MMOGamer: A Meeting at Rancho Bernardo

Interview: Areae’s Raph Koster Talks Metaplace

Published October 11, 2007 By Steven Crews

Steve paid a visit to San Diego to interview veteran designer Raph Koster about his new startup, Areae, and their first project, Metaplace. Read or listen to the interview after the jump and keep your eyes open for the next installment of our Metaplace coverage.

The following interview is the first in a series of two features this week covering Areae’s upcoming virtual world creation system, Metaplace.

It was likely both the easiest and most interesting interview I have conducted to date. As both a journalist and likely future world builder myself, I had already begun compiling a laundry list of questions about the system from the very first moment after I read the initial announcement.

My areas of interest, however, were fairly narrow. As a former MUDder who saw Metaplace as a potential means to resurrect “the good old days,” they mainly ranged to such topics as “How is the editor going to work? How are you planning on keeping this thing afloat?” And, of course, “When can I start?”

When conducting interviews I tend to think of myself as a public servant in the search after truth: It is my job to discover new sources of information, and thereby to provide answers to people’s unanswered questions.

So, in that spirit, I decided to consult the public—or, at least, the portion of the public with whom I am personally acquainted—on what they would like to know.

“If you could talk to Raph Koster about this new system they’re working on,” I did not feel the need to mention that I was actually going to, “what would you ask him?”

After throwing out the obvious non-starters, such as “What’s with that logo? It looks like it’s going to be designed for nine year old girls!” I felt that I had arrived at a good, solid mix: things that I wanted to ask as a gamer, things I had to ask as a journalist, and things which the people at large seemed to want to know.

With this motley assortment of questions in hand I ventured forth to San Diego. There, Koster and I took our places in Areae’s meeting room and began to talk Metaplace… and we did not stop for nearly an hour.

The MMO Gamer: To get us started, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, tell us a little bit about yourself, and how we came to be sitting across from each other here today.

Raph Koster: Most of your readers probably first heard of me through Ultima Online. I was on the original UO design team, I was the creative lead for the original UO, and lead designer for Second Age and UO Live. I did UO for about five years—four years, maybe—starting in 1995.

Before that, actually, I was active in the world of text MUDs. LegendMUD is still around, I worked on that for a long time.

After UO I did a couple of things that never saw the light of day for EA, and then moved over to Sony Online, where I was the creative director for Star Wars Galaxies. I left Star Wars Galaxies, two months, three months after it shipped. For those who keep score, it was before CU, even. It was around the time that cities went into the game, is about when I left. And that was because I moved to San Diego to become Chief Creative Officer for SOE, and doing that I mostly did—I had an R&D group, and I did a lot of public speaking, and milestone reviews, and things like that.

After I did that for three years I decided to strike out and do my own thing for awhile. I’d been inside of giant corporations since ’95, so it was a nice change of pace. Started Areae last August, July-August, and here we are now having announced Metaplace, which is our top seekrit project—S E E K R I T, seekrit. We just announced that a little bit ago at TechCrunch.

The MMO Gamer: Indeed you did. Let’s start right from the beginning: Tell us, in your own words, what is Metaplace? What is the basic concept behind it?

Raph Koster: The basic concept behind Metaplace is to make virtual worlds work the way the web does. We mean that totally literally—as I’ve said many times now.

So here’s the thing: We look at the world of MMOs, we go, first of all, every single one of them is a moon shoot. They’re costing tens of millions of dollars to make, and they take enormous teams.

It’s getting so I’m really forward to seeing any MMO that isn’t based on a movie or a licensed property, because almost all of them these days are, all of the big AAA ones. And that’s because it’s the only way to justify the costs any more. You’ve got to have that built-in audience or it’s hard to get enough money back, essentially.

The cost of development’s just gotten crazy, and as it does that everybody just gets more conservative. It means that we don’t see the kind of experimentation that we used to. You don’t see the niches as much, you just get blockbuster stuff. And blockbuster stuff can be really totally cool—don’t get me wrong, blockbusters are awesome. But they’re also kind of aimed to try to make everybody happy, rather than finding stuff that is for a particular group of people and they really dig it, but other people really don’t get it. You know, targeting niches.

So Metaplace was in large part to try to bring that back. You know, we want to bring back the modders, bring back the diversity, bring back more kinds of stuff. And we’re pretty idealistic, we have all of these high-flown ideas about the applications and the virtues of virtual worlds, and how cool they can be, and all the things that people can accomplish with them, all the different ways that they can have fun, and make friends, and build communities, and teach, and all the rest that just weren’t going to happen if everything stayed in blockbuster mode.

That was the motive. So Metaplace is a platform that fixes all of that, and that’s what Metaplace is.

The MMO Gamer: When did you first come up with the concept of this? Did you found the company with the intention of making Metaplace, or did Metaplace come about as sort of brainstorming of things for the company to do?

Raph Koster: You want to hear an anecdote?

The MMO Gamer: Sure.

Raph Koster: Way back when, in 1998, when we were talking about what the first expansion pack for UO should be, I said, “You know what we should do? We should release the server, and our scripting documentation, and let anybody make servers and have red moon gates that you could go to from our server to other people’s servers.”

Everybody laughed very politely, and then that pitch got shelved.

In some ways I’ve been thinking about it since then. This version of it, with a lot of the characteristics of it, actually took a little bit of time after I left SOE to figure out. And that was because—essentially the reason I ended up making it so webby is that I was doing it by myself for awhile. When you’re a team of one you go out there and you start looking at what other technology can you co-opt, what can you leverage.

So the idea was bouncing around for sure, for a long time I’ve been wondering, “How do we accomplish this?” But, at the same time what Metaplace is now is really the result of what we’ve done here. Even when we founded the company we talked about doing other things. And then it’s evolved enormously once, obviously, we had a team of programmers better than me—it changes pretty dramatically. [Laughing]

The MMO Gamer: What in a name? How did you come up with “Metaplace”?

Raph Koster: Coming up with names sucks. It’s really painful. You may have noticed that the name Areae for the company is hard to pronounce and a lot of people don’t understand it. That would be because they tell you, “You now need to supply a name for the company, you’ve got twenty-four hours to come up with it thanks to all of the paperwork that we’ve got to fill out.”

You’ve been searching for three weeks trying to find something that isn’t already trademarked or taken and doesn’t suck, and you panic. [Laughing] So you end up compromising.

In the case of Metaplace I think we got luckier, because it does mean exactly what we’re making. We’re making a kind of central destination that is a place of many places, it’s above all the places that people will make. It took about five months to come up with the name Metaplace, [Laughing] it took a lot of work. God, we even had a naming company involved at one point. We didn’t pick any of those names.

The MMO Gamer: I admit, I kind of wish you’d gone Snow Crash on it and named it Metaverse, but then I suppose every other character would be named Hiro Protagonist.

Raph Koster: There’s already Metaverses out there, there’s lots—every possible variation of Metaverse has been done. Actually, I was surprised Metaplace wasn’t. There’s Metaworld, there’s Metaversed, is an MMO news site for virtual worlds specifically, there’s an MMO “virtual world service bureau” called Metaversatility.

So, Meta is… popular.

The MMO Gamer: Probably a wise idea you skipped that, then.

Raph Koster: [Laughing]

The MMO Gamer: I’ll be honest, when I first saw the placeholder image—the announcement on the Coming Soon site that said to come back Tuesday at 4PM—the one with the little girl with the ponytail, I was a bit concerned.

I freely admit to being what most people would call a quote-unquote “hardcore gamer,” and the image looked about as soft as you could possibly get without registering as talc on the Mohs scale.

