Is there such as thing as a casual online world?

 Posted by (Visited 11528 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,
Apr 092008
 

I’m not sure there is, at least as we understand it. Not at the moment, anyway.

When we speak of “casual” we mean a cluster of things. Sometimes we mean targeting a different demographic, one not excited by the hardcore fantasy-and-sci-fi fictions we concoct. Sometimes we mean shorter play sessions. Sometimes we mean things like not requiring grouping in the worlds, which makes it easier for a less dedicated player to have fun.

More “casual” experiences often have a connotation of being shallow. One thing that is clear, though, is that it doesn’t matter how casual you make an experience, some people will use it in a hardcore manner.  And that means that it must have hidden depths of some sort. A shallow experience simply doesn’t tend to keep people.

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Metachat is on Facebook now too

 Posted by (Visited 9826 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , ,
Mar 272008
 

You can get it here.

This actually connects to the same chat world as the one on MySpace, and the one on our forums. So it’s all one big happy cross-SNS virtual worldlet in Flash.

We also got a bunch of forums interested in trying to integrate a Metaplace world on their forums… it’ll be one based on Metachat to start with, though it can of course change later. It’ll be their own world, though.

Last time I mentioned this little app on here, people challenged the question of whether it was actually a world or not. Well, it supports hundreds to thousands, there’s physics, a sense of place and space, you can kick a soccer ball, interact in real time… the background could scroll, and you could have avatars instead of profile pics. So… close enough, to my mind. 🙂

BTW, we’re going to start spotlighting community members and their worlds. The first spotlight is up now — Tachevert (of WorldIV) and his world “Danser,” which is one of my favorite MP projects so far.

Metachat launches on MySpace

 Posted by (Visited 7605 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with: ,
Mar 132008
 

Metachat logoWow, it’s been a crazy couple of weeks.:)

We’ve said all along that Metaplace is a platform for making all sorts of virtual worlds. I know a lot of you are waiting for games written in it – specifically an RPG, probably. But well, games are hard, and they take time. And we didn’t see any reason to wait! So we decided that it was time to start releasing some of the worlds that have been made with Metaplace, and today we launched the first one – a simple chat room.

This is part of the OpenSocial launch on MySpace, so it’ll be interesting and exciting to be in the first wave of apps… as of right now, we seem to be the #1 app. Of course, it just launched a few minutes ago. 😉 I fully expect to get overtaken any second now by Flixster…

There’s a more detailed post on this over at the Metaplace website, including some implementation tidbits.

If you have a MySpace profile, you can hit the apps page to add it, or visit Metachat directly.