While here at Virtual Worlds Fall, I ran into Prokofy Neva, who asked “whatever happened to that GoPets initiative to come up with a rights document?”
Well, the answer, I believe, is over at BetterEULA, where a Wiki has been set up to do research, work on drafts, and so on.
Steve Crews from MMOGamer came down to the office a week or so ago with questions, and I think I stunned him with the verbosity of my answers. 🙂 He has both transcript and audio of the hour’s worth of conversation.
The MMO Gamer » Blog Archive » Interview: Areae’s Raph Koster Talks Metaplace
Some of you may have seen the announcement that IBM and Linden are looking to work together on creating standards to move avatars between worlds.
In fact, there was a whole “virtual worlds interoperability summit” that happened yesterday, with a bunch of folks at it, including Linden. I have a rough liveblog of Zero Linden’s talk on the matter which I will post up eventually. Many thanks to the folks like Peter Haggar of IBM who gathered everyone together to talk about the issues.
I think interoperability is a noble goal, and federations of worlds is an inevitable development. But aspects of the discussion made me nervous. Never mind the question of whether moving avatars across worlds is already patented or not, I was a bit bothered by assumptions that seemed to exist in the room (and said so, which made me somewhat unpopular, I think).
Among them: Continue reading »
Well, sort of.
So there I was, at the San Diego ComicCon, sidling past the Penny Arcade table on my way to say hi to Scott Kurtz at the PvP Online booth, when suddenly this Tycho person grabbed me and pulled me aside to rant and rave. He had an idea, he said. A crazy idea.
I should have known. Another wannabe game designer. But hey, this one has this semi-popular website and regularly trashes developers he doesn’t like. I had to stand still and listen, or risk professional doom.
Basically, he said, he had this idea for a construction game. “Like, SimCity?” I said. No, like with dumptrucks and demolition balls and cranes and architects with blueprints and everything. Like, real construction, Bob-the-Builder style.
And he wanted it as an MMO.
Great, I said, humoring him. I’m working on this thing called Metaplace, and you can make it yourself, and…
“No, no…” he said. “I want you to write up a design article. For the site. Like, a guest spot.”
No, it’s not a headline from The Onion.
Our world gets more science-fictional every day…
