While Metaplace is still running under a NDA, I’ve been given some freedom to talk a bit about the upcoming online game development/virtual world/social networking technology. If you aren’t aware of what Metaplace is, then let me clarify first. Metaplace is the brainchild of famed Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies developer, Raph Koster. It seeks to provide a way for anyone to create their own virtual world. Basically, it is a simple way for people to create their own online social spaces and games. It is designed so you can create anything from a simple chat room, to an expansive MMORPG. The platform is designed to be run in a web browser and currently runs under Flash, employing 2D graphics. However, anyone is free to code up their own clients (in fact, I believe someone has a Java client in the works), even ones that could theoretically support 3D graphics.

Metaplace is currently in beta testing at this point, and while it may not be completed yet, it certainly has come a long way. I’ve been involved in testing for a number of months now and I have seen the platform evolve tremendously in just that amount of time. The User Interface has been better unified and tied together, and the Metaplace Team is still working on improving the users experience in that regard. Building worlds is a snap. Everything from finding new objects and tile-sets to pop down to better create your own world is all very simple to do. So, creating your own little online chat environment is a complete snap – and you can even make it look pretty nice too, considering some of the worlds I’ve seen.

But that’s a chat, not an actual game. If you want to develop a game, how does that go? Well, it is a bit harder than building a simple chat environment, as you can imagine, but the Metaplace team has done a lot to make the process easier. Metaplace itself uses the LUA scripting language – a popular language that is used among various areas in gaming, such as World of WarCraft interface mods. This language should be pretty simple to pick up for most people. Yet, what if you’re like me, and you aren’t really much of a coder and just don’t have the time to pick up a coding language like that? Well, people can package up their game systems and pop them onto the cross-world marketplace for other builders to use. That means that, even if you can’t code yourself, you can make use of entire game systems coded up by other residents of Metaplace.

While it certainly has a ways to go yet, given how Metaplace is going, I expect pretty great things out of it, to be entirely honest. I look forward to seeing what the developers do with the platform – and where the players take it.

Also, with this new-found freedom, I hope to give a few more updates involving Metaplace in the future. I’d like to pop up some tutorials, and also use the platform as an excellent talking point for future talks on online communities – there’s a lot of potential there, after all.

A few places around the Internet have noted that the United States Army has decided to get a bit weirder as it gets ready to start up a new recruitment scheme inside of the infamous virtual world Second Life. Now, while this might seem fairly strange, given that the army has also developed a video game for the purpose of recruitment in the past, and that Second Life does boast a fair number of inhabitants with a pretty easy system for building new locations, it actually doesn’t shock me too much at all. If anything, I’m much more surprised that they haven’t been doing this already. More so with all of those terrorist training camps around Second Life, right?

Now, I’ve talked about Metaplace before in the blog, back when it was first announced. However, some time since then has past and I’d like to take a look at Metaplace once again and where it seems to be going.

While Metaplace isn’t actually a game, exactly, but rather tools that allow people to create their own games. Now, by that, I don’t mean that these are tools that professional developers will use to create online games for people, but rather, these tools will supposedly be easy to the point that just about anyone will be able to create their own online game or virtual space.

So, talk about user generated content, eh? Just about literally everything will be user generated. That is an awful lot of power for the everyday person to have. You can already see plenty of websites out there that host hundreds independently made flash-based games, and Metaplace promises to make that process even easier. In fact, the plan is that, while it will initially release with a Flash-based client, it won’t be tied to that forever. 3D will also be possible, and users could even program a client of their own to use such capabilities.

I’ve already gone into a lot of why I am excited about the prospect of Metaplace, so I would rather like to talk about how I see it going now. That basically comes down to this: still excited, but a bit worried.

Metaplace is a hugely community-based idea. The possibility to share your own game components and your own games entirely, is huge. Due to that, Metaplace will thrive about as much as its community thrives.

Ergo, my worry.

The Metaplace community has become fairly quiet. There are still people about, still throwing around ideas, but so far it seems that Metaplace is going to have a fairly small core community so far, as opposed to a large group of various people putting ideas together and creating a huge variety of games.

Does that mean this will be the way things are at release? Nah, not at all. That might well all change. I don’t expect a lot of people to really get all that excited about something releasing that they won’t actually be playing. I also suspect much of Areae’s community goals are not so much pulling in developers, but instead, fostering that small group.

Why would that be? I have a feeling that Metaplace is something that is going to need to be spread via word of mouth. That is, this core group of developers are going to be rather likely to create a few finished games – as opposed to a huge amount of unfinished games. With those few finished games, Areae will be able to prove the concept – and more importantly, people will start playing them. If they start playing games built on the Metaplace platform, then they might well try a hand at making their own as well.

I am going to be rather willing to assume that this is the plan of attack that Areae is taking right now. It seems like a sound enough plan, as long as the community builds up a few strong games and starts not just pushing their own products, but also Metaplace as a whole.

That said, I do have my own project, Project Aether. This project has… well, we will say it has been going slow. Much like a good chunk of the Metaplace community has drifted off into quietness, so as the development of the project. As is, I am anticipating a boom once open beta is released – and at worse, I have a few back up plans!

