The post title comes from a great song by Ellis Paul, but the import of the post has more to do with the massive movement in the virtual worlds space these days. While the gamer side of things is awaiting Warhammer, there’s a lot of activity going on around user-created content, microworlds, web-embedding, and so on.
It isn’t just the constant flow of new kids’ worlds — the latest being World of Neopia, FlowPlay‘s ourWorld, vSide coming out of stealth and announcing a deGrassi partnership, and the new Nickelodeon announcement of Monkey World as well as its Spongebob world.
It’s also the announcements like SmallWorlds, a 3d world in a browser where users decorate apartments. It’s Whirled, newly launched by Three Rings, where users can hook together 2d rooms, build their own avatars, and even upload SWFs into the environment. It’s Vivaty, formerly known as Media Machines, putting an X3D-based 16-player space in 3d in a browser window. And now Multiverse has a 2d Flash client as well, which lets you put a 2d facing on a world also accessible via 3d (though Multiverse does still seem aimed more at indies and middleware than at end users).
And we can’t forget things like SceneCaster and myMiniLife, which while not multiuser, are still piling up giant quantities of user-created content via easy to use tools.
I think it may actually be time for that user content stream of virtual worlds to spill over more mainstream.
I just realized I never posted about this over here, only on the main Metaplace site. A while back I did a little tool for Metaplace users to help them make isometric walls. Nothing too fancy, and there’s higher-end tools out there for this sort of purpose, but this does do some nice stuff like help you make sloping walls, do whole batches of textures and generate hundreds of walls quickly, etc.