Wagner James Au's latest book Making a Metaverse that Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to A Virtual World Worth Fighting For releases on June 27 after the 20th anniversary of Second Life is on June 23, 2023. Au started as an embedded journalist employed by Second Life to cover the evolving trends of digital culture within their virtual world, and he's continued to be an intrepid reporter of this space on his New World Notes blog tracking the evolution of various different Metaverse platforms.

I had a chance to take an early look of Au's book, and do an in-depth interview with him this week to unpack some of his deep insights into the industry. He goes back to the source material of the Metaverse of Snow Crash, providing the following strict definition of the Metaverse that is justified by associated passages from Neal Stephenson's classic sci-fi novel that coined the term. He says, "The Metaverse is a vast, immersive virtual world simultaneously accessible by millions of people through highly customizable avatars and powerful experience creation tools integrated with the offline world through its virtual economy and external technology." By this definition there are already well over 500 million active monthly users on Metaverse platforms including Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, ZEPETO, Rec Room, VRChat, Avankin Life, IMVU, Second Life, and Horizon Worlds.

The book starts off with a retrospective look at Second Life, and some of the reasons why it never hit an inflection point to go mainstream. It also digs more into the philosophical origins of the Metaverse via Snow Crash, with a deep dive with author Neal Stephenson in the second part unpacking the Metaverse as product road map and how Stephenson's Lamina1 is attempting to fuse aspects of the cryptocurrency and blockchain with the Metaverse complete with literary citations and inspirations from Stephenson's body of sci-fi work. It digs into some of the limitations of Meta's approach with Horizon Worlds as well as some of why Au is skeptical that VR will ever take off as a mainstream consumer technology. More on those critiques here in a bit.

The second part of the book does a more in-depth deep dive into some of the leading Metaverse platforms including Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, and VRChat. Au speaks to leading world building and experiential design developers from each of these platforms, and in some cases speaks to executives when he is able to get ahold of them. A common theme throughout this book is that Au comes back to many Second Life veterans who offer their reflections on the different dynamics of each of these platforms, and he is able to usually pull out some little known, obscure, or under reported fact tying back each Metaverse development back to Second Life.

The third portion of the book is where Au is able to tie up a lot of loose ends in terms of countering different Metaverse hype, but also unpacking the promises of pragmatic Metaverse applications as well as digging into the Metaverse perils and the variety of ethical and moral dilemmas. He lays out some trends and future paths moving forward including AI, cloud rendering, and up and coming platforms including how Discord and Value's Steam platform could be some spaces to keep an eye on.

I really appreciated how much original reporting Au did for this book in gathering quotes from a broad range of Metaverse developers, industry insiders, and academics, and the tone is similar to his blog in the sense that he's either pulling quotes from his prior reporting or he was able to get the latest perspectives on the industry over the past year and a half. This is a quickly moving industry, and so his Afterword at the end is able to fill in the gaps to bring us mostly up to speed on a variety of different new develops that he was not able to cover in the main chapters.

Au is skeptical that virtual reality has the viability to become a mainstream technology,