I’ve been hanging around Metaplace for a good while now and it has been fun watching it develop. Look forward to seeing what open beta brings (since an awful lot of development is from users)
I keep misreading that as “Meatplace”. Is that intentional? Like, a bad pun that is also a really deep comment on the contrast between the potential of the internet and the actual uses it is put to?
It seemed clever and cute to me. I will be interested to see what kind of games people build. I’d like to ditch the cutesy look though. I hope something different for avatars becomes available. In fact, I’d like to ditch the avatar most of the time too and just click on things. I don’t really need to move an avatar around all the time.
I wish I had something interesting to say about Metaplace, but I really don’t. I loaded it up, played the tutorial a little, then never went back. I don’t want that to sound like an indictment because I’m sure the problem is all user-sided. I’m just hardwired for gamey games. All I see in a sandbox is a bunch of sand.
The people complaining about the lack of a game at Metaplace are missing the point. Metaplace isn’t a game; Metaplace is where you can make your own VW game, VW chat room, VW market place, whatever.
It’s cool to see what people come up with but I’m not really a creator so there isn’t much there for me as of yet. I check in every so often to see what’s new but until someone creates a game I’m interested in playing, I’m not going to be spending much time there.
“To drey-yeah, that is true, and the features do seem exciting, but most of us suck at creating things.”
Yup. But that doesn’t seem to stop bucketloads of people from creating bucketloads of crap. I’m still wondering how Metaplace will make its $. Time magazine has a listing of what it calls the top 10 technology flops of the past decade….Youtube is on the list. Not because it doesn’t get traffic but because they haven’t been able to make a buck from it.
I hope it works well, I’d love for Raph Koster to get a huge honking moneyhat
I remember when Second Life launched and people said the same thing. SL, in it early days, was not a giant red-light district but a rather benign, glorified chat room. Sure, you could fly around and teleport and stuff but there wasn’t much meat. SL wanted its users to fill in the blank. For all intents and purposes, SL and MP are basically just like HTML: a toolset to build something else. So you can either invent Geocities or you can invent Google. And until that blank gets filled it, people yawn and move on.
The problem that places like this run into is you wind up wanting people to come and you begin to look at where most of the traffic goes and come up with one word: sex. At which point you world begins to slowly devolve as people begin to compete for traffic and, thus, begin pandering to the lowest common denominator. Hence you get SL in its current form.
MP seems to have avoided the issue for now because all the avatars are of the chibi variety and probably can’t be scripted to the degree that SL can. I’d also bet the TOS is a bit more strict as well. It’s also private worlds which means you don’t run across it by accident. It should be interesting to see how Koster avoids the long term problems of devolving content and how many people build successful non-sexual content in MP.
@Tmon: I was in the closed beta and didn’t do much with it either, sadly; the new WoW expansion launched around the same time I got in. /sigh
@JuJutsu: I think at least part of the way making money is intended is through the marketplace to buy widgets and what-not to world build with. I’m sure Raph has lots of other ideas or he wouldn’t have begun the company.
Boanerges :
all the avatars are of the chibi variety and probably can’t be scripted to the degree that SL can. I’d also bet the TOS is a bit more strict as well. It’s also private worlds which means you don’t run across it by accident. It should be interesting to see how Koster avoids the long term problems of devolving content and how many people build successful non-sexual content in MP.
The avatars — indeed ALL the art — can be changed completely.
Scripting is both easier and more powerful than SL’s.
And finally, the TOS is looser, not stricter, and based on the Rights of Avatars stuff.
BUT, it’s a segmented world, with private areas, and you cannot take your creations to other people’s worlds. Which pretty much resolves most of that.
What this really looks like to me is a game that appeals to those who may have enjoyed The Sims Online. The video reveals what looks to be a very similar control scheme and props.
On top of this, they grant players the abilities to invent their own games and introduce their own content. Lets face it: that’s way better than anything The Sims Online had.
Strictly speaking, that Second Life is 3D may actually be a point against it here: where user-created content is concerned, 2D content is much easier to create and make look good.
