-centric design has a design flaw Let’s overgeneralize user-centric design a bit: Designers create…