InformationWeek’s sneak peek at Metaplace

 Posted by (Visited 5518 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with:
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!

 Posted by (Visited 5828 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with:
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!

UGC and IP in a cloning world

 Posted by (Visited 10123 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Nov 042008
 

Slashdot is discussing an article at Joystiq about UGC and IP rights which comes from a GamePolitics news item of a few days ago about the update to the PSN TOU around UGC — specifically because of LittleBigPlanet.

The bottom line, amidst all that linkage? Sony is taking a fairly traditional approach to IP rights, from a networked game sense:

Sony can use user content without restriction to advertise. They can also ‘commercially exploit’ your creations without permission, and if they do benefit ‘commercially’ (read: monetarily) from your creations, they owe you nothing. You’re also agreeing to abandon your moral rights to the work. Most importantly, you’re not allowed to commercially benefit from your creation without their permission.

— Mark Methentis, Joystiq

Now, LittleBigPlanet feels more like a toy in a lot of ways — you work with the pieces they give you. Then again, it took mere moments in UO for someone to grab a bunch of fish and spell out a dirty word on the bridge in the middle of Britain. (What’s more, seeing that occasioned a moment of glee from the team, though perhaps not from management).

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Metaplace funding, name change, invite-only beta

 Posted by (Visited 12797 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with: , ,
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):

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Your invite to Metaplace Beta

 Posted by (Visited 11057 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Oct 152008
 

Today is an exciting day for me.

It was in mid-2006 that I was sitting in my spare bedroom working on a prototype client for what would become Metaplace. My wife was running the server on her desktop Mac in another room. We managed to get some tags hardcoded into a text mud’s room description, and pretty soon we were two blue circles running around on a field – all streamed off the Internet. And even back then, I really wanted to show it to you guys here on the blog, because even though it didn’t look like much, it was really cool.

Well, today I do get to share it with you! Or rather, what it became. We’re a little ways past the blue circle thing at this point.

It’s an early look – we are most definitely still in testing, and closed testing at that. But it felt like it was time to let some more folks at it.

If you go to http://www.metaplace.com and enter the code EARLYLOOK in the text field where it says “Redeem invite key,” you’ll be given access to the testing. But you better hurry, because there are only 200 key uses available. If you don’t make it into the first 200, sign up for the waiting list – we’re letting in cohorts every week now.

Once you’re in, send me a friend request, send me a message, come visit the forums, and let me know what you think!

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