What would be my lead concern at the reigns? First, I’d want the game to catch on. Second, I’d hope that the copyrighted and/or obscene content doesn’t prove the primary draw to the point where overlooking such a travesty proves the shortest route to success. Second Life managed to catch on, but it devolved so drastically that I suspect some people on the payroll secretly wish it didn’t.
You know, the Second Life it is a glorificated chat room, the issue is that become a glorificated ADULT chat room. If we dont see it as a game (thai it isnt) and we see it as a place when sexually frustrated people with fetishs can interact between each other, then i believe that its fine.
Will MetaPlace devolve in teh pr0n? Well its less realistic, an isometric 2d world with chibis is less sexually atractive, if you cant show everybody your fetishs and if theres isnt that competition for “who got more visitors” that flourish in Second Life…well it can hold. Like Habbo Hotel.
@JuJutsu
No, go to a real cafe with real friends and talk about how you killed pixels in a real game.
People doing cafes or protests in REAL games are wannabe role players. People playing SL or Metacafe are just idiots (yes, that many idiots out there in the world).
User-created content tends to have a lot of fail and a lot of sex, but historically it hasn’t taken terribly fancy protocols to allow users to find usable quality and to find whatever level of sexual content they’re looking for, including nearly none. E.g., I don’t know all that much about Usenet, but my impression was that its protocols aren’t so complicated underneath. Admittedly Usenet didn’t completely cope all that well with enormous scale and spam-related issues, but if Metaplace scales up as far as Usenet and only degrades as much as Usenet did, that sounds like a success to me. HTTP has scaled up to a good fraction of the world population, and people can still find content. Modern HTTP is pretty complicated, but the underlying navigation architecture largely dates to prehistoric versions of HTTP which were not very complicated. Wikis and IRC servers reward care in thinking about community management, but they don’t require rocket social science to be useful.
There are lots of ways that Metaplace could fail. Even if its design and implementation are technically very solid, it is hard to design something that is flexible and understandable and supports something that people actually want to do and aren’t doing already. (Revealed preference can be a lot more revealing in hindsight than in foresight.) It is also hard to launch something in such a way that it catches on (or, alternatively, hard to target precisely the right niche at precisely the right time so that catching on will happen relatively naturally). Avoiding being swamped by too much sex and garbage doesn’t seem terribly hard in comparison.
It’s kinda neat. Little slow as my connection sucks atm. But I do love sim type/ builder games, could care less for the chat aspect.
I’ll play with it somemore when I have time. Though someone stole my name!
It’s interesting how some people will see no issue with correspondence via instant messaging over phone, email, or instant messengers, but the minute you invite people in to play with virtual world tools, it’s “get a life, loser.”
@geldonyetich
Generalize more. Did you ever open a cafe in a virtual world and did you protest against too high coffee prices? With your so called friends?
I’m not nearly enough of the extroverted social butterfly to find those activities appealing.
For me, messing around in virtual Metaplace space threatens to pull me out of my shell, not provide an avenue to retreat further in.
That these so-called friends of mine might be mincing pedophiles or proud animal fornicators is second to the concern I’d probably not be socializing with anybody at all if left to my own devices.
EpicSquirt :
People playing SL or Metacafe are just idiots (yes, that many idiots out there in the world).
Seems like a pretty uneducated statement to me. Perhaps you should log in and check it out instead of blindly lashing out Metaplace has a brilliant back-end that supports some pretty good scripting. I was capable of writing some nifty little games in very little time. The scripting is LUA-based, so it’s easy to learn so long as you follow their API wiki, which is very well documented if you ask me.
This isn’t WOW or EQ. That’s not what it was meant to be. You should probably stop judging it as such, since it will get you nowhere fast.
I sat there this weekend glued to the damn game. And I can’t even script…yet. (though it motivated me to start reading thier wiki tutorials)
It’s pretty wild, especially if you have a collection of skills including photoshop, or 3d modeling, but for the people that enjoy world building with no art skills, just import other peoples models, which I did as I tried to figure out the toolset.
I’m curious how smooth it will run though, I was trying to get a car game going. Built the world, but couldn’t find any behaviours that fit, and when I tried to do it myself, the car kept dissapearing.
My lack of scripting ability did stