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AGDC08: Devs on why MMOs have a web-based future
A write-up at Gamasutra of an AGDC panel featuring MMO developers who have begun working on web-based projects gives us an opportunity to explore the new (some would say it's actually the old) frontier of massively multiplayer gaming.There are many MMOs that are experienced via a web interface (such as Sherwood), but traditional gamers have largely shunned the trend. Why, then, did some of the most hardcore MMO developers (including Dan Ogles, Raph Koster, and Scott Hartsman) abandon the traditional MMO in favor of this new frontier? Some of their work, like Ogles' Loudcrowd, is barely recognizable to traditional gamers.They offered some answers on the panel. For example, Koster (originally of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies fame, now working on the creative platform MetaPlace) said that game devs have more to learn from web devs than vice versa. Ogles talked about using Adobe Flash so anyone can embed elements of the game anywhere on the web they like. It's worth a read if you're able to work through some pretty technical development speech.
Picking apart the MetaPlace Bill of Rights
MetaPlace is not an MMOG. It's a platform for creating virtual spaces that can be used for anything the creators can imagine. As such, the traditional MMO EULA is completely inadequate. Raph Koster -- the head honcho on the MetaPlace project -- made that clear in a panel at AGDC08. So, the folks working on MetaPlace had to come up with a whole new set of rules -- rules that allow users ownership of their virtual property, for example. There's a veritable landmine of problems awaiting this endeavor, of course. That's not to say it's impossible. It's just going to be extremely challenging.Koster published a first draft of the Terms of Service for MetaPlace on his blog the other day. It's based based on the Declaration of the Rights of Avatars that he conceived back in 2000. Readers of the MetaPlace ToS are likely to come away with two impressions. The first: that it's really cool and admirable and that in a general sense, Koster and friends are on the right track. Two is that the MetaPlace team seems to be underestimating just how epic a quest it's committed itself to.
Raph Koster on the Metaplace idea
After a recent question from a Metaplace forum member last month, Raph Koster decided to sit down and explain to us just where exactly the idea for Metaplace was born and how it has evolved into what it is today. He begins by explaining his MUD roots and how much that influenced him in the multiplayer online space. He explains that he'd had ideas for web-based sandbox worlds ever since then and had frequently toyed with the idea to create his vision, but finances and other limitations restricted that. Now that he has the resources, this vision he's had for so long can finally be put into action with a team of professionals, instead of just him working on it in his spare bedroom. It's an inspiring little story and certainly worth a read if you're interested in Raph's work or the potential future of MMOs in general.
2008 Worlds in Motion Summit schedule announced
The 2008 Worlds in Motion Summit schedule has been announced, along with a synopsis of this year's speeches and panels. The conference on virtual worlds and social gaming will be held on September 16th and 17th, during the Austin Game Developers Conference.Worlds in Motion bills the 2008 Summit as a conference geared toward those who wish to better understand the business opportunities offered in the expanding social game networking space, and who plan to leverage their content and brands into interactive online worlds. Early bird registration ends July 31st; details can be found at the Austin GDC homepage. Read on after the jump for highlights of the upcoming 2008 Worlds in Motion Summit.
MetaPlace closes in on first beta stage
Ever want to tighten up the graphics in your own game or interactive environments without going to a video game design college? Okay bad joke, but that only a small part of the plan with Areae's MetaPlace. The project envisioned by Raph Koster will give users a dynamic platform and the accessibility to create embeddable shared virtual spaces, interactive games, and or a mish-mashing combination. News has been light but there are some new updates on the latest MetaPlace blog. Tami "Cuppycake" Baribeau shares some development accomplishments that took place over the past year and states MetaPlace is nearing the first closed beta stage! What's genius is the planned badge and achievement system intended to encourage user participation. The more users share creations, explore, customize, invite, and participate in numerous other activities they'll unlock badges. No, they won't be stored away in a virtual closed account space all sad and lonely. Instead your friends can check them out and probably earn a badge in the process. Who knows what will end up unlocking a badge, but we love collecting things. All thanks to optional and fun achievement systems.
