Wagner James Au / New World Notes
Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
Making a Metaverse That Matters
Contact me — links below!
recent posts
- Warning: LLMs Able to De-Anonymize User Accounts on Reddit, Hacker News & Other “Pseudonymous” Platforms; Report Co-Author Expands, Advises
- Want to Go On-Together? A New Virtual World for Real Life Coworking
- All the World’s Avatars (1 Billion & Counting)
- Gamers Overwhelmingly Hate Gen AI in Games, Major Industry Report Finds — Here’s Why!
- Why Do Gamers Generally Prefer Fantasy Virtual Worlds Over Sci-Fi MMOs?
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Originally published on my Patreon — join to read more content like this first! Figure above: Real identities of Reddit users exposed by their discussions of favorite movies; from “Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs” paper available at Cornell University’s arXiv Pseudonyms are crucial to virtual worlds, gamer hangouts on Reddit and Discord, and other online…
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Not a 3D Slack / Discord but something more social and chill, it has Very Positive ratings on Steam and many thousands of players in it every day… Originally published on my Patreon — subscribe to read more content like this first! On-Together: Virtual Coworking is a new virtual world and a fairly new-ish spin…
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The antipathy is so savage and widespread, promoting a game as having any gen AI in it might actually hurt sales. Originally published early 2026 on my Patreon — join for more posts like this! In the final weeks of 2025, a leading game industry research firm quietly published a crucial report on Gen AI…
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For years, a programmer kept having a recurring dream — more a nightmare, maybe — where they were lost in an endless library containing all the knowledge of the universe ever written, but where the seeker never finds the answers they are searching for. The dream was inspired, of course, by Jorge Luis Borges’ legendary…
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Above: Me in a more innocent time (by which I mean 2024) It started with my good friend and staggeringly smart colleague, designer Amber Case (a former research fellow at MIT Media Lab and Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society), raising problems with XR headsets in a recent essay, points that never occurred…
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This New World Notes blog is brought you by these 20th anniversary Patreon supporters: Tom Boellstorff of UC Irvine, co-author of the history of TV POWWW!. Timothy McGregor of The Fitting Room in SL. Missb Neva, owner and hostess of the Hypnotic Romance siim in SL. Gary Ocean of Breedables CoOp. Julian Reyes, founder of…
