Wherein I talk about games I am making
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!
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):
While I was in London, an interview with F13.net came out. We also did a small key giveaway for entry into the Metaplace testing, but those are all gone. Don’t worry, there will be more. 🙂
We covered stuff ranging from Metaplace to academia and game studies, to the AAA MMO market.
F13: What do you make of Blow’s assertion that “modern game design is actually unethical”?
Raph: Jon’s take on the underlying mechanics of fun, from a chemical point of view, isn’t very different from mine. I think that Dan Cook probably said it most succinctly, that “game designers are hijacking the learning systems of the brain.” But perhaps we might tweak that to “the REWARD systems” of the brain.
Lots of other things accomplish this, sometimes for good and sometimes for evil. A lot of work goes into devices and designs built to encourage gambling, for example, and if you read up on the subject, you quickly find that there’s something deeply manipulative about it.
On the other hand, we are also tapping into that when we give someone a gold star for doing well in grade school, and this is usually used for a positive purpose.
If you go to the front page of Worlds In Motion right now, you see successive screenshots of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, Virek Online, and World of Warcraft. What’s Virek Online? It’s our most recent community spotlight. 🙂
Kinda cool to see this completely user-built Scandinavian folk music RPG (no, I am not making that up) side by side with the big boys. 🙂
I forgot to blog about this when we released it, but I have some more of those handy little development tools that we’re releasing for Metaplace available here for you. There’s a particle editor that spits out sprites so you can bring them into 2d worlds easily, and there’s an animation strip editor that helps you make sprite sheets. Both of them are only available for Windows right now — sorry! — but they’re fun to mess with and might be useful to you even outside of a Metaplace context. You can grab them here. They’re basically unsupported, since I do them mostly in my free time.
Some screenshots are below. There’s full docs in the tools.