The top 20 most influential people in the MMO industry
If you've ever searched the web for a comprehensive list of the biggest and the best in the MMO industry, Beckett Massive Online Gamer magazine has done it for you in a recent article entitled "Top 20 Influential People in Massively Multiplayer Video Games of 2007". The top half of this list should reveal no surprises for you, including such industry celebs as John Smedley, Scott Hartsman, Raph Koster and number one on the list: Rob Pardo. But the bottom half of the list may contain a few names you don't yet recognize. Interestingly enough, NCsoft makes an appearance four times on this list with James Phinney of ArenaNet, Richard Garriott and Starr Long of Destination Games and Jess LeBow of Carbine Studios.This list highlights the most talented people in the industry and how they've influenced the future of MMOs, as determined by Beckett. You can find more details on each of their stories in the printed issue itself (Issue #13 for July-August) which hit newsstands on May 28th.
Metaplace designers seek users' advice for badge system
The developers of Metaplace are pinging the public in search of feedback and good ideas with regards to the platform's planned "badge" system. The system resembles achievements on XBox Live; users and creators of virtual worlds may accomplish certain objectives such as becoming the first Metaplace world to reach 100 simultaneous users, and a unique badge graphic representing the achievement may then be shown to other players and builders in the community.Areae is dealing with some difficult design decisions. For example: should badges have point values, so whomever has the most points is the most awesome of them all? Should users be able to give badges to one another? How should badges be displayed?Rather than tackle these questions alone, Areae is offering to everyone the chance to fill out a survey. It's not just multiple choice; participants can explain the reasoning behind their choices. If you've got two cents to share, by all means, go share them!
Metaplace stress-test and community spotlight
Should social chat spaces ever be stressful? The developers of Metaplace want to find out. Next Wednesday, April 30, at 5PM US Pacific Time, Areae will stress test their social chat space. They hope to get feedback on loading times, performance, and avatar creation.Once you have made your avatar, that newly-minted persona should follow you into the social world. They'll have forums set up to discuss the test afterward. Just surf to the Metaplace home page next week to take part.TreasureMaze is a Metaplace-based game so innovative that Areae offered the developer a job. Developer "Arcturus" (not his or her real name), a musician and programmer, had in mind a multi-player RPG in the Legend of Zelda mode.It took "Arcturus" only a couple of hours to put together the basics of the game, which says a lot about the sort of toolkit Metaplace provides game developers. The balance of time since then was spent scripting encounters, writing dialog for NPCs and adding extra scenery. "Arcturus" used Metaplace's art import tools to easily make use of Danc's Planet Cute game prototyping tiles. Making it simple to bring the work of developers and artists together may turn out to be Metaplace's greatest strength.
Dragonlings invade Metaplace!
Cross a government Systems-Analyst with Areae's Metaplace, and you might get dragons. At least get if you're Metaplace alpha tester "chooseareality". Areae's latest community spotlight shines upon "chooseareality" and her new game, Dragonlings. She used the Metaplace game-creation toolkit to make an adventure game where you, as a newly-hatched dragonling, must make your way through the world, learning, exploring and growing to full adulthood. "chooseareality" had tried several times to make this game and others using conventional tools, but until she'd started with Metaplace, had never been able to leap the learning curve enough to actually get a game written. Metaplace's tinting and scaling tools helped extend a few original pieces of art into the dragonling characters for the whole game.Do Metaplace, VastPark, Kongregate and others that showcase and help with the creation of player-written games popping up all over mean a new Renaissance for gaming? Finding the best games out of the hundreds we're sure to see would probably be a worthy game idea all by itself....
