Wherein I talk about games I am making
[mp2wp]TheStage,640,550[/mp2wp]
I’m doing a fireside chat sort of thing with Cory Ondrejka as part of the Metaplace Creative Series. You can log in to TheStage above at 2pm Pacific to participate — we’ll be taking audience questions too. We’ll be having a nice conversation about the future of virtual worlds. Cory, of course, was a prime mover at Linden Labs, makers of Second Life, and today is at EMI (yes, the record company!). The chat will be embedded on his blog as well.
We’ve announced a nifty new feature, the Golden Egg, which serves as a sort of case study of crossworld entertainment on Metaplace.
The Metaplace Central master egg
One of the interesting challenges with something like Metaplace is that users all build separate worlds, and then they scatter to them. Getting people to both visit all the worlds that are interesting, and also to meet up in worlds, can be challenging. There’s a discoverability issue, and a social cluster issue. Cool worlds can get “forgotten” as they slip down the feature lists, for example.
We have all sorts of tests going, and one of them is this Golden Egg. Basically, in Metaplace Central you see this blue egg. Click on it, and it will tell you “if you find a golden egg in a world, you can click on it — once! — and get 500 coins.” It will also suggest one such world where an egg might be found. In fact, you can click right then and there to go visit that world — though you likely won’t appear anywhere near the egg. And when you do find the egg and claim your coins, the egg you found will suggest another world which you might want to hunt through, and so on…
Any worldbuilder an install an egg in their world — it’s closed source, so they can’t get at the code that runs it, preventing exploits.
It costs a fortune — like, 25,000 coins, which let me tell you put a serious dent in my bank account yesterday, since I bought 10 of them. But it’s totally worth it from a marketing point of view, and the price limits it to users who have already had success building, increasing the odds that the worlds you are sent to are interesting. Every egg becomes an inbound link, and it provides an incentive for users to come visit your world. You can make eggs easy or hard to find, and even wrap gameplay around them. Eventually, we may expand this to have variable reward eggs — perhaps based on how hard or easy the egg was to get.
A Golden Egg in a world
Each egg is actually doing some rather nifty crossworld communication. Every egg notifies the central egg as to where it has been installed, and every egg asks the central egg for suggestions of other worlds. The central egg even manages a high score table of the most successful explorers. All this is an example of using Metaplace’s web capabilities — the eggs communicate with each other using simple web services implemented entirely within Metaplace itself.
They are also a demonstration of the power of a common platform. Eggs could be found in all sorts of worlds — hangouts, games, shops… you can see stuff like this becoming used as a virtual webring, for example. Some of the gameworlds on Metaplace as using the egg as the final reward for beating the game, or getting to a certain level, so it is a way to drive engagement. And once you have Metaplaces embedded in various websites, it starts getting rather interesting.
This particular example is rather gamey, but bear in mind that any sort of data could be communicated across worlds in this way.
It’s too soon to say whether this is an interesting notion or not, really — the eggs went in yesterday. But in the meantime, I know some of my older worlds are getting tons more traffic than they used to. 🙂
If you feel like exploring the worlds with eggs, just stop by Metaplace Central and click the blue egg. Maybe I will see you at the Ice Pond. 🙂
We’ve worked hard to make Metaplace as easy to use as possible, but there’s still people with different learning styles and who prefer to be shown something rather than learn from tutorials or experimentation.
Users Chooseareality and KStarfire are running interactive classes on basic building, using the Behavior Tool (one of the coolest Metaplace features, IMHO), editing the map, etc. The next one is on Friday, and is about
…how to use the tools under “Shape The World”, such as resizing and coloring your map, place properties, tiles, camera settings, and terrain tools.
The Behavior Tool, on the YouTube behavior page
Upcoming ones are on the Behavior Tool on the 23rd and placing objects on the 24th.
You have to sign up for these in advance, because these guys have made very cool interactive classrooms for them, where each user gets their own “workstation” to try stuff out.
I don’t think I have written about the Behavior Tool before… The cool thing about the Behavior Tool is that it gives an easy way for non-scripters to add behaviors to objects without needing to code. Not just stuff like “play YouTube video” (though that’s in there, of course!) but also things like AI behaviors, web integration, game system stuff — whatever.
What’s more, many of the scripters create behaviors for this tool and put them on the marketplace. So you can buy something like a movement system, or an aggro behavior, or a dialogue system, and attach it to objects this way. Scripters can decide what fields are exposed for casual users, and they show up as simple sliders, type in fields, color pickers, that sort of thing, so the behavior can be easy to use. There’s a nice Wiki tutorial on using the BT here, and Lunarraid, one of our users, has been adding tutorials for each of the standard behaviors.
Yesterday I had a real urge to play some guitar for people. It used to be that I’d get to do a few hours of playing songs for people at every Cub Scout camp-out — but David is into Scouts proper now, and I don’t go on the camping trips. So I left the office saying, “I might do a concert thing in Metaplace this weekend…” A few folks said to let them know if I did.
Which just added to the pressure! I had never tried it before! So I figured that I should do a dry run first. And I did it last night, and you know, it was a heck of a lot of fun — but also pretty different. So here’s what I did and what it felt like. I am sure some of this is old hat to those of you who have done lots of this in Second Life, but it was new to me. 🙂
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:
