Fieldnotes from the Metaverse | Interview

I was recently interviewed by Dirk Songuer for his book: Fieldnotes from the Metaverse which “documents the history, perspectives, and narratives of the metaverse” and the interview is now online.

We had a great conversation about identity in techno-social systems and the metaverse as medium. Naturally, we also discussed in detail the core thesis of my own book: that Dungeons & Dragons is the most important Social Technology of the 20th Century.

How D&D allowed players, for the first time, to step into the simulation (or the metaphor) of another world, and how in turn this shift influenced the creation of the Internet, virtual worlds, and our understanding of the Metaverse.

It was a great chat that covers a lot of my thinking and position on various topics that Dirk was interested in exploring for his own book. It was a great chat that covers a lot of my thinking and position on various topics that Dirk was interested in exploring for his own book. It’s also a bit of an honour to be included in the interview list, alongside Raph Koster, Richard Bartle, Julian Dibble, Dan Hunter, and Edward Castronova – some real legends!

You can read the full interview here.

I’ve included a few quotes below:

Dirk Songuer: You also mentioned Dungeons & Dragons, and how it shaped the way we think about identity within these worlds. What do you mean by that?

Jay Springett: The innovation of Dungeons & Dragons as a social technology is that, for the first time, we were able to come down from the bird’s eye view of war gaming, chess, or other types of board games, and step into the simulation (or the metaphor) in the first-person. I often think about the amount of cultural vertigo that this must have caused in the 1970s in people discovering the game for the first time.

As Emanuel Derman says: “All models are metaphors” and people stepped into the metaphor or model, as in world model, or simulation – I’m using those terms somewhat interchangeably.

And these games people were all over at MIT at the time, meeting at the MIT Strategic Games Society. People like Mark Swanson, who then designed several D&D campaigns. Or Tim Anderson, a famous computer scientist that co-created Zork. These were also the first people that looked at things like the SQL database whitepaper. They’re thinking about multidimensional systems, keys, identities, and identity as a cluster of ordinals. And so, in 1976 we got Colossal Cave Adventure by Will Crowther, and then by 1978 we got MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) by Trubshaw and Bartle.

I think that’s the major insight about Dungeons & Dragons’ influence. You step into a metaphor, which immediately has these implications for how you understand the computer system

Microsoft built a global real time voice network in 2005 but there were absolutely zero governance mechanisms whatsoever. And as my friend Ben says, the experience of his first 10 years on Xbox Live was “character building”.