Gamemaking

Wherein I talk about games I am making

Metaplace user blogs!

 Posted by (Visited 6803 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with:
Feb 162009
 

We’ve started up a Metaplace evangelist program, and several folks have started up public blogs about Metaplace. This is not the NDA lift, but we’re letting some folks start to show off what they and others have done. Here’s a list of some I have seen so far:

I am sure more will pop up soon!

My LGWIV keynote now online

 Posted by (Visited 6376 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: ,
Feb 062009
 

A movie of my keynote at Living Game Worlds IV is up now. You can learn about the weird connections I see between The Old 97, banjos,  copyright lawsuits, pop music, cellphones in Kenya, and molecular biology. Oh, and virtual worlds, of course.

Towards the end, I show a lot of pictures of Metaplace worlds from a few months ago. 🙂

There are also lots of presentations and sessions and panels up — I highly recommend the pioneers panel, but honestly, it was a great conference, they were all good.

New Metaplace interview

 Posted by (Visited 5213 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: ,
Jan 252009
 

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).

InformationWeek’s sneak peek at Metaplace

 Posted by (Visited 5565 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with:
Jan 142009
 

We have lifted the NDA for one person: Tom Claburn of Information Week. And “Metaplace Readies Virtual World Platform” is the resulting article.

Congrats to the (many!) users whose work got spotlighted by the reporter! 🙂

It would be a mistake to see Metaplace exclusively as a game environment. The platform also has a strong social component, even at this early stage with its limited audience of testers. When the doors open, Metaplace may end up competing not with the likes of Second Life or Habbo but with Facebook. To imagine how that might happen, consider how some Metaplace testers have been streaming music into their personal worlds using programming hooks to Last.fm. Others are trying to implement music composition in their virtual spaces. Really, if data is available online, there’s probably a way to access it and present it on Metaplace. That means that worlds can duplicate many of the functions of Web sites, albeit with a different user interface. …

Betting on the masses, as opposed to the technically proficient, to produce compelling virtual worlds might seem like a risky decision. There are still people who can’t accept that an army of amateurs has produced something as useful as Wikipedia.

But Koster is undaunted by such concerns. “If we give people access and freedom, we’re pretty sure they’re going to surprise, shock, and astonish us with what they go do,” he said. “Honestly, it’s been happening to us on a regular basis.”

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