Making A Metaverse That Matters book review

I’ve spent the last weeks reading “Making a metaverse that matters” by Wagner James Au, the author behind the blog New World Notes. Now that I’ve finished the book, I would like to tell you my opinion about it, so that you can decide if it is worth buying it or not.

The book subtitle is “From Snow Crash & Second Life to a virtual world worth fighting for”: I mention it because it exactly describes what is the theme behind the book. Wagner James has been in the metaverse space since “before it was cool”: he was already operating as a journalist inside Second Life, which can be considered the first mainstream metaverse platform. The book starts its story even before, with that “Snow Crash” where Neal Stephenson coined the term “metaverse” itself.

The first part of the book is indeed a lot about the past. There is an explanation of what was the “metaverse” inside Snow Crash and how Neal Stephenson was able to predict many characteristics of today’s social virtual spaces. Then there is a detailed story of Second Life, from its conception, going through its initial successes, coming to its failure to keep growing its user base, until what it is now, a platform with a niche of very committed users. I admit in this first part of the book, I was worried that the book was just about talking about the glorified past. While I love reading about people who were able to conceive “the metaverse” many years before the mainstream learned about that term, I also think that many years have passed by, and the situation now is totally different, so just reading about past stories would have been pretty limited for me in understanding what to practically do in the present. Furthermore, with much respect with Neal Stephenson and what he was able to forecast, he still is a novelist who wrote a book for entertainment, not someone who wrote for us a technical set of specifications on how to actually build the metaverse. So while I esteem him, I still think that his book should be a source of inspiration, more than a manual to study and follow.

Luckily the book, after this initial dive into the history of the “metaverse” goes on speaking about topics that are more relevant to present times. There is a description of the most successful social platforms like Roblox, Fortnite, and VRChat. There is a discussion about why they succeeded while Meta at this moment is having difficulties in pushing Horizon. There are insights about avateering, monetization, and social graphs. There is a chapter about the false myths of the metaverse, then a description of use cases, the risks, and so on. Many themes are talked about which are relevant to understand “how to build a virtual world worth fighting for”.

It’s understandable that the author starts from speaking about the past since he lived during the Second Life era. And it’s interesting that there is always this connection to the past throughout the whole book, because actually that past is relevant to understanding the present. This is true mainly for two reasons:

• Some of the people who were working in the field at that time have kept working in the field, producing relevant results. For instance, I discovered that the acquisition of Oculus by Facebook (now Meta) may have been kickstarted by the previous CTO of Second Life suggesting Mark Zuckerberg to try the Oculus Rift because it could have been the next big thing in tech
• Many lessons of the past are still relevant in the present: for instance, the thrive for retention of users, or the consequences of making the avatar realistic, or trolling… were topics that were already important in Second Life and are still relevant for today’s platforms. Many people who were in our space 20 years ago (or even before) often complain on social media that we are constantly reinventing the wheel, while many problems that we have today have already been faced, and sometimes solved, in the past.

So the idea of looking at the present from the point of view of the past makes sense in the end.

Wagner James has always very practical and hype-free views on his blog, and he keeps the same attitude in this book. I loved his insights on topics like avateering, interoperability, and monetization in the metaverse. Just to quote one thing that I’ve found very interesting: he is against the trend of proposing complete interoperability between metaverse platforms. During the metaverse hype, everyone was saying that the Metaverse is the evolution of the Internet and one of the key pillars of the final Metaverse would have been full interoperability between metaverse platforms, so that you would be able to buy an item in Minecraft, then enter a portal and find yourself in Roblox, with your same digital identity, and with the same item you bought in Minecraft, jus translated to Roblox. The author anyway questions what is the sense of all of that: first of all, not even on the present internet there is interoperability between platforms, since I can not use the same account, subscriptions, or even the same posts in the various social media (so Twitter and Instagram are two completely separated places). Then, it would be incredibly complex to develop such full interoperability between all the platforms of all the worlds, there would be the need for very strong standards and a lot of technical magic. And in the end, it would mostly be useless, because most of the time an item I bought on one platform would have no sense in the other ones: if I buy a very special weapon in Fortnite, why would it be useful to have it in the Barbie universe? It makes no sense for the Barbie universe to support it. So the idea that the book conveys is that there are some things that make sense to have as interoperable, like some features of the digital identity and especially the social graphs, but all the rest should be left as peculiar features of every single platform. The social graph would be very handy to carry around because our friends are friends on all the platforms, and we would like to share good moments with them everywhere.

This is not the only useful insight I got: the book also talks for instance how having super realistic avatars in Second Life led the platform people to become more materialistic, and while at the opposite, the joyful simple style of Roblox avatars helped it succeed. As I’ve said, there are many things we can learn from the history of social worlds and this book has been useful for me to know about them.

Some people asked me why such a book can be relevant for people like me who have been in the XR space for many years. Well, first of all, there are always new lessons that can be learned: the moment we think we know everything, we stop learning, and we die inside. Then most of us were not already actively in the space during the Second Life hype, so we missed the lessons learned from that time. And especially, in our lives we tend to stay in some communities, but not all of them: I’ve mostly used VRChat for work, so knowing relevant lessons also from other social spaces is still important for me.

One last aspect of the book that I’ve enjoyed is that it also talks about the stories of people. The insights about the metaverse are often mentioned through the stories of people who invented the platforms or who were part of these worlds. So the founders of Second Life like Philip Rosedale are mentioned and quoted throughout all the books. And so is Neal Stephenson. But apart from these superstars, there are also other people that started from nothing and became successful in their niches in the virtual worlds, like the creator of a digital fashion brand or a guy who made a successful world in Second Life. I was also surprised to read about an old man, approaching 90 years old, who performed his music in Second Life! The book is so much about stories of people that one of the final chapters tells us what these people do today, as if it was a book centered on their lives and we should be curious to know the end of the story.

I think the mix of all of this is why I enjoyed reading Making A Metaverse That Matters. Wagner James Au has a style of writing that I like, and the book is easy to read. Then it mixes technical thoughts, interviews, and stories of people, for a mix of humanity and technical notions that is perfectly balanced and that makes the book not too technical and not too personal. There are a few things I disagree with the author about, but it’s important that there are different opinions in this space. I’ve found it also quite inspiring, and actually, I’m already using some lessons that I’ve learned in my work of defining the technical strategy at VRROOM (our metaverse platform for concerts and live shows). So I’ve not only enjoyed the book but it’s actually been useful for my career. Of course, your mileage may vary, so I’m not expecting you to have necessarily the same level of appreciation because for instance you already know all the story of Second Life or your job is not social-VR-related, but in my case, I found it really a good book to read. I want to thank Wagner James Au for having gifted me a copy of it.

In case you want to read the book, too, you can find it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Metaverse-That-Matters-Fighting/dp/1394155816 (the link is without affiliation, so you can trust the honesty of my review). It costs around $20 for the Kindle version (probably I would have made it a few bucks cheaper), but if you have an Audible subscription, you can hear the audiobook for free. Enjoy it, and let’s build together a metaverse that matters 🙂