Metaplace Community Spotlight: Life of the Party
Within the gigantic sandbox known as Metaplace, there is a new game in town. Created by alpha tester DrOffset, this new game entitled Life of the Party helps to showcase the ease at which player-driven content can be created in Metaplace. DrOffset mentions the fact that his game has involved around eight hours of development so far, and most of the scripts he's used are from the wiki itself, freely available to anyone. His 2D artwork was created himself, yet he plans to animate them three-dimensionally.In his Q&A by Areae Community Manager Tami "Cuppycake" Baribeau, DrOffset explains the exact premise of his mini game and how he came up with the idea. According to Metaplace's motto, players can "build anything, play everything, from anywhere" -- and DrOffset's Life of the Party certainly demonstrates one way to achieve this in a simplified, yet entertaining manner.
Pump up your local forum with Metaplace!
Got a small or medium sized community forum? Want to add YouTubes, mini-games, customizable avatars and heck -- a whole world all your own (why not?) -- in it? Then Areae wants to talk with you. Their Metaplace minigames for the masses / virtual world portal needs beta testers who wouldn't mind giving their new tech a trial run in their forums. You will probably need to paste some PHP code here and there -- but if you know what that entails, are comfortable doing it and want to give your community members reasons to spend more time on your forum, then head over to Metaplace for more details.This could be your chance to get in on the ground floor of the Next Best Thing. Give it a shot, and if it works out for you, tell us about it!
A brief history of botting
Botting -- the act of using a program (a 'bot') to kill mobs, perform quests, harvest nodes and so on -- usually is explicitly banned by a game's EULA, and at least ethically gray even where it wasn't directly ruled out. Right or wrong, botting has been with us since the very dawn of massively multiplayer games, in MUDs -- text-based Multi-User Dungeons. Raph Koster -- Ultima Online developer, Star Wars Galaxies architect and CEO of game-development-for-the-masses Areae -- brings us back to the days of yore when MUDs first met botters -- and how they dealt with it. It's a stirring tale of autohunters, deathtrap rooms, trigger phrases, healbots and the devs who loved them.
GDC08: Raph Koster's 'Reinventing MMOs, a Metaplace 'antemortem''
Raph Koster, president of Areae, and Sean Riley, Lead Programmer, held a panel the final day of GDC '08 called 'Reinventing MMOs: a Metaplace 'antemortem'', which was all about dissecting why the concept of MMOs needs updating. Going in, I was hoping for insight, which I got, but wasn't expecting a lot of technical talk, which I also got.And the takeaway I got from this session is this: Koster's doing some good, forward-thinking work, but Metaplace doesn't really shine for me just yet. Details on both after the break.
Metaplace live developer chat today
Raph Koster -- known for being the lead designer on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies -- and his development studio Areae are the masterminds behind a little piece of software you may or may not know as Metaplace. Some also know Raph as that guy who did the MMO thing on Penny Arcade a while back. Today at 5pm PST, a live developer Q&A is scheduled over at the Metaplace site. We're not entirely sure what to expect from it considering that Areae has said it won't be taking place in IRC, but you can be certain that we're going to be there to report on it for anyone interested. Metaplace is planned to be a platform which will allow users to create their own online space -- be it a massively chat room or a 32-person puzzle game server -- and then connect all of these games together like the internet. The software itself is not locked to any one platform and is planned to be accessible by anything with an internet connection. The whole idea is to let users create the kind of game they want, in the kind of way they want and in the easiest possible way.Join us after the jump for coverage of the whole event, live blog style!
Stanford University's Metaverse U Conference
Virtual worlds and online gaming continue to grow in cultural importance, changing the outlook of commerce and entertainment almost daily. To make sense of these changes, Stanford University feels it's high time they convened a group of leading experts in the field to discuss what it all might mean, both today and reaching into the future. To this end, the Stanford University Humanities Lab is hosting the Metaverse U Conference, to take place on campus on February 16th and 17th. Among the notable names speaking at this event are Raph Koster of Areae's Metaplace; Cory Ondrejka, formerly of Linden Lab; Howard Rheingold, author and critic, credited with coining the term 'virtual community', and many other guests. In fact, those three in particular will be speaking together in conversation on Saturday, an event I expect will be both illuminating and provocative.I'll be attending with Massively's Barb Dybwad, so look for us and say hi! If you can't make it, however, don't despair -- the organizers have told us that "we are about to announce that the entire conference will be streamed for free into Second Life for anyone who wants to attend there."