Raph Koster: Right.

The MMO Gamer: Once I saw what it actually was, I felt a sense of… relief, let’s call it. Have you been getting that reaction a lot?

Raph Koster: Actually, only from hardcore gamers. Who are not, by the way, even the largest group of people who are interested in Metaplace. It’s been really interesting because we’ve gotten really a broad cross-section of people coming to talk to us.

We are getting from the core gamers a lot of, “Oh wait a minute this looks like it’s designed for nine year old girls,” even though we had an alien and a spaceship on the cover, too. People just focused in on the girl with the ponytail.

You know, part of the thing there, honestly, is that we like having a sense of humor. And to us cartoony versus not or whatever—we often have a slightly sick and twisted sense of humor. You saw we have one shooter which is all like chalk art, we have another one where you have these cute little bouncing aliens, and when you shoot them they leave behind these impressive blood splatters.

So, we’re a little bit sick and twisted, too. I wouldn’t read too much into the art, because actually any given Metaplace world can have completely different art, too. So all we were trying to do there was just show diversity.

The MMO Gamer: I’ve read people discussing the announcement on various message boards calling this the second coming of Diku. How do you feel about that?

Raph Koster: As long as we don’t log in to ten thousand Midgards, that would thrill me to death. And I don’t doubt that we will log in to ten thousand Midgards. But I think to me Diku was actually really, really important to the development of MUDs and virtual worlds, even though it meant that there were a zillion repetitive clones.

The fact that it was easy to set up led to all kinds of cool stuff being done, and people who before that, because there was a higher barrier to entry, people that wouldn’t have been able to participate, got to.

Frankly, without DikuMUDs, there would have been no Meridian 59, there would have been no Ultima Online… Damien Shubert worked on a DikuMUD… I worked on a DikuMUD… Rick Delashmit worked on a DikuMUD…

It was important because it made it possible for more people to touch the medium and then do stuff with it. I think it would be totally awesome if we ended up being the virtual world Diku. That would kick ass.

The MMO Gamer: One of the keys to Diku’s success was the fact that the source code was freely available to change and modify as you saw fit—which many people obviously did, leading to all of the variations that you just discussed.

I assume you’re not planning on doing that with Metaplace?

Raph Koster: We’re actually architected really differently from Diku.

Diku had essentially the server and the game rules, and the data structures, everything was hard-coded, and what made it easy was that making content was really easy, so it was really easy to just fill in tables of stuff and you could make a zone.

We’re architected differently—in some ways we’re architected more like an LPMud, for those few of your readers who know what I’m talking about. We have the server itself, and then we have the game logic is actually done in script, and the data structures are also open, and the network layer is open, so we have a server that, right now anyway, is closed, although we have talked about letting it out in the future.

But, the server doesn’t do that much. What makes the games different is actually in the layer above that. And that stuff, everything we make, is going to be open. All of the games that we make are open. We have a saying that we only make content so it can be stolen.

Hopefully, a lot of the other makers of stuff using Metaplace will also do the same thing. They can choose to make it closed source if they want, but open source is kind of the default.

The MMO Gamer: You state on the website the goal of millions of worlds being created. That’s an ambitious target by anyone’s standards. But, what it really boils down to is the question: what do you define as a “world”?

Raph Koster: To me a world could be as simple as a little chat apartment with you and a friend. It doesn’t necessarily mean millions of worlds the size of WoW. I think it’s important that we not be too snobbish about it. I think that the truth is that different people like different kind of worlds, and they’ll have different needs for different kinds of worlds, too. So as soon as you’re saying, “Hey, anybody! What kind of world do you want?”

We think an awful lot of them will be empty. We think an awful lot of them will be just “Hey, I want to stick an apartment on my Facebook profile, or on MySpace.”

Those all count to our mind. They’re kind of the equivalent from the text MUD days of the old talkers, or a very simple MUSH or something. That’s a world, right? And it could scale up, you could have hundreds of people in there if it got really popular. And hey, maybe you have LamdaMOO or something, and that’s fine.

So to us it doesn’t necessarily mean a game. But it does mean a multi-user space that people can hang out in. Because to us really that’s the core of what a virtual world is: a multi-user space. Games then get put in it.

The MMO Gamer: You’ve said that you’re “client agnostic.” Could you tell us what you mean by that?

Raph Koster: Metaplace uses an internally developed tag language. We call it “metamarkup,” because we just stick “meta” on the front of everything. We’ve also in the past called it “game markup language,” because that’s really the core of what it is. It’s a markup language for describing games.

Like any markup language, how you render it is up to you. So, we’re providing some reference clients, and instructions on how to write a client, but we’re letting anybody write a client from day one.

And the markup language is designed so that you can ignore tags that your platform can’t handle, so you could write a text client if you wanted to, you could write a passive webpage client, you could write a client that is a graph view of the data. you could write a cellphone client, you could write a 3D client, you can really write any client you want.

By default the worlds don’t make assumptions about what client is displaying them. You can make a world that requires a certain level of client, you can make a world that’s like, “Hey, this is Tetris, if you don’t have graphics, you can’t play,” or, “Hey, this is an FPS, if you don’t have 3D you can’t play,” and you can tell the client, “No, you can’t come in.”

A lot like on the web when you’re on a mobile browser and you can’t do something, that kind of thing.

The point is that the system doesn’t care what the client is, and that’s the level at which Metaplace is client agnostic, an individual world might not be.

The MMO Gamer: Do you think that broadband penetration has gotten to the point where moving entire games onto the web—even up to the scale of an MMO—is viable?

Many people, for instance, still only have 756K DSL. Would that be robust enough to handle anything that, say, a high-end game could throw at it?

Raph Koster: We have been doing bandwidth testing, and it looks to us if you can get around 1.4K per second, per user, you can handle quite a lot of real-time action with physics and whatnot. That’s 1.4K per user per second, bytes, not bits.

So the answer is yes, you can. You can actually do it.

The MMO Gamer: You’ve said previously that someone could have a barebones MMO up and running in five minutes or less, right?

Raph Koster: That’s right.

The MMO Gamer: So let’s say I’m Johnny Q. Player, and I want an MMO to put up on MySpace. I’ve never so much as heard of Lua, and I think games are delivered to EB by the stork.

Walk me through it.

Raph Koster: You come to Metaplace, and you register. You don’t have to fill out very much info to register. Then you click on the Create World wizard, and it says, “Great! What do you want to start with?”

And you want the apartment to put on MySpace or something, so you click “I want to start with the apartment for MySpace!” and it says, “Great! Ok! Do you have like a Flickr photo stream or something that you want on your wall?”

You say, “No, I don’t have anything like that.” It says, “Ok, what’s the name of your apartment?” And you name it the Steve Crews Apartment. “Ok, here’s your URL, and here’s a block of code for you to paste into your MySpace profile.”

Those of you who are only listening to this don’t know this, but he actually got to see this. It took a lot less than five minutes, you can actually do it—even if you stop and read everything—it’s more like forty-five seconds.

The MMO Gamer: Someone who has never even heard of Metaplace comes to my MySpace page. Is there a plug-in to install? Or do they just see the apartment like that [Snaps fingers]?

Raph Koster: They just see the apartment. That client is written in Flash, and at this point everybody has Flash—it’s so close to everybody there’s no point in counting the remaining one percent or whatever. So it’s just there.

And we don’t actually require a login for you to get into a world. A world might require a login if it wants, but we don’t require one. So if you make an apartment and you just use our default style sheet, everybody who browses to that page will be transparently logged in as a guest avatar.

