New Metaplace interview
The Metaverse Journal has a new interview with me up. It’s all about Metaplace, the industry (games and virtual worlds), and what my five desert island discs would be. They call me an “elder statesman,” and then comment I probably wouldn’t like that, and they’re right. 😉
In re-reading the answers, there’s one minor correction I want to make:
Lowell: As a writer, has anything recently in virtual worlds stood out for you as high-quality writing?
Raph: To be honest, I don’t think that writing has ever been a huge part of social virtual worlds. It’s had far far more of a presence in the RPGs, where it is really starting to get much better.
That should, of course, be “a huge part of graphical social virtual worlds” — since writing was the key form of expression in the text-based ones! (Also, I am not minimizing the good writing work some are doing — it just doesn’t seem to be a major current in the field right now).
3 Responses to “New Metaplace interview”
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Yeah! I mean, what’s the point of having five albums without a means to play them? On the other hand, they might last longer than the guitar, and you could shape them into weapons. You’d also have a source of plastic.
Of course, the guitar could be used as firewood and the strings could be weapons, too. If you maintained the guitar, you’d eventually be practiced in fingerstyle since the pick would wear out. Still, maintaining the guitar against the elements would take a lot of effort. A simple drum might last longer and could be easily repairable.
Writing got a great more relevant to the experience of playing mmorpg’s with WoW’s new expansion. The experience is now flavoured with storytelling that is maybe a hundred times more relevant than we are used to.
Thats a hundred times measured in how much story a player notice per days ingame. (Up from a few minutes to several hours.)
I’m finding in Second Life much the same dynamic as in UO; in the absence of a designer-provided narrative, people write their own stories. SL is even more of a sandbox than UO was in this respect.
Some of the narratives are fairly simple; earnest young nightclub owner struggles against the forces of economic dislocation, Linden Labs’ capricious behavior, and a staff that is slowly coming to realize that they’re working their bottoms off for $0.58 US an hour.
Some are fairly intricate, if not in a standard narrative form; the Greenies are a series of vignettes told in visual form of the misadventures of an group of tiny aliens.
And some of the roleplaying sims have intricate backstories and histories, some explicitly presented in text form and some baked into the build and pieced together through exploration.
It’s perhaps not as obvious as the miles of ugly, empty strip malls and floating bot farms, but there’s quite a lot of solid writing there if you dig a bit.
But perhaps I’m predisposed by my background in theatre to consider virtual worlds more as collaborative works rather than author/audience experiences.
As for “elder statesman”, well… I wouldn’t put it exactly in those terms, but you and Richard and a scant handful of others are the closest we’ve got. I think it’s a title you’ll grow into, twenty or thirty years from now. 😉