Become a professional MetaPlace guru
Want to work for Raph Koster?If you have some object-oriented programming experience and a "familiarity with game and user-interface design," you may apply for a job as a Content Designer at Areae. If hired, you'll provide the MetaPlace community with game content as well as support and documentation for the MetaPlace toolset. Plus, you'll get to be one of Master Koster's Padawan learners.For those who are unfamiliar with Koster or MetaPlace, Koster was the lead designer of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. He also worked on some other SOE projects, and wrote the book A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Now, he's helming the Areae project MetaPlace, which is a platform on which users can create their own online games and virtual worlds.[Via Raph Koster]
Raph Koster imparts MetaPlace game design wisdom
Areae's official MetaPlace blog is a bastion of quasi-regular updates amidst a whole field of general silence. You usually have to go to the source for any kind of information, but the source made some visits to the MetaPlace website; Raph Koster published two whole posts there over the past few days, and while he didn't go into a lot of detail about MetaPlace itself, he had a lot to say about the basics of game design.Since MetaPlace's premise involves users creating their own games or other interactive environments, Koster thought it would be prudent to lay out the core principles of game design. The first post was about the "atoms" that make up a game -- essentially mini-games that come together to make a greater mechanic. Koster used Tetris to illustrate concepts. The second part was about the mathematical skeletons of gameplay mechanics, and offered up some techniques for brainstorming ideas.He didn't spend any time at all discussing the less mathematically-oriented attractions in games, like social interactions, narrative structure and writing, visual artistry, emotional engagement , or immersion. It might be accurate to describe those things as the meat on the mathematical skeleton, but maybe they're coming up in a future post. These were just "fundamentals" posts, after all!
Areae explains MetaPlace's MetaBucks
The MetaPlace developer blog was updated with a description of Areae's plans for "MetaBucks." Unsurprisingly, MetaBucks will be the currency of MetaPlace. They will be exchangeable both ways for real-world currency, and will be used to buy tools and assets with which to build worlds. Also, MetaBucks will provide a system for creators of virtual worlds made in MetaPlace to charge subscription fees.If you're thinking, "gee, that sounds very Second Life-esque," you're not the only one! MetaPlace seeks to bridge the gap between gamers and virtual world residents by providing tools (like MetaBucks) that will be useful to both. For a browser-based title, MetaPlace is unusually ambitious in terms of scope.If you're curious how all this fits into Areae's business plan as a whole, check out the business plan FAQ. Basically, MetaPlace is free until the world you create crosses a certain traffic threshold. After that, it costs money to continue hosting your world there, but you can use MetaBucks to charge players or take donations, and use that income to cover the costs.
MetaPlace goes MetaPunk
If you're not familiar with MetaPlace, here's the deal: it's an open platform that allows users to create and share their own casual massively multiplayer games. It's platform-agnostic -- meaning it'll be usable by anyone with access to the web. Oh, and did we mention it's the brainchild of Raph Koster, one of the big names in MMO development, and the guy behind Penny Arcade's hypothetical construction MMO?MetaPlace is still in alpha testing, but fans of the project are thinking ahead. Check out the brand new official website of MetaPunk, a MetaPlace-based "cyberpunk massively multiplayer online role playing game." It's never too early to start planning for the fun. MetaPlace could be one of the most exciting things on the MMO horizon, so if it's something that sounds even remotely interesting to you, get involved in the community.[Via Cuppytalk]
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?
