Star Wars Thrawn Trilogy

Battlefield Earth (the book, definitely not the movie)

The Land: Founding - Aleron Kong

Steel World - B.V. Larson

Ready Player One / Ready Player Two - Ernest Cline

Twinborn Chronicles - J.S. Morin

The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss

The founding text is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992). It's short, funny, entertaining, and full of new ideas in a freewheeling early 90's spirit. The list in the comment you are replying to is not bad, since most interactions you will ever have with someone about a metaverse will hinge on shared descriptions you have with them of a metaverse, so whichever books you hear about the most are by definition the most useful ones to read.

Almost everyone has read or heard of Ready Player One (2011), which contains extensive descriptions of its own corporate dystopic metaverse, albeit one that I find insufferably cliche and unoriginal.

Metaverse descriptions are descended from the first cyberspace descriptions in Neuromancer (1984) which is a beautiful book worth a read.

The title and content of the article, in which Hanke espouses the virtues if Niantic Labs (an AR company), were cognitively dissonant for me.

> The concept reached one of its most complete expressions in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, where virtually everyone has abandoned reality for an elaborate VR massively multiplayer video game. A lot of people these days seem very interested in bringing this near-future vision of a virtual world to life, including some of the biggest names in technology and gaming. But in fact these novels served as warnings about a dystopian future of technology gone wrong. As a society, we can hope that the world doesn’t devolve into the kind of place that drives sci-fi heroes to escape into a virtual one

I'm trying to understand what Hanke is really saying. Is he saying that VR sucks, and AR, specifically AR that encourages people to interact with the real physical world, is where its at? I assume by "biggest names in technology and gaming" he is referring to Niantic's competitors? Specifically what about those bets does he disagree with?

I really want to gripe about "Ernest Cline's" Ready Player One. There was an element of dystopia to it, yes, but it was only the movie adaptation that came away with the takeaway that the virtual world was bad. In the movie they decide to add in the protagonist making the executive decision to shut down the virtual world on a couple weekdays or something. That pissed me off. That world was people's livelihoods. This kid lived in a poor junky slum and had a great social life and presumably some level of income in the virtual world when the movie starts. At the end of the movie he is super rich and has a hot girlfriend (who's character arc was largely that she perceived herself as ugly?). There's really not that much in the film or the book that says that forcing people to go unplugged made any sense.

The actual book was about a virtual world gone extremely right. The dystopian part was the corporations that sought private control of the platform.

Bonus complaint: The evil corporation in the film literally enslaves people and brazenly murders others in public, yet it's CEO is brought down by some unremarkable local cops? What?

Of course, I think I can help.

What is trying to be communicated here is psychographic content will be delivered via standard device substrates existing in well aligned usage patterns that will no doubt delight the end-user with value. Metaverse here simply means they will deliver an experience that is parallel to user expectation yet orthogonal to the digital representation of the physical model of the prevailing social zeitgeist.

Or maybe someone just read Ready Player One recently, and is just thinking: We're going to build the Oasis but nobody could possibility understand what that is, I'll have to break it down into easy-to-misunderstand corpobabble.