If they have an identity that they want, they can choose to log in, and at the bottom of the embeddable client there’ll be a little bar that probably will say “Powered by Metaplace” and there’ll be a login choice there. But by default it’s just there. It’s just right there just like the ad banner is there, and just like the streaming video things are there.

The MMO Gamer: What about the editor? Is there a contemporary that our readers could use for comparison? Like, say, Neverwinter Nights Aurora, The Elder Scrolls Construction Set… maybe even Dreamweaver?

Raph Koster: I would say it’s simpler than NWN, and it’s simpler than Oblivion. Some aspects of it are a bit more like GarageGames, but it’s overall really simple.

Let’s say that you wanted to just make a nice little forest landscape. You would log in to your world using your tools client—again, we’ve got one on the web, it runs everything in Flash and Java, so you don’t need to even download a tool.

You go to the accordion of tools on the side, you click on the build accordion, it pops open, and you to see, “Oh, do you want objects, or do you want sprites, or what do you want?” You click on terrain, one of the options there will be, “Give me a hilly landscape.” You click “hilly landscape” and it generates a height field for you.

The MMO Gamer: Kind of like the Sim City map editor?

Raph Koster: Actually very directly inspired by the Sim City map editor.

That would give you a simple height field, you can smooth it, you can go in and edit it. Yeah, a lot of stuff actually is inspired by the Sims tools.

Then if you want to change it to have your smiling face for the terrain texture, you find a link to your smiling face from anywhere on the web—it might be on our image hosting, it could be on other people’s image hosting, it could be you already have it—whatever. You paste that link into the editor, and then you paint. It’s that easy. There isn’t any extra steps.

It’s similar for adding even more complex objects: You import the art, then you can start adding stats and stuff to it, but it’s basically the same process.

The MMO Gamer: No programming experience is required to build a basic world, correct?

Raph Koster: That’s right.

The MMO Gamer: How deep could you get if you had, say, professional programming experience?

Raph Koster: You can get pretty deep, because at that point, for a veteran programmer I would start comparing it to using Director, where you have behavioral properties that expose essentially properties that you can modify via a wizard, or you can click the Advanced button and actually open up the code.

And if you open up the code then you’re working in lots of bite-sized Lua files, each one an event-driven script with execution entry points and all that jazz. We have blocked off some of Lua, so we don’t let you for instance just do straight file system access, but we’ve added a lot of stuff to it, so you can do web services access, talk to a remote database, for example, or a distant website.

You can go pretty far. One of the games that we did internally was basically a clone of Subspace. It was like a sixteen player Subspace clone, and it has web facing high score tables, and physics, and a dozen kinds of pickups and all kinds of stuff, and it’s all built in this object-oriented fashion, so that you can drag just the little health bar module out and use it in other games, and all that kind of thing.

And that was basically one guy for three weeks. So, you can get pretty far.

The MMO Gamer: What if somebody is really, really antisocial… could you make a single-player Metaplace world?

Raph Koster: Yes, you can. This actually isn’t something we’ve talked about that much, but yes, you can make a single-player Metaplace world.

One of the things you as world owner get to set about your world, part of the building process, you get to say things like “I want my map to be this big, I want art, scripts, how many people it holds… and at what threshold it instances.”

So, you can set up instancing at one, whereupon it will create instances of single player games, but you’ll still have the advantage that each of those instances can talk to the web, spit out high score tables, that kind of thing. You can also set it up so that it is one player playing and everybody else just watching. So, that’s kind of cool, too, you can do it that way.

The MMO Gamer: Once your world is up and running, when you use the editor to add content, can you do that in real time, or, do you have to update it when you’re done, or take the entire world offline while you update it?

Raph Koster: It is real time editing. Imagine if you were messing around in Sim City and other people were messing around at the same time you could see the stuff that they were changing.

The MMO Gamer: You mention that all of the worlds in Metaplace are going to be linked together. How is that going to work? You just have a link sitting around to someone else’s world? Or, for instance, could a friend and I link our two worlds together physically, and have the ability to move back and forth between them?

Raph Koster: Because Metaplace works the way the web does, a location in Metaplace is a URL with an anchor. So, a coordinate is literally an anchor.

As a builder you actually get to specify what anchors there are, so what you usually would do is mark the entry doorways, or teleport spots, or spawn points, or whatever. You can easily—I mean this is one of the stock, obvious scripts that we have—is have a script that what it does is tells you to go browse to another anchor point, which, what that does is essentially takes you to that other world.

The other world might not have a link back—again, it works the way the web does. You don’t just walk from world to world, necessarily, because walking from Tetris into WoW is kind of a dumb idea. There is no “you” in Tetris to walk.

If the worlds are both avatar-based, and they happen to share the same style sheets that it even makes sense for you to walk from one to the other, then you can set them up to walk from one to the other. But it also doesn’t make sense for you to fly your EVE spaceship into WoW and start blowing up orcs.

The MMO Gamer: That was actually going to be my next question.

Raph Koster: [Laughing]

The MMO Gamer: If someone would say, be in my far-future sci-fi laser blaster world, and clicks on a portal to an elves and pointy sticks land, how would that work out?

Raph Koster: If they have never been to elves and pointy sticks land they’re probably going to create a character there.

Our take on this whole “universal identity” thing is that people don’t actually want it in their virtual worlds. People like having alts, and they like being a spaceship person in one and an elf in another. They like that and they like that consistency.

So, we’re not going to break that. We’re going to say, “If you want people to be able to move, then you’re going to have to agree upon standards between your worlds so that it would even make sense for somebody to move across,” and the easiest way to do that is for them to actually be worlds that use the same game rules.

You can do that, you can have worlds that show the same game rules linked together, and then each world is more like a zone of a larger thing.

The MMO Gamer: So is all of this running entirely on the web? Is anything client-based?

Raph Koster: The client is really, really thin and stupid, actually. Our Flash client is currently around 30K. It’s really, really thin and stupid.

The client is basically a network client, and, hell, we even use telnet as our base protocol for Flash because it can’t do UDP. It’s very simple network, it’s got a web browser in it, that’s how it fetches assets from the web, and it has essentially a tag parser and an input mapper, that’s it—oh, and a renderer, if you want one.

That’s it, really. So the clients are really, really thin. Really, really thin.

The MMO Gamer: On your personal website you have a somewhat famous quote: “Never put anything on the client. The client is in the hands of the enemy. Never, ever, forget this.”

Raph Koster: Yes.

The MMO Gamer: Is Metaplace perhaps the ultimate expression of this? Moving the entire game onto the web?

Raph Koster: Yes, actually. It’s interesting because I think a more typical question would be the reverse, it’s like, “You’re letting everybody write clients, ahh!” you know? But it’s actually the opposite.

All of the game logic is on the server. We have a cool thing with the markup, which is that you can define, for example, keys that all they do is send markup to the client locally. But, again, that doesn’t let you do anything to effect anybody else, and so it’s mostly for doing things like playing sound effects locally, stuff like that.

All of the logic is on the server, always.

The MMO Gamer: What if someone wanted to write, say, a standalone full-screen client that people could download to their desktop. Would they have the ability to do that?

Raph Koster: [Yes they would], I hope they do, and if they do we’ll host it for them.

The MMO Gamer: What about a client on the Apple] [? [Read companion article for the background on this question]

Raph Koster: I would not only host that for them, I think I would spotlight them. Only, I’ve got to tell you I was an Atari 8-bit guy, myself.

The MMO Gamer: You’ve stated that the system will have the capacity for 3D, but it will not have 3D support at launch. Would that be something you’d be developing in-house, or something you’d leave to the community?

Raph Koster: We’re currently planning on developing it in-house. If the community decides to pick up that ball and run with it, we will gladly cancel said plans.

Our plans for that are—the system is architected because it’s markup based, right? To us, adding 3D is essentially two things:

One, it’s creating a reference client stuff that handles more file formats. So right now we handle a whole bunch of file formats, 2D assets, audio, streaming video, stuff like that. It would essentially be adding loaders for things like COLLADA, SketchUp, or whatever else. And we probably would start with stuff like COLLADA, or SketchUp, because they kind of cut across a wide array of tools.

And then, the second piece that we would develop would probably be a standardized fallback system, so that an asset could be represented with a 3D asset and a 2D asset, and the client picks which one it’s capable of drawing. So we would want to add the fallback support to the tag language so that it becomes part of the standard that everyone can write to.

But, we’re not a company that’s going to be out there writing cool renderers, that isn’t really our expertise. So, more power to ‘em.

The MMO Gamer: As to the capabilities of the renderer once it is available, what sort of features do you anticipate being supported? I assume we’re not talking about Unreal 3, here.

Raph Koster: The nice thing is that because of tags, you can actually add features. It’s fairly easy to say, “Hey, we’ll support a mesh, and then we’ll support skeletal animation for that,” and then we could do things like say, “Ok, now a new tag sends down a specular map, and you can apply it on top of an existing texture. Now a new tag sends down a bump map that you can apply on top of an existing texture.” It is possible to actually add stuff like that.

Currently we’re not doing any of it yet, but it’s not hard to envision. Again, we’re not really client developers, so we haven’t wasted a lot of cycles thinking about it, except to make sure that the system will support that kind of thing.

The MMO Gamer: Tell me about the portal, Metaplace.com. When you go live, what are people going to see there?

Raph Koster: They’re going to see a front page that has spotlighted worlds, that will be cool ones from the community, maybe ones that—frankly—we sold the real estate on the front page to.

There’ll be listings a lot like the front page of YouTube: Popular worlds, most recently added worlds, top worlds within categories, popularity based on rating, based on traffic, based on critical acclaim…

The front page is basically a way for you to come to the page and find something. If you dig a little deeper you’ll find much deeper indexes of the worlds, broken up by category, tag cloud, search indices, all kinds of ways to locate stuff.

You’ll also find user profile stuff. You don’t need to be a member of Metaplace to play anything, you only need to be a member to build something.

However, that said, players may want to have a profile anyway because the profile is if you sign up with us then we can do things like track what worlds you play, give you quickie shortcut lists, track your play history, gallery of avatars that you could stick in a widget on your blog, your favorite worlds widget, stuff like that.

And, access to the virtual currency that we’re going to have across the network, which is a marketplace for buying things like disk quota, bandwidth, more worlds, stuff like that.

We’re not out to replicate social networks, we’re really basically not out to replicate anything, the whole idea with a lot of this stuff would be that you could export it from your profile onto any other page on the net. So we’ve been talking a lot about essentially having an achievements kind of system that exists network wide, badges, for creators and players, stuff like that that is across the whole spectrum of all the Metaplaces rather than being about one world.

The MMO Gamer: When I initially read the announcement, the first three things that popped into my head as to being the major hurdles that the system would have to overcome were money, money, and money.

So, let’s talk about that.

You’re obviously a business, with rent to pay and employees on salary, and I assume you would like to keep it that way.

Where does the money come from in this system?

Raph Koster: We were originally VC funded, but obviously we don’t expect to be taking money throughout our existence that way.

We actually have a variety of business models, and this of course is the stuff that the players always hate us talking about, but we’re going to talk about it anyway, because they’re all enlightened people and understand that we need to make money.

The virtual currency that exists at the network level is probably key. There are a lot of services that we can provide users that exist at that network level, it’s everything from, “Hey, if you tend to play the games on our site there’s probably going to be ads on our site, you don’t want ads,” that’s an upsell. Getting access to the richer profile stuff might be an upsell.

There’s all kinds of things like that… just think of it like tiered service. You register with us you start getting benefits.

You can also, if you’re a content creator of any sort, you can charge other people the virtual currency for access to your worlds, for your scripts, modules, for example, stuff like that. There’s a marketplace for content creators, and we’ll take a cut of stuff on the marketplace.

And we’re going to be the only source of minting the currency, so people who want to obtain it have to get it from us.

Approved business partners will be able to cash out that virtual currency, so if you make a popular world, at some point we’re going to come knocking at your door and saying, “Your world’s really kind of expensive to run, the bandwidth load, the hosting load, and so on, we need you to pay us.”

And we’re going to bill you in the virtual currency, so you could turn around and charge your users in the virtual currency. At that point it’s basically like we’re your billing system in a box. You don’t need to get set up with your own system or anything. And then if you are an approved partner you can cash out whatever profit you make, so at that point you can basically an MMO business on top of Metaplace, and that’s fine with us. There’s all of that kind of thing.

And there’s other things on top of that, we’ve been in talks lots of possible partners who want to run commercial worlds, people who have existing IP in other areas that want to bring it over to Metaplace, there’s people who want to run storefronts, all kinds of things like that. The reason to use a virtual currency is because it kind of cuts across all of those applications, we can always end up as the virtual currency and use it as a transfer mechanism, and then on top of that there’s ad stuff. You know, the usual.

The MMO Gamer: Being an American company I would assume that the US Dollar is going to be the primary means of exchange for the currency system. What about international players? Will you have support for the Canadian Dollar, Pounds Sterling, Euros?

Raph Koster: We’ve already been approached by people who want to handle our business overseas, essentially.

A big thing here is that unlike even a lot of the sharded MMOs, we are not interested in creating like “Metaplace Europe,” or “Metaplace China,” or whatever. There is going to be one network.

Again, a virtue of the virtual currency setup is we can have partners who will handle essentially the billing mechanism for you to obtain virtual currency, so there could be a Chinese partner for that, or a partner in Europe, and so on, and lots of different possible payment methods, but you’ll still end up in the one virtual currency.

The MMO Gamer: You said that if I have, for example, an addictive puzzle game, I would be able to charge people, for instance, eight Metas—or whatever you’re going to call the currency—for access to it?

Raph Koster: Yeah.

The MMO Gamer: What if I want to charge a hundred Metas?

Raph Koster: …Ok…

The MMO Gamer: The reason I ask is—

Raph Koster: [Laughing] They have to agree!

The MMO Gamer: In seemingly every single game—or, in your case, system—that releases with an auction house, you always have certain enterprising individuals who put up items for say, two copper, and a hundred gold.

Raph Koster: Right.

The MMO Gamer: People see the two copper part, and ignore the hundred gold part. So, do you have any plans to combat quote-unquote “Meta Fraud”?

Raph Koster: The thing about “Meta Fraud” kind of things is they are very dependant on what the actual interface looks like. That precise example you cite is an interface problem. So, until we have that interface it’s kind of hard to say what plans we need to put in place to fight it, because, to my mind, a lot of that kind of thing is essentially a flaw in the UI design.

The key thing to understand is that because the virtual currency is a network level thing, you aren’t writing that code in your world. You are accessing our API, and it happens on our site, so we can verify the transaction, we can make sure that it was correct, we can double check and make sure the popup confirms, and all that kind of thing. So it’s not like you can just willy-nilly “Somebody logs into my world, I’m going to drain their account!” Can’t do that.

The MMO Gamer: Getting further into the money issue—

Raph Koster: Even further?! [Laughing]

The MMO Gamer: What is your stance on the “ownership” of virtual property?

