Metaplace

Back in March when I attended the Game Developers Conference, I was able to attend a few sessions which featured a certain game developer of  LegendMUD, Ultima Online, and Star Wars Galaxies fame, took part in. Now, I happen to actually like Raph Koster. I read his book and liked it, I played Galaxies and liked it for a while, and I enjoy reading through his blog. He’s interesting and the sessions he was involved with were also very interesting. Regardless, I am by no means a huge fan of his – which isn’t to say I dislike him or his work, but rather his name on a product isn’t really a major selling point.

I just wanted to get that out there, because what I am excited about is his new project, because it is exactly what I’ve been wanting to see the industry produce. This new project is called ‘Metaplace’ and it is certainly a bit different than what some people may have expected – although I’m personally none-to-surprised. Metaplace is not a game, it is not a virtual world, it is not an MMO, or anything like that. Rather, its a platform that allows the layman to create any of those. This makes me giddy at the very concept of the project.

Why would this excite me? Well, there’s the obvious reason that I enjoy game development and online games – what would be better than mixing the two? I’d have the ability to actually create an online environment on my own, without extensive knowledge of coding. I could also build a rather sizable game with a small team that doesn’t have years of experience behind them in game development, and still manage to (hopefully) pull out a somewhat competent world. I’m planning on doing both of those too.

Yet, there’s more than that. There’s really what it could potentially mean to game development and to the web at large.

As far as game development goes, there’s one very clear thing that I can see coming from this project: game development heading into the hands of the gaming community at large. This could be big. If you happened to play the original Neverwinter Nights, for example, which featured an easy to use toolset for creating your very own DnD adventures inside of the game, you’ll probably know that there were literally thousands of modules created for that game. Also, if you played either Oblivion or Morrowind on the PC, which also had a toolset, you’ll know that the community produced thousands of add-ons for them as well. These are not the only two games to see such modifications, but they certainly ensured easy mod development – NWN especially so.

Of course, not all of these modifications are good. But there were still plenty of great ones among the bunch, many of which were known through the community, and easily found on sites that hosted mods. The average ones still saw some distrobution as well, and the bad ones were usually well noted – but even they could draw in a few interested people.

Those games certainly did one thing though: it allowed people to make what they wanted too – well, within certain limitations presented by the game engine. It meant that there was a whole ton of extra content for people to experience.  This made thesee games fantastic.

This is partly why I am interested in Metaplace, specifically because Metaplace is aiming to take it far and beyond what either NWN and Morrowind/Oblivion did. Instead of allowing players to modify existing worlds, or create their own levels/campaigns (so to speak), Metaplace is offering people the chance to create entire games. Not just RPGs either, but just about any kind of game.

This allows for players to not just make the ‘item of their dreams’ or the ‘campaign of their dreams’, but rather the game of their dreams. This is also without being restricted by the huge cost and development hours normally needed for game creation, that makes games such a huge risk – and thus not worth taking risks. People will be able to develop game ideas that could extend beyond what we normally see in our local game stores. In fact, it is entirely possible that innovation will be a key ‘selling point’ for the games people decide to play through Metaplace. Seriously, if I had one complaint about the game industry in its current state, it really would come down to this not being the case.

It would certainly be interesting to see what sorts of creations people would come up with, but this will depend greatly on how, actually, easy it is to create a game and how many people are going to be willing to invest the time to do so – no matter how immense or small their plans and no matter how easy the process is.

Metaplace is aiming to do a lot within gaming, but that isn’t its only focus. Actually the folks over at Areae are aiming it towards the web – which makes sense, since they seem to be setting Metaplace to function very much like the web does.

As such, they don’t expect to just see this used for developing games – which is probably a huge reason why they use the term ‘virtual worlds’. A virtual world could be a lot of things. It could be a game, it could be a social space, it could be an online store front, or it could have educational purposes – who knows. Its broad, just like the possibilities of what you can do with it are (hopefully!).

The focus with the web can be further scene in that the virtual worlds can be placed on the web. Metaplace.com itself will function like a ‘YouTube’ of sorts, letting potential players find potential virtual worlds of their liking. The worlds themselves will be accessible through a browser in a flash window and can even be placed in profiles on sites such as Myspace and Facebook. Yet, they are using open standards on clients, so you’d be free to write up your own if you wanted to do so.

I’m going to be keeping my eye on this one and I’m going to see about getting some people together to tackle on a big project with it, if it does live up to what Areae is hoping the platform will be. I certainly hope so (which I’m sure you can tell), but I will remain skeptical. This is a pretty huge undertaking after all, and it is entirely possible this entire project could fall apart as easy as any other game development or web business. Which is to say… quite easily.