Here are 18 books that The Metaverse fans have personally recommended if you like
The Metaverse.
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From early on, I found myself captivated by the concept of a dystopic future for humanity. Years later, a 20+ year police career cemented the notion that people are not inherently good and that if a dystopic future is at all possible–we as a species will make it a reality. My love of science fiction, especially all forms of dystopia, combined with a hard-earned street-level grit and a love of action. Whether writing solo or with my amazing co-author, Dr. Gareth Worthington, I often inject these elements into my stories. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I did!
I’m an action guy. It drives me. So when you have a very well-developed sci-fi dystopia that asks tough questions about consumerism, corporate power, and our growing addiction to tech, and it’s loaded with action, I’m in.
This is that book, and while the actual writing is not always to my specific taste, the overall presentation is masterful. And did I mention action-packed? Looking back, Stephenson’s depiction of our addiction to technology is basically prophetic. Put this one on your list.
The “brilliantly realized” (The New York Times Book Review) breakthrough novel from visionary author Neal Stephenson, a modern classic that predicted the metaverse and inspired generations of Silicon Valley innovators
Hiro lives in a Los Angeles where franchises line the freeway as far as the eye can see. The only relief from the sea of logos is within the autonomous city-states, where law-abiding citizens don’t dare leave their mansions.
Hiro delivers pizza to the mansions for a living, defending his pies from marauders when necessary with a matched set of samurai swords. His home is a shared 20 X 30…
Ever since childhood, I’ve been dazzled by the idea of virtual worlds described by pixels, first in ancient computer games, and then in novels that gave the rudimentary graphics of decades past a vivid new life—from the hallucinatory realities in Philip K. Dick’s novels to William Gibson’s Neuromancer to most of all, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. As a young writer, I stepped sideways into a dream assignment: Helping make the Metaverse real. After writing about it for two decades, however, I’m still learning about it now.
Julian wrote “A Rape in Cyberspace,” a widely-discussed Village Voice article about transgression in LambdaMOO, a very early virtual world (known as a MUD, for multi-user dimension) depicted completely in text.
Expanding this story into a deeper exploration of its fascinating user community, My Tiny Life was incredibly influential to me as a very young writer—convincing me that online games and virtual worlds offered endless stories and insights into the human condition.
His book remains crucial to understanding virtual worlds. Indeed, as I write in my own book, a senior developer at Meta desperately tried to get colleagues to read it, so they didn’t repeat past mistakes. Sad to say they didn’t, and so they did.
This is the true story of a journey into LambdaMOO, a virtual Eden, where race, gender and identity were infinitely malleable and whose visitors thought they had escaped from all usual cultural limits. Until a brutal rape and ideological warfare between high and low castes brought the virtual and real worlds into seizmic collision. "LambdaMOO is a new kind of society, where thousands of people voluntarily come together from all over the world. What these people say or do may not always be to your liking; as when visiting any international city, it is wise to be careful who you…
Ever since childhood, I’ve been dazzled by the idea of virtual worlds described by pixels, first in ancient computer games, and then in novels that gave the rudimentary graphics of decades past a vivid new life—from the hallucinatory realities in Philip K. Dick’s novels to William Gibson’s Neuromancer to most of all, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. As a young writer, I stepped sideways into a dream assignment: Helping make the Metaverse real. After writing about it for two decades, however, I’m still learning about it now.
A legendary online game designer who helped lead development on incredibly influential MMOs including Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, Raph also happens to be a keen and witty writer, willing to dive deeply on what went right (and often hilariously wrong) on his many projects over a storied career.
Postmortems is a front-row seat to the practice, and the eternal paradox of trying to create an otherworldly realm while also dealing with fixities of human nature. Or as he might put it, can you make an online world set in the Star Wars universe when every player wants to be a Jedi?
Few game designers have shared as many lessons learned as Raph Koster. In a quarter-century of writings and talks, he has offered up game design lessons, online community theories, and candid self-evaluation.
This first volume of a three-book set of selected essays collects previously written postmortems and many brand new pieces. They are accompanied by historical material such as posts written for players, chat logs, speeches, design sketches, and more. The result is an inspiring historical look back at the development of virtual worlds.
These are the stories behind Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, the story of the early…
Ever since childhood, I’ve been dazzled by the idea of virtual worlds described by pixels, first in ancient computer games, and then in novels that gave the rudimentary graphics of decades past a vivid new life—from the hallucinatory realities in Philip K. Dick’s novels to William Gibson’s Neuromancer to most of all, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. As a young writer, I stepped sideways into a dream assignment: Helping make the Metaverse real. After writing about it for two decades, however, I’m still learning about it now.
From a certain angle, metaverse platforms are the quirkiest example of the social media revolution, where grassroots creators express themselves online to gain fans, influence, and (on the very high end) a full-time income.