That’s right, today held the first live chat for Metaplace , and it certainly was an interesting event at that. The event itself was actually held using the alpha version of the Metaplace Client, embedded into the Metaplace website itself. While at first it just appeared to be a normal web chat, styled after an IRC client, it became very apparent that this was not actually the case. This client could collect information from websites and display it in chat – such as weather, definitions, and stock quotes. Not only that, but it had a command that enabled the user to search YouTube for videos and then watch them embedded in the chat window. Just to top it off, during the developer chat, everything went very graphical:

While still in an alpha state, this developer chat/alpha stress test showcased a client that has plenty of potential. It should be interesting to see how Areae progresses with it.

I will grab the transcript when it goes live and throw it up here too.

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.

The latter is actually something I’d like to bring up though. While I’m still on a hiatus with Vanguard, I’ve been talked into trying out EVE Online once again – I’m previously played it for about two months before now. While I respected the game before, I didn’t quite get into it originally. Yet, ever since the Game Developers Conference when I had a chance to talk to some of the developers I’ve been considering giving it another go. A friend of mine who’s been playing eventually pushed me over and I decided to play.

I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit more this time through. I’ve also noticed a few things about the game and the community around it that I’ve found quite interesting.

So, as I have this particular interest in community management, I’ve been checking out the EVE site for the various things that I like about it. I have to say, I like a lot of it too. They’ve done some stuff that has actually impressed me quite a bit.

For one, they have a bunch of short stories on their site that explain about the game world – this isn’t something that other companies haven’t done before, but I do like that they share their fiction in that way. It helps build up a greater idea of what the EVE Universe is like, and just who exactly you are flying around on your ship, and just who the people who’re working for are.

More interesting than that, though, is their news updates. EVE News isn’t just game developments – although their is a section of news for that. Rather, they include in-game events. These events could be fictional events that are able to advance the various over-aching story-lines that are happening in the EVE Universe, as well as news on major player-related happenings. For example, a major alliance just lost a Titan-class ship – an obscenely powerful ship of which very few exist in the game and are excessively expensive to create. This made the in-game news as well.

I like that quite a bit. It draws me in, it makes me feel like I’m part of something larger, and that I can actually have an effect upon the galaxy around me if I work hard enough. It actually makes me want to play more and it draws me into the game much tighter than if it hadn’t existed.

They also have a handy database on their site which shows the equipment in the game. This has been great for looking up equipment that I can arm my ship with. It’s a pretty handy little tool – as is their character pages which let you view your current skills and how far you’ve currently advanced in the particular skill you’re training (EVE uses time-based advancement, not experience-based). These two features have been particularly nice as it makes me feel like I can play EVE without being logged in – which means I can be ‘playing’ even anywhere I have a computer with Internet access.

They even have a few novel little things that go beyond the website: E-on, the EVE quarterly Magazine, which seems to contain news  and other EVE-related information. They also just recently released EVE-TV, an internet-television show all about EVE. I actually received an issue of E-on at GDC (although I can’t find it anywhere!) but I’ve yet to check out EVE-TV. Perhaps I will later tonight. I’ve been particularly interested in these two things though, as they also bring the concept of playing the game out of just being logged in. They involve the players in a whole different way – although they do cost money to partake in.

Also, judging by the in-game experience, EVE has done some interesting things as well. The inclusion of a browser is fairly interesting and fits with the setting of the game just fine. But, it lets you view news and game updates easily. They’re also planning on integrating wiki software with the game client to create “EVElopedia”, a concept that intrigues me quite a bit.

Now, I don’t want to just sound like I’m gushing over this game. There’s very real reasons why I find this all so interesting. I think CCP, the company that runs EVE, has done a lot with their community that could be learned from. For example, their website is genuinely useful. There’s stuff there that actually helps me. Not only that, but I feel compelled to visit their website, and by doing so, it draws me into the game more. That’s a huge plus. It isn’t quite like the Armory or EQ2/Vanguard Players from Blizzard and SOE respectively, that shows my character information that I can share with people I want – which is a same, yet an understandable necessity in an open PvP environment. Yet, at the same time, I never felt compelled to really visit Vanguard Players or EQ2 players. They showed character information… but not in a real useful way that benefited me.  The only case that wasn’t true was the java chat system in EQ2 Players that let me talk to people in-game when I couldn’t log in.

I’m very intrigued by EVE’s production of a magazine and online TV show. They both cost money, but they both seem to be very interesting. It brings me in as a player, and it increases their IP further than just the game as well. It involves me, it makes me feel like I’m really part of a community that extends beyond the in-game world. It reminds me of the City of Heroes comic book that came with a subscription of the game – which I also thought had a similar effect.

Also, the inclusion of a wiki is great to see. The fact that its incorporated into the client itself is just very cool, in my opinion. Yet, one of the things I kept hearing at GDC was how game development companies need to start embracing new web technologies for their sites. They need to embrace web 2.0 and let it further them as a company. Well, this is one good example of how that can be done.

So, to CCP, I give you props for that.