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Raph Koster announces Metaplace, the new do-everything MMO platform
MMO heavyweight Raph Koster left Sony back in March 2006 to start his own virtual-world company, and only now are we beginning to see just what he was so excited about. Koster and his cohorts have just announced Metaplace, a brand new virtual world venture promising an open-platform, open-ended approach to the increasingly bloated genre of massively-multiplayer gaming.As the first project to come out of Koster's recently-established Areae company, Metaplace is an ambitious exercise in building not just a virtual world, but a virtual world standard, upon which users/players can create a multitude of varied MMO communities. Although details are currently sparse, the Metaplace website promises that the platform will integrate smoothly into our current web standards, allowing for integration of Metaplace elements into websites, RSS feeders, and more. Metaplace was recently featured as one of the 40 hottest startups in the TechCrunch40 conference, and a short video of Koster demo-ing the platform can be found on BBC News. Will Metaplace change the MMO market, or is it just another company riding the user-generated bandwagon?
Playing Dirty: Searching for sex in Club Penguin
Every other week, Bonnie Ruberg contributes Playing Dirty, a column on sex and gender in video games: Sex is everywhere. That's true in real life, that's true on the internet, and that's definitely true in online games. But whether we like it or not, sex doesn't always involve the people we think it should. I'm not just talking about the Second Life-er who tells you she's a twenty-five-year-old woman and turns out to be a forty-five-year-old man. I'm talking about kids. Specifically, I'm talking about sex in online games designed for children. If you came within a fifty-feet radius of Raph Koster at GDC last month, you've probably heard his two cents on the how gaming is being taken over by companies from outside the industry who make games that don't even register on our radar. Koster did mention Korean MMOs, but what he really focused on were kids games. In particular, he pointed the wobbly finger of prediction a virtual world called Club Penguin. With 4.5 millions unique users in December, 2006 alone, Koster claims Club Penguin can rival the largest online games in the world. He seems to be right. My question is, with that many people playing, there must be sex in Club Penguin, right?
The art of High Delivery
Gamers aren't well known for being pretentious. To further complicate things, art is subjective. One man's priceless Pollock is another man's vision of what a five-year-old having a seizure produces. On that note, we present High Delivery. Now, there's no blood or guns, but play it to the end and the sentiment is very sweet -- under the right conditions you may even shed a little tear.Raph Koster has a very New Yorker-style explanation on his website about the title. It's not very often that we get to use a word like "subtle" to describe a game. Even other games given the "art" label like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are more "awe inspiring," and there is nothing subtle about the Colossi. So, play High Delivery through once. Is it art?
Killer Pac-Man shirt, from Raph Koster's Theory of Fun
Raph Koster has some merch available featuring some of the cartoons from his book, A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Our favorite: the killer Pac-Man shirt, which comes from this cartoon captioned, "People get scared of the influence games have over them -- fears that they will cause murderous rampages on the street. That's unlikely."Does that Pac-Man remind anyone of this creepy dude?[Via Wonderland]