Deeply and thoughtfully reported by someone who started her own journalist career in social media, Taylor’s book is a must-read on the rise of the social media revolution, from the early 2000s era of blogging (when I got my own start) to the video sharing powerhouse of TikTok—and evolving to a broader ecosystem forecast to be half a trillion dollars in value by 2027.
'A terrific history of the online creator economy.' The New York Times
'This book is about a revolution. It has radically upended how we've understood and interacted with our world. It has demolished traditional barriers and empowered millions who were previously marginalized. It has created vast new sectors of our economy, while devastating legacy institutions. It is often dismissed by traditionalists as a vacant fad, when in fact it is the greatest and most disruptive change in modern capitalism.'
Acclaimed Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz presents a groundbreaking social history of the internet-revealing how online influence and the creators who…
I’m a New Zealand philosopher who’s written a lot about the human enhancement debate. Philosophers are well known for their willingness to defend unpopular conclusions against all critics. Sometimes they engage in what I call “philosophical shit-stirring". You may think that’s a profanity but it’s actually a technical term. I’ve advocated some deliberately unpopular shit-stirring conclusions in the past. One of these is liberal eugenics - the idea that you can turn an evil like eugenics into something good by prefacing it with the feel-good term “liberal”. These dialogues are the beginning of a philosophical stock-take on what we should or might become.
What can you do if you’re gloomy about the state of the world? Rushkoff’s is a book in which the rich have largely given up on the all-in-it-together ideology of earlier times.
If the system is crumbing, can you get rich enough to escape before its final collapse? Reading Rushkoff’s book I wondered if the replacement of earlier times’ get-rich-quick schemes by today’s get-super-rich-super-quick offers explained how so many people were gulled by the fraudulent offers of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto hedge fund.
Suppose you do manage to quit these schemes with sufficient money before they crash. Where can you flee? New Zealand, Mars…? During the Pandemic we in New Zealand heard much about people who wanted to shelter in Jacinda Ardern’s Aotearoa. If rich escape fantasists Google “New Zealand” and “climate change” they might want to hold out for Mars.
Five mysterious billionaires summoned Douglas Rushkoff to a desert resort for a private talk. The subject? How to survive the "Event": the societal collapse they know is coming. Rushkoff argues that these men were under the influence of The Mindset, a Silicon Valley-style certainty that they and their cohort can escape a disaster of their own making-as long as they have enough money and the right technology.
Rushkoff traces the origins of The Mindset in science and technology through its current expression in missions to Mars, island bunkers, AI futurism, and the metaverse. Through fascinating characters-master programmers who want to…
I’m the Science Director of the Science Museum Group, based at the Science Museum in London, and visiting professor at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, and Department of Chemistry, University College London. Every time I write a book I swear that it will be my last and yet I'm now working on my ninth, after earlier forays into the physics of Christmas and the love life of Albert Einstein. Working with Peter Coveney of UCL, we're exploring ideas about computation and complexity we tackled in our two earlier books, along with the revolutionary implications of creating digital twins of people from the colossal amount of patient data now flowing from labs worldwide.
‘They trust me….dumb f*cks.’ This telling exchange from the Harvard days of Facebook co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg appears in An Ugly Truth, which shines a harsh light on the tech behemoth that, ultimately, is built on the data of billions of people. As Meta, Zuckerberg’s new business incarnation, wafts into the virtual worlds of the metaverse, the story of Facebook is far from over, which makes this engaging book a tad unsatisfying. Nonetheless, it is a vivid example of how with Big Data comes Big Responsibility.
'[A] careful, comprehensive interrogation of every major Facebook scandal. An Ugly Truth provides the kind of satisfaction you might get if you hired a private investigator to track a cheating spouse: it confirms your worst suspicions and then gives you all the dates and details you need to cut through the company's spin' New York Times __________________________________________ Award-winning New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang unveil the tech story of our times in this riveting, behind-the-scenes expose that offers the definitive account of Facebook's fall from grace. Once one of Silicon Valley's…
We’ve had the privilege to be part of a profession that has developed beyond all recognition. Both of us worked in senior public relations roles and know how difficult leadership can be in this context. A desire to combine what we’d learned with the best research resulted in us becoming professors in a university business school. Our aim is to provide a bridge between practice and academia, an ambition that has led us to work with inspiring practitioners and researchers around the world. We’ve had a great time and as you’ll see from our ‘book picks’ we draw on many perspectives to inform our work as authors, educators, and researchers.
Here we are in the world of the metaverse. So many public relations books are about what the practice looks like now. This one is different. It’s inviting us to look at what the world will look like when just about everything is infused with AI and total sensory immersion is commonplace. It invites us to look at how public relations can harness these technologies and the power they will give us to develop incredible knowledge about people, build deep relationships and emotional connections. If so inclined, we could manipulate people without them even knowing it. For me this was a wake-up call to the profession. We can’t just be seduced by the shiny tools of technology, but need to step back and reflect on their ethical implications.