Raph Koster: We are the network, we are not the world operator, we don’t run your world, customer service is your job. Similarly, we’re not claiming ownership of your stuff. It would be kind of silly considering that you may have links to it from some place else. It probably isn’t on our site, even.

The MMO Gamer: So if someone has a popular world, gets sick of running it, and decides to sell it on eBay for a few grand, the company wouldn’t have a problem with that?

Raph Koster: That’s essentially selling the account to access it, from an admin point of view.

The only thing about that is at that point I would have to check with lawyers to find out if there are any weird privacy questions where we could end up liable because you transferred your account with your credit card information to somebody else. So there’s weird things like that, I think the way to put it is actually we’re kind of like a hosting company.

You’re uploading a copy of information, you’re using our tools to create information. When something is created you get the copyright, so the IP is going to remain yours, whether or not it literally makes sense for you to transfer your account, or whether we need to set up a mechanism maybe for you to give your world to another active account, maybe we have to do that, I don’t know. I mean, the core of the thing is if you make a kick-ass game idea, we don’t own it, that’s your kick-ass game idea.

I’m sure there’s all kinds of legalese around that, where we have to have licenses to display it, and all kinds of crap like that, but…

The MMO Gamer: On another somewhat touchy subject: In-game advertising. Will builders who aren’t charged for hosting periodically have their pages taken over by McGriddles, ala IGN?

Raph Koster: Honestly, we don’t know yet. I think that there will be advertising on the portal. I think that there is the potential to do advertising in the games, I think that throwing up McGriddle ads in somebody’s carefully crafted fantasy world makes no sense at all, and doesn’t help anybody. It doesn’t help the advertiser, it doesn’t help the player, and it doesn’t help the world operator, because all it does is tick everybody off.

I don’t think that any of those things make sense. However, if somebody wants a world full of ads—which some people will—some people will want to make a realistic world with ads in it, some people will want to do things like storefronts which are essentially ads, more power to them.

The MMO Gamer: Are you considering the possibility for sponsored worlds? Halo 4 Online brought to you by Mountain Dew Game Fuel?

Raph Koster: Sure.

The MMO Gamer: But you aren’t currently in talks for anything like that?

Raph Koster: If I were in talks with numerous potential partners I couldn’t disclose who they were.

The MMO Gamer: Moving on to yet another prickly subject: Intellectual property rights. Would a creator who uploads content onto the marketplace you mentioned earlier be able to specify their own license for it? For instance, GNU open source, or Creative Commons?

Raph Koster: We haven’t settled on—we know that we will allow people to mark stuff as open or closed, for sure. And in fact, probably as just open and copyable, closed copyable, and closed non-copyable, for sure. Kind of three tiers that we know we’ll have.

Having stuff like support for Creative Commons licensing, something like that, is a natural fit I think, [but] there is essentially a gap between what you can enforce in code and what you cannot. So our primary goal is IP rights that can be enforced in code. A lot of the Creative Commons stuff is effectively, “It’s open source, but I’m putting this text tag on it,” you know. So putting a text tag on it is the easy part. The harder part for us is employing the hard coding.

The MMO Gamer: How would you deal with, say, someone using a ton of unauthorized copyrighted material in their worlds?

Raph Koster: If we get a takedown notice we’re going to have to respect it. Especially for hosting assets, we have to respect that, it’s the law.

The MMO Gamer: Under what circumstances would you delete a user’s world outright?

Raph Koster: Nonpayment? [Laughing] Something illegal?

We are not out to tell you what your world should be, we’re not out run your worlds for you. Obviously there are things—because anybody could be liable—where there are cases where something illegal is going on, something that actually needs to be taken, it wouldn’t matter if it were us or if it were a website host or whatever, people have to take action.

If somebody goes and starts planning terrorism, or if somebody starts plotting a murder, or if somebody is using it to extort… you know, whatever, who knows. Yeah, you take action for things like that.

But, we’re not really even going to be looking at what you’re doing, because we’re running the platform, and hopefully there’s so many worlds we have no idea what’s happening on all of them.

The MMO Gamer: Moving on once again. I have tried to come up with a more… delicate… way of phrasing this question but have always come up short, so I’m just going to have to ask it straight out: What are you going to do to ensure that every other world doesn’t just end up devolving into a shemale furry orgy?

Raph Koster: I actually have no doubts that we will have plenty of those worlds. I also have a lot of faith in users as to the diversity of stuff that they actually want to see, and want to make.

You have to understand that unlike the projects that stuff everybody’s creations into one world, our worlds are segmented, so you won’t be seeing the giant shemale furry penis bouncing whatever orgies happening over your fence in your back yard. That won’t be happening—well, unless you put it there, which I wouldn’t you past you, but hey— [Laughing]

The MMO Gamer: Thanks, Raph.

Raph Koster: So the worlds are segmented that way, you decide who has permission to edit your world, essentially.

That’s the first thing, you won’t bump into that stuff by accident. And then the second thing is we’ve already gotten such an amazing diverse array of people and of projects that people want to make, and so far the only mentions of “Hey, let’s make porno world,” or whatever, have actually been jokes on f13. Most people are actually saying, “Hey, I want to make cyberpunk world, I want to make a university, I want to…” you know.

People really want to use it, and I think if that’s the case we’ll see a big diversity of projects.

The MMO Gamer: I’m aware of the restrictions for individual worlds, but I was speaking more broadly as to all the worlds in the system in general. People given unlimited freedoms tend to take those freedoms to the extreme.

You’ve mentioned yourself in interviews, the first thing many people associate when they think of Second Life is flying penises. And, if a game—or system, in your case—doesn’t have its reputation, it has nothing.

Second Life eventually had to go so far as to implement a policy where distributing “broadly offensive” content was punishable by banning and deletion. Are you planning on having any similar policies at launch?

Raph Koster: I’m sure we will need to have some policies, because that broadly offensive category actually is essentially trying to respect laws of places where the client can be played.

We can be as idealistic as we want about—and we are—about freedom of speech and so on, but we still also have to operate inside countries, and countries have laws. We will, I’m sure we will have to have a variety of policies, and they may change over time as we start existing in different territories. Obviously, child pornography would be a great example, that has to go away. That’s a great example of the kind of thing I was referencing earlier, it’s just plain illegal, so it’s just go to go away. In terms of people stumbling across offensive content, we do have a rating system for maturity and all of that kind of thing, one of the beauties of having the portal indexing stuff is that as users come across stuff it can get surfaced, and it can be reported, it can be not displayed in the search results, until enough people have visited it and said that it’s Ok, for example. So there’s lots of things that we can do in order to make sure that the experience at the website doesn’t even necessarily show you the entire universe unless you’re—it’s kind of like SafeSearch, kind of stuff.

The MMO Gamer: Final question. I’m not wishing any ill will on you here, but, companies in the gaming industry have a tendency to, shall we say, go out of business. What would you say to a potential world builder who’s steeling himself to create War and Peace in game form, but is hesitant to do so over concerns for the longevity of the system?

Raph Koster: To some degree there isn’t anything I can say, because they can always just not trust it.

We are well funded, we’ve got backers who are excited and passionate about this space and about what we’re doing. We are opening a fair amount of the platforms, I’m sure if we disappeared somebody could use it to reverse engineer from the other direction. That happens even in the closed-off game industry where stuff isn’t shared.

But even then, I think for us a lot of the excitement here is that we see this as essentially opening up a new segment, opening up new opportunities. And if we don’t succeed somebody else is going to build this, frankly. If we really do flame out then more power to them, I hope they avoid our mistakes.

