Metaplace is now in open beta

 Posted by (Visited 9108 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with:
May 152009
 

Yesterday was a big milestone for me. Anyone can now go to Metaplace.com and register. You get a small world for free, with full access to all the content creation tools. Lately, I’ve been describing it at “the power of Second Life, with the ease of The Sims, on the web.”

It’s early days yet, of course. There is a lot more left to do. For example, we have not yet released the ability to embed worlds on websites and profile pages, which is a huge part of the story. There’s more to come in terms of web integration, plugins on the marketplace so that it gets easier and easier to make what you want, and so on. We’re not done by a long shot.

But it’s still exciting. As users create more content and share more, the power everyone has to create will rise dramatically — we’re making the classic bet on users and the network effect that has helped so many websites. I can’t wait to see what develops.

Here’s the welcome video, for those who have not seen it:

The perfect geek age?

 Posted by (Visited 57074 times)  Misc
May 142009
 

Was being born in 1971 the perfect time to be born a geek?

  • It meant I got to see Star Wars in the theater, 13 times, at ages 6 and 7, exactly when it would overwhelm my sense of wonder.
  • I got an 8-bit computer at exactly the age when boys get obsessive about details, and I spent days PEEKing and POKEing and typing in listings from magazines and learning how computers actually worked.
  • It meant at least half the new games I played were actually new ideas.
  • And yet I got to play real pinball machines.
  • In real arcades.
  • New Wave science fiction was the used paperbacks laying around, and I got to read cyberpunk and steampunk as they were invented, and see SF when fandom was not yet a media circus.
  • I got to play D&D from as close to the beginning as most anyone.
  • And feel like I had inside baseball knowledge during the D&D scene in E.T., which the other folks in the theater didn’t get.
  • I was there for when the X-Men were new and fresh
  • I got to high school when PCs were becoming ubiquitous.
  • I got to college when Macs were on Apple campuses, and actually useful.
  • And when you had no choice but to use libraries for research, so I actually learned what real research is.
  • And I was too young to feel cynical about Dead Poets Society.
  • I got onto the Internet after it was tiny, but before it was mass market. So I got to see and use most of the tools and software that were key to its evolution, as they were used, then replaced, then discarded. Pine, gopher, Usenet, Mozilla…
  • I read Sandman when the issues first came out.
  • I got into the games business before it was mass media, but got to ride the wave.
  • …and also got to see the Web unfold…
  • …and got Wikipedia and Google just in time for when I didn’t need to use libraries anymore…
  • …and see some of the science fiction coming true.

Looking back on it, it makes me feel a bit sorry for those born ten years later. And I can’t judge ten years earlier, but so much of that seemed to hit at the right age. Looking back at history, it seems like the last big waves of popular invention like this were decades ago. Teens with hot rods? Engineering in the 20s? I see my kids now, and they are so clearly getting the finished products of so much, not the products in the process of invention… Am I wrong?

Blerp & Minsh: layering the web

 Posted by (Visited 10567 times)  Game talk, Misc  Tagged with: , , ,
May 132009
 

Blerp, a new property of the RocketOn folks, is a new social network with a twist. RocketOn, like Weblin, is a plugin that lets you layer stuff on top of the web. It was for avatars and MMOs, but now it’s been repurposed as a way to annotate the web. You get a frame around your browser that lets you drop text, pictures, and so on on various webpages. People you are linked to get to see the annotations, and you can slurp your networks from Facebook, twitter, etc. Blerp’s just opened its alpha, so check it out here.

Minsh is a little different; it adds a virtual worldish layer to Twitter by representing the people you follow as fish. They use little chat bubbles to tweet, and you can click directly on them to reply. I suspect that using this tool will drive users further towards synchronous use of Twitter… It’s in closed alpha, but here’s a video:

Meep cupcakes

 Posted by (Visited 8002 times)  Gamemaking, Misc  Tagged with: , ,
May 132009
 

meep-cupcakes-001meep-cupcakes-002These appeared at the office today.

Meeps have continued to develop as a mascot for Metaplace. In Metaplace Central, you can now go to a meep vending machine to buy them. They shoot out and land in the water to be eaten by sharks. Yesterday a user published a meep cannon on the marketplace. It fires them off at a high rate and they make a satisfying, gooey splat when they land. We now give out plush meeps to top performers every week. And they eat cupcakes too.

And this one on the right is the one that I ate. You can tell by the nervous look on its face.

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