This concise text provides an accessible introduction to artificial intelligence and intelligent user interfaces (IUIs) and how they are at the heart of a communication revolution for strategic communications and public relations.
IUIs are where users and technology meet - via computers, phones, robots, public displays, etc. They use AI and machine learning methods to control how those systems interact, exchange data, learn from, and develop relations with users. The authors explore research and developments that are already changing human/machine engagement in a wide range of areas from consumer goods, healthcare, and entertainment to community relations, crisis management, and activism.…
All my books (I hope!) sweep the reader into another world – it’s one of my favourite themes in the books I love to read, as well as write. When I was about seven, I first read some of the books which would shape my life, including Elidor by Alan Garner and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine l’Engle, which brought me right out of my own life and into worlds as varied as the frightening interstellar realm of Camazotz and the battlefields of Elidor. I’ve been trying to capture that sense of ‘being swept away’ in my own work ever since.
All of Vashti Hardy’s books are brilliant, but I recommend Crowfall because Hardy creates an incredibly immersive world – the island of Ironhold – and characters including a mechanical sea monster, a pet robot, and a very brave boy named Orin. When Orin discovers his island is under threat, and ends up being put to sea in a rickety boat, how can he save his family and home? An unforgettable adventure.
A rip-roaring, island-hopping adventure - and unforgettable ecological fable - from the award-winning author of Wildspark and Brightstorm. 'Hardy has drunk from the same cup as Philip Reeve and Philip Pullman.' - LITERARY REVIEW
Ironhold is an orderly place where "industry brings prosperity", and where nature is pushed aside for progress. But when Orin Crowfall, a lowly servant boy, learns that the island itself is in grave danger, that knowledge makes him a target of powerful forces. He narrowly escapes on a small boat, but then faces a fight for survival with his robot friend, Cody, in the stormy ocean,…
I’m one of those odd people who always needs to know why. Why do computers work, why do societies break down? Why do humans kill? Why are cat videos so irresistible? All of those questions explore what it means to be human, but science fiction takes those questions to the extreme, pitting people against the most extreme environments and situations in order to see how they’ll react. To me, that never grows old, and the books I love the most are the ones that do it the best. In my humble opinion, of course.
The world of Otherland is Earth, and the people are human, but woven into that familiar landscape is a virtual world that hasn’t quite happened yet. Imagine a virtual, digital world in which your avatar can ‘feel’. Why would you ever want to leave?
I first read Otherland soon after I started playing MMORPGs [Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games]. MMORPGs provide a ‘persistent’ world in which your character can fight, craft, build, or just socialize with other players. As such, it can become very immersive, and that’s just through the power of the imagination and some pixels on a screen. Now, imagine how immersive a virtual world would be. And how dangerous.
Otherland started me thinking about technology and how humans relate to new innovations. It also inspired some of my own writing.
Otherland is a universe ruled by Earth's wealthiest and most ruthless power-brokers, The Grail Brotherhood. Surrounded by secrecy, incredible amounts of money have been lavished on it and two generations have laboured to build it. Now it is claiming Earth's most valuable resource - its children.
LitRPG is special. It really is. LitRPG provides authors with some of the most powerful tools in storytelling. Computer-simulated worlds make magic fully believable. They enable giant mysteries, actual monsters, forbidden treasures, and incredibly diverse adversaries. LitRPG can be a love story or a tale of revenge. It can bring hope, despair, or just desserts. It’s a perfect vehicle for modern fantasy—a setting where the apocalypse can be at hand, where humans can fight gods, and where the world itself might be sentient. My love for LitRPG drove me to write an epic containing a series of huge, underlying mysteries that would reveal themselves over the course of the story.
A Russian novel with a top-notch translation, Alterworld is a controversial series, but one that is etched into LitRPG history and is legitimately worth reading.
The story’s terminally ill protagonist cheats death by uploading his consciousness to a game world, trapping himself in-game, and unlocking a whole slew of issues to overcome. Be forewarned: the series is mired in controversy for several reasons, not least of which being the author’s mercurial political stance. Initially hyper-critical of government, the author becomes famous and suddenly changes his tune. If you binge read the series, this jump to pro-national propaganda will stick out like a sore thumb, but it’s a bit like a trainwreck that’s difficult to look away from. It’s odd and serves to make the series that much more interesting.
A page-turning LitRPG debut in the tradition of Nam Heesung, Legendary Moonlight Sculptor, and Ernest Cline, Ready Player One. Bestseller #1 for years 2013, 2014 and 2015. Bestseller #1 at Audible in 2016. Translated to Korean, German, Polish and Czech languages. A new pandemic - the perma effect - has taken over Earth of the near future. Whenever you play your favorite online game, beware: your mind might merge with the virtual world and dump its comatose host. Woe be to those stuck forever in Tetris! And still they're the lucky ones compared to those burning alive eternally within the…