The MMO Gamer: Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us, Raph, we enjoyed it. We hope we can do it again some time.

Metaplace Part Two: A Meeting at Rancho Bernardo

Published January 11, 2008 By Steven Crews

As a word of forewarning to any new readers: I am a subscriber to the Hunter S. Thompson school of reporting—though, mostly without the drugs. Which means, in a nutshell, that I am given to verbose first-person narrative, which reads more like a pulp novel than a news piece.

Far be it from me to force you to wade through multiple pages of setup and exposition if all you came here for is new Metaplace information (or, at least, as new as a months-old office visit can provide), so, should that be the case, you may feel free to click right here to proceed straight to The Good Stuff.

Also, for anyone unfamiliar with the basic concept behind Metaplace (which I will not be largely not be getting into, as this article is long enough as it is), we have an extensive interview on the subject you can read right here. Or, for those who prefer a slightly more visually stimulating medium, you can also watch the official presentation given at TechCrunch.

As for the rest of you…

A Meeting at Rancho Bernardo

George Orwell once wrote: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” In a time of near-universal evolutionary and derivative game design, the same could be said of attempting to innovate.

I make no great secret of the fact that I’ve been around the block my fair share in the online gaming genre. I started out on MUDs in the early nineties, before moving on to the harder stuff, like UO, and EQ, and haven’t looked back since.

Suffice it to say, in this day and age it takes a hell of a lot for any new project announcement to get me to sit up and take notice.

In the case of Metaplace, I not only sat up, I just about leapt right out of my seat, and was shortly thereafter yelling into the phone at my editor like the clichéd police chief in an old hardboiled detective drama: “Get me Raph Koster!”

In the world of gaming in general, and in the MMO genre in particular, I’d watched, for over a decade, as team sizes ballooned from the dozens into the hundreds; budgets from the thousands, to the millions, to the tens of millions, and rising still with no end in sight, as players demand ever-more polish, ever-more content, ever-larger worlds, and expect it all to be delivered to them in free patches on a monthly basis.

Those of you who took economics (or read Marx) in college will likely recognize this as a pattern of unsustainable growth.

Something had to give. Either games had to start becoming cheaper and easier to make, or, the only people left making them another decade down the road would be the vast, faceless corporations, churning out the same bland sequels based on their stables of licensed properties every six months into perpetuity.

That was where Metaplace would come in. Or, at least, so I hoped after reading the announcement.

But, I’m not one to stand on hope for long. I wanted to know for certain whether this thing was going to be panacea, snake oil, or, more likely, something else entirely in between… which meant that I had to get down there, and see it in person.

So it was that one fine Thursday morning in October I found myself driving over a hundred miles south to Rancho Bernardo, an exurb on the outskirts of San Diego.

There, in a nondescript office block (so nondescript, in fact, that I passed right by it the first time), within earshot of a major freeway, the team at Areae are at work on something that, if successful, should cause everyone to sit up and take notice.

I’ll allow Raph to explain in his own words:

“The whole point of Metaplace is to get more people making more kinds of games and virtual worlds—everywhere—and to make it easy.

The barrier to entry has gotten too high, and we’re tired of seeing the same game getting remade over and over again with shinier graphics. We’re out to fix all of that.”

All that was left to do now was to see if reality would measure up to the words.

The door was closed and the shades were drawn as I knocked—though, this was not practically surprising, as it is a well-known fact that developers are allergic to sunlight—with only an unobtrusive placard on the wall announcing the presence of Areae, Inc within.

After several long moments had passed with no answer forthcoming, I glanced at the placard again just to make sure that I was indeed in the right place, when I noticed that I had already committed my first faux pas of the day, reading the subscript that I hadn’t earlier: ENTRANCE IN COURTYARD. I was knocking on the back door. That would certainly help explain the nondescriptness.

I had just turned on my heel and taken two steps towards where I assumed the courtyard to be located when the door sprung open behind me.

“Sorry,” said a tall and rangy man with a goatee standing in the entryway. “This is the slow door.”

He motioned me inside, into what could only be described as the bachelor apartment of development studios. To call it spartan would have been an insult to Spartans everywhere.

Even the ubiquitous cubicles which seemed to be mandated by law for every office I’ve ever set foot in were conspicuously absent, replaced by an open bullpen layout, consisting primarily of a single room, with rows of desks forming an island down the center, and flanking the walls on all sides.

The only décor of note were various whiteboards coated in multicolored marker scrawl, and posters from games that members of the team had worked on in the last—some of which hadn’t even been hung up yet, propped limply up against the walls from the floor.

One wall in particular was dominated by several whiteboards in a series, which were in turn covered by hundreds of neon-hued Post-it notes. Their scheduling system, they explained. Finished items on the left, items left to do on the right. The right outnumbered the left by roughly ten to one.

Raph waved me over, and greeted me from what could be called the corner office: A desk up against the wall with windows, and only a single neighbor to his left.

After shaking hands and saying our hellos he proceeded to make introductions around the room, identifying everyone by name and a little something about what they did prior to their arrivals at Areae.

Their backgrounds and experience ran the gamut from a man who literally wrote the book on MMO game development, to a recent grad student of UC San Diego.

Most of them glanced up briefly at this new interloper in their midst as Raph came to them, gave me a wave and a nod, and then immediately turned back to their screens. I chalked this up as either a sign of supreme work ethic, or that the delay in opening the door had been due to a hasty secreting away of the slave driving whip and drum into the back room.

With the exception of one or two people who were out of the office, it took under five minutes to meet the entire company. Then, Raph announced, it was time for the tour.

He waved an arm across the room and said, “There’s basically this, a meeting room, and a lounge that nobody uses. That’s it. Just turn 360 degrees, that’s the tour.”

I was suitably impressed. If you looked up “agile development” on Wikipedia, there would be a photo of Areae for illustration.

I was eager to get down into the finer points of Metaplace… but, before we got to business, Raph and I came to a mutual discovery: We were hungry.

Him, because he had seen the dentist that morning and had been unable to eat breakfast; myself, because I had been up until 4AM helping a friend put the finishing touches on her resume, and had gone directly from bed, to shower, and into car, with a brief stopover to put some clothes on, in order to make this noon interview on time.

Aside from which, even if I wasn’t hungry, what the hell kind of MMO gamer would I be if I turned down lunch with Raph Koster?

So, after whittling down the hundred-odd restaurant options within walking distance and settling on Thai, we set off out the door.

As we went, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to pick his brains… which is something I rarely get to do to a person in his position without someone from PR there to ensure that I don’t ask anything even remotely interesting.

Among the varied pearls of wisdom I gleaned during the walk, SWG is evidently properly pronounced “swig,” and he does not relish people blaming him for NGE, as he was off the project a year beforehand; “Before CU, even,” he reminded me.

Also, you should never, ever, ask him about Trammel.

After we’d sat down to eat (I accepted his recommendation of the Bombay Rice), our conversation ranged to everything from handicapping the presidential race, to discussing whether YouTube was making the youth of today stupider, or if they had always been this stupid, and YouTube merely provided a broader window with which to view it.

Well… everything, except for Metaplace.

I know a number of people who don’t like to discuss work over lunch—which tends to be one of the few times of the day they don’t have to discuss work—so, I never brought it up, and neither did he.

The closest we got was when I regaled him with an anecdote about my contribution to the Pitch Your Game panel at GDC San Francisco earlier in the year.

My pitch, coincidently enough, was an MMO utilizing player created content to stay ahead of the “no developer can ever produce faster than players can consume” curve.

One of the panelists was unimpressed, and responded that he was pretty sure that Raph Koster was already working on something along those lines.

