Metaplace has an official Twitter account now! Feel free to follow. 🙂
Metaplace is on Twitter!
(Visited 4357 times) Gamemaking
Jan 262009
Gamemaking
Wherein I talk about games I am making
New Metaplace interview
(Visited 5149 times) Game talk, Gamemaking
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
(Visited 5516 times) Gamemaking
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.”
Metaplace is looking for a lead designer!
(Visited 5827 times) Gamemaking
Nov 202008
Are you a veteran lead designer with a strong interest in the webby side of the gaming world? Because we’re looking.
Basically, we want someone to own the user experience top to bottom. Ideally, this person is someone who has both good system design chops and also a strong ability to craft user experiences. The full description is at the link!
Metaplace funding, name change, invite-only beta
(Visited 12795 times) Gamemaking
Oct 222008
Today we announced that Areae is no more — there’s just Metaplace. Easier to spell and say. 🙂 And also that we closed a Series B funding round, with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz joining the funders. And that we are now into invite-only beta — there are invite keys on TechCrunch and GigaOM right now, and there will be more scattered about soon.
The beta site is up now too, with a link to the press release. Some press coverage thus far (I’ll just keep adding links at the bottom as more come in):
