To say goodbye to Metaplace.com in style, there’s a party scheduled at noon tomorrow January 1st, probably running all the way until the lights go out at midnight. Please come on by and hang out!
I am also going to do one last, final farewell concert, after some users asked me to. It will be at 2pm Pacific (or Metaplace time) in The Stage, and I will embed it here as usual.
…means reading those crazy crazy liner notes, full of pretention and affection.
…means finding Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band and Steve Martin as a wild and crazy guy.
…means wondering why my wife had so much Barry Gibb when she was a young teen. And uh, Crystal Gayle?
…means laughing over the albums that we gave each other on CD this year that suddenly we can also play on vinyl.
…means marveling over the 25 cent stickers on them, remembering being broke in college and tracking down obscure stuff in bins in used record stores.
…means blasting Joan Jett & the Blackhearts.
…means rediscovering our classical and jazz collections.
…means, unfortunately, hours and hours and hours of “ripping” the vinyl, because the romance of the record will probably only last another few hours. 🙂
Today we announced that the consumer-facing Metaplace service, the one you all know as the user-generated worlds website at Metaplace.com, is closing on January 1st. There’s a FAQ and an official letter on the site.
The reason? Well, it just hasn’t gotten traction. I have many thoughts on why, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t go into all of them right now. It is a sad day for us here, and I know many users are going to be very disappointed by this turn of events.
Metaplace Inc isn’t going away – in fact, we have some pretty exciting plans. But those plans are best shared on a future day.
If we have to sunset the service, we want to do it right. So for the next two weeks – come visit, and enjoy and celebrate all of the amazing creativity and work users put into their worlds. We’re providing a way for users to grab the data that makes up their worlds. We’ll be opening a website for the community so that you don’t lose touch with your Metaplace friends. And we’ll have a big party on the last day – because Metaplace.com will not go quietly, but with the sound of meeps and music and laughter.
It was a wonderful world full of wonderful people, and I will miss it more than I can say.
Another guitar instrumental… it’s in open D, capo IV. I sorta-tabbed it, after the break.
The latest results from the giant EQ2 data research project came out a few days ago, and this time they center on gender. I’ll just point straight to the summary from Terra Nova:
- Men are more driven to achieve within the game space, and women are more driven to socialize, although these differences are not as large as one might expect.
- Female players fall into two distinct categories: stereotypically feminine players, typically brought into the game by a partner, and very hard-core players.
- The hard-core women are more intense than their male counterparts: “The top 10% of male players played an average of 48.86 hours per week, while the top 10% of female players played an average of 56.64 hours per week.”
- Female players are healthier offline than the males. This is especially true among older players.
- When males and females play together within a romantic relationship, the males are less happy and the females more happy. When not playing in a romantic relationship, these outcomes are reversed: the females are less happy and the males more happy.
- There are a surprisingly large number of bisexual females playing, but not males. While male bisexual players stuck to the national average, females were about five times higher than the national baseline rate.
- Females under-report their playing time more than males.
The full paper can be gotten here (scroll down a bit) but you have to register or purchase it.