To which my retort was, “I’m not sure if Raph Koster is the right guy to do player created content. I believe he was the one who once said, ‘The client is in the hands of the enemy.’”

Raph didn’t seem to find quite as much humor in that as I did. Instead, he seemed more interested in learning the identity of who had been spilling his beans, as there were only supposed to be a few people who knew at that time what they were up to. So, Raph, if you’re reading this, it was that guy, right over there:

As the meal was concluded and the check arrived I found myself facing an ethical dilemma: The editorial policies of this site are such that if I should so much as accept a tissue to blow my nose after a sneeze, it must be disclosed as a potentially biasing gift to me from a developer.

Do I insult his hospitality by offering to go Dutch? Or remain silent and risk incurring the wrath of my editor?

Not wanting to get into an “Oh no, I insist!” argument half an hour after we had met, I elected to keep my mouth shut. After all, I could always just stick it in my write-up to cover myself with full disclosure.

“We’ll let the VCs pay for it,” said Raph, pulling a card out of his wallet.

Now I was starting to feel guilty. We were literally eating his budget. God forbid, should the company ever fold for lack of funds, that Bombay Rice will hang on my conscience as heavily as the proverbial want of a nail for which the kingdom was lost.

I could almost picture him now, laying prostrate on the ground, fist clenching the receipt in rage, his accountant looking down at him disapprovingly, chastely remarking, “If you hadn’t bought that guy lunch, we wouldn’t be in this mess!”

To which Raph’s only response would be to bellow out a black curse from the very depths of his soul: “Damn you, Crews! Damn you to hell!”

Thankfully, for now nothing so melodramatic occurred. Instead, I expressed my gratitude for lunch, and we began the return trip to the office.

On the way, we discussed the irrational hatred the posters on the Fires of Heaven boards seem to harbor towards him, and I revealed one half of the reason for the enthusiasm behind my visit:

“I’m an old MUD guy,” I told him. “I wish MUDs never went away. I see Metaplace as a way to get back into that old Online Creation spirit, when there were a dozen new servers popping every week.”

Raph shook his head. “MUDs haven’t gone away,” he insisted. “LegendMUD is still around. A lot of others are still going.”

“Alright,” I ceded his point, “they haven’t quite gone away entirely, but they’ve been relegated to the same corner of the internet as the NAMBLA website.”

On that pleasant note, we arrived back at the office.

The Good Stuff

No sooner had we gotten inside than Raph beat me to the punch by offering, “How about a quick demo before we do the interview? Might help with your questioning.”

As I was just about to suggest that very thing, I was, as you can imagine, very amenable to the offer.

Before proceeding any further, I would remind you that everything I’m about to describe comes from viewing the alpha version of Metaplace. The odds are very good that by the time you read this just about everything will have in some way been changed.

We took our seats in the corner office (after I’d stolen a chair from the desk of someone who had yet to arrive to work), and Raph fired up his web browser.

First up was a brief overview of the portal—though, this portion of the demo was somewhat inadvertent. They were unfortunately experiencing a few technical difficulties, whereby most of the worlds Raph attempted to load greeted us with an error message, and he spent several minutes clicking around the site looking for ones that worked.

Truly, one of my life’s greatest regrets was being unable to see Cuppycake’s contribution, Ponyplace.

While I was obviously, given the mandate of this site, most interested in the potential online gaming development aspects of the system, one look at the available categories on the Play section of the site and it became clear that Areae had no intention of being pigeonholed into anything so narrow.

They ran from such things as Shops, Lectures, Meetings, and Religious… to the strangest for me personally: Political Campaigns.

All that I can really say about that one is God help the state of democracy in the world when things deteriorate to the point of “Which candidate you would most like to have an imaginary beer with in a virtual world while roleplaying on your Fursona?”

Then, as if on cue, the next page contained a list of subgenres, and I couldn’t help but grin, “I’m sure Goth and Furry will be seeing a lot of use.”

Raph shrugged, “I’m sure they will, too. That’s why we added them.”

After this, he walked me through the process of creating a new world. It took, literally, three steps, 45 seconds, and was so easy that my mother could do it—and she has to call me to ask which button to push any time she wants to check her email.

The first step comprised choosing a genre from three categories: Games, Social, or Serious. We stuck to Games, which opened up such options as Fantasy Roleplaying, Science Fiction Roleplaying, Arcade, Puzzle, and Sports.

Following this was a page to select the builder’s skill level, with options for“Noob,” “Bring It,” and “Hardcore.”

We went with Noob—which was presumably the reason for both the ease and speed of creation—and, on the final page we were prompted to choose a base style sheet which sets the starting look and feel of the world—whether you want it to be Tetris, UO, or Zork—and then enter a name and address.

This last bit was the part that worried me, as at the moment it seems that whatever you choose ends up as metaplace.com/worldname.

Anyone who has ever tried to find an unclaimed domain to register can tell you there are only so many appealing combinations of words in the English language… and the good ones go fast.

Unless a subdomain or category system is implemented—something along the lines of metaplace.com/fantasy/worldname, etc.—I could easily see the addresses devolving into obscure acronyms or nonsense within the first few months.

Of course, it is supposedly possible to ignore the portal entirely once your world is made, distribute your own client, and run your own website completely independent of Areae. So, should that be the case, what address you acquire will likely be a moot point.

After receiving an update as to which worlds were working and which were not, Raph fired up the first: The now-familiar cartoon girl and her cheerful apartment (featured in the lead story image for this article), which, if I recall, was headlined on the front page of the portal as “Shortiez at Metaplace.”

Based on appearances, I wondered idly if Shortiez were some manner of Bratz-esque line of dolls designed to relieve the parents of tweens of their hard-earned paychecks, but, a quick check of Google later on revealed nothing of the sort.

Raph pointed out various features to me, such as magazines on the coffee table that pulled up RSS feeds for various sites (with raphkoster.com topping the list), or the NPC who could be instructed to read off headlines in chat bubbles.

Next up was what was described as “Our Subspace clone,” a top-down shooter which he touted as having, “a dozen pickups and full physics,” which, “basically took one guy a week to make.”

As there was no one else playing at the time, Raph didn’t have much else to do aside from making a lap or two around the map before moving on.

The final demo was the stick figure shooter mentioned in the interview, Josh-fu. Like the space sim, there was no one else playing, so, after moving around the map and shooting a few walls to demonstrate basic functionality, he decided to take the opportunity to show off the editor, loading it with a single click in the same browser window he had been playing in a moment prior.

Once again, I was impressed by the sheer simplicity of the system. The basic level of the editor was, to borrow Steve Jobs’ favorite catch-phrase from his days at NeXT, “total WYSIWYG.” Point and click, drag and drop, and copy and paste seemed to be all the skills necessary to create a relatively simple game.

For those interested in going deeper, editing of the bare code down to the basic elements was available with a few additional clicks, with human-readable scripts broken down into blocks of functions designed to be easily transferred between games.

And, if you want to go deeper but are unsure where to begin, there was also a full Wiki, with articles covering everything from standalone client creation to the fundamentals of Lua.

Raph was now starting to move out of show and tell territory and beginning to discuss some of the more underlying aspects of the system, so I switched on my voice recorder. I have a fine memory for conversations (such as everything you’ve read up to this point), but technical minutiae goes right in one ear and out the other.

In hindsight I wished I had turned it on sooner, as I’m sure there were many other things I would have liked to have quoted him on.

Case in point, much of the article from this point on will be essentially one long direct quote. Call me self-deprecating, but I think most people would prefer to hear the systems explained straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were, rather than filtered through the lens of my own admitted biases.

So, I’ll allow Raph to take it from here:

“The markup language is the basic thing. We use that for the network communications. It’s not XML, because XML would be four times too heavy, way too data intensive, just… too much. We wanted something which was still human readable—you could literally write it by hand if you really wanted to—and you actually do describe the whole world with it. You don’t describe assets, which is key. All assets are links on the web.”

The editor for Josh-fu was still on the screen, and, to emphasize his point, he moused over to the sidebar where a number of the game’s graphic resources were displayed, hovering the cursor over a bullet icon. “For instance, this is just a URL to an image somewhere.” Sure enough, upon clicking it, a box popped up with the bullet’s web address.

I immediately saw a bit of a problem with this system, and asked, “Aren’t you concerned that a year down the road every other world is going to be filled with boxes with little red Xs in them?” Visions of a million people who didn’t know the meaning of “hotlinking” danced in my head.

John Donham, Areae’s VP of Production, who had been observing the demo relatively mutely up to that point took the opportunity to chime in, “We are. But, if someone doesn’t have a reliable host, we plan on offering image hosting and things like that for them. We don’t think it will be that big of a problem.”

I considered pointing out that hosting content on their own servers would remove their plausible deniability of “That isn’t our child porn/copyrighted material/government secrets in that guy’s world, in fact it’s not even hosted by us, your honor!” But, I’m no lawyer. I assumed they’d had someone jump through the legal hoops for them on that subject already.

Raph continued:

“Metamarkup is our equivalent of HTML. And, just like HTML we expect there to be many, many browsers. Our equivalent of browsers is the client. You’ve seen the Flash client… We actually have a standalone C++ client, we even have a client written in BASIC. Anybody can write a client, and we hope that lots of people will write clients, for whatever platforms they want.”

“You may be letting the genie out of the bottle with that one,” I suggested. “I could just picture the Apple II client in six months.”

Raph seemed to like that idea, and started laughing. “Hey, Sean,” he called across his desk, “Apple II client? That sound good?”

“Yeah, I’ll get right on that.” Sean called back, disinterestedly.

“But yeah,” Raph said, “that would be awesome.” He then issued the statement I took the liberty of co-opting at the beginning of the article before going on:

“The level above the browser is things like style sheets and modules. Apache, out of the box, doesn’t do very much. It serves up a plain old webpage. It doesn’t have any extra logic, it doesn’t come with shopping carts, or search engines, or anything like that. But, you can get plug-ins for it.

Our game server is like Apache. It doesn’t make a lot of assumptions about what kind of games are running on it. You saw the shooter game, you saw the virtual apartment, you saw the space one with physics and stuff—I didn’t show you Tetris, but we’ve got that too—all running on the same server.

It doesn’t make assumptions about, ‘I need a weather system,’ or anything like that. The server is really lean and mean. It’s got physics, it’s got web services so that it can talk to the web in and out, it’s got collision and path finding, things that are really, really common that lots of people want, but then it doesn’t have ‘move,’ and it doesn’t even have ‘talk,’ because those things are going to vary too much from game to game.

Then, the level above Apache on the web is essentially CGI. It’s the scripting stuff. For us, that’s how you build your games. It’s essentially the same thing as via CGI, only in our case it’s via Metascript, which is based on Lua, but we’ve made it event-driven, and made it sandboxed. It’s sandboxed so that if a couple of you are working on the same world and you mess your script up it doesn’t mess break anybody else. And it’s event-driven because that’s easier to pick up and it works better for network gameplay.

Other than that, it’s Lua syntax. We’ve got an API that exposes all the stuff that the server can do. You can create your own data structures, you can create your own objects, you can create your own behaviors… Like, we wrote Bubble Chat in half a day. That’s the other nice thing, it’s really easy. Something even like writing Bubble Chat isn’t really that hard.

So, that’s our equivalent of CGI.

The next step above that is, of course, if you want to make a website these days you go on the net and you have Blogger, or WordPress, or Joomla… there’s a lot of out of the box solutions.

If you want a shopping cart, you don’t have to code a shopping cart in CGI any more, you can just go get one, and there are modules that you can just plug in. So we support style sheets and modules. In the create world walkthrough I showed you, we could pick a style sheet and then get a brand new world from0 that. I could inherit a whole world with all the rules—kind of like starting up a Diku—or, you can get modules that are parts of worlds.

Let’s say you want the RPG Bubble Chat, plus the space game’s movement system with full inertia, and then you change the view, and replace all the art and make it tanks, and now you have tanks doing Bubble Chat in isometric view. That’s fairly easy, you just have to assemble the pieces. Changing the view is just hitting a toggle key.

The last step above everything else is the Google, the Yahoo, and that’s what the portal is. It lets you find stuff. Every world that gets created gets ratings, reviews, a forum, a blog, a wiki—community infrastructure.

We’re not out to replace all of the stuff that’s out there already for that, we’re not going to be making the coolest blog system, or the coolest any of those, it’s just a starter so that with one click you have something to work with. Then, if you want to go set up your own site, and your own forum, and your own blog and your own everything, go for it. We’d be thrilled not to have your hosting bill.

We said, even before we announced Metaplace, when the company was founded, ‘We’re going to make them work the way the web does.’ We meant that totally literally. Everybody thought that we meant it in some kind of metaphorical way, but no, we meant it really, really literally. That’s what it does, from the ground up.”

The demo was thus concluded, and we retired to Areae’s meeting room, where we held our lengthy discussion on some of the finer points of the system.

As we spoke, I had the opportunity to look back and reflect on what I had seen of Metaplace so far.

Taken on their own, the three worlds showcased in the demo were not overtly remarkable. Aside from the built-in multiplayer component, they were along the lines of the type of things that get posted to Newgrounds dozens of times per day.

Even the vision of a unified world-building language designed to “work the way the web does” has been attempted before. Anyone remember VRML?

What was very remarkable, as Raph pointed out, was that they were all being displayed on the same client, running on the same server, and built using the same tools, all the while being organized and hosted from a common portal.

And, the fact that those same worlds would have played just as well, client willing, on a cell phone, a full screen Windows or Mac client, or the middle of your MySpace profile—right in between the jukebox applet filled with horrid music, and the personality test results stating that you are 85% Evil.

Add to this a combination of financial backing, intelligent design choices, and name recognition clout (honestly, how many of you haven’t lapsed into referring to Areae as “Raph Koster’s company,” or to Metaplace as “Raph Koster’s project”? I will admit to both, often having to correct myself out of respect for the rest of the team) and you find a strong potential to succeed where others have faltered.

As the interview drew to a close and I was gathering up my things to embark on the long drive home, I revealed to Raph the second half of the reason for the enthusiasm behind my visit:

“I’ve been saying for years that the gaming industry is terminally diseased, and what it needs is for a new Guttenberg to come along and reinvent the printing press.”

“Oh,” Raph said, with the slightest hint of sarcasm. “No pressure, there.”

I shrugged, “You guys are getting the closest to that as anyone I’ve seen in years, so I’d say you’re definitely on the right track.”

That was true enough.

As I stepped out the door—thanking them for putting up with me for so long as I went—it was with a sense of cautious optimism. I walked into that office with doubts. I walked out with some of those doubts allayed, and entirely new ones founded in their place. But, for now, those are doubts that I will not share here.

It is not for me to tell a company attempting something new how I think they could do it better. My criticisms and scorn are reserved only for those who content themselves to not only do the same old things that have come before, but can’t even be bothered to do them well.

Areae, so far, has most decidedly not fallen into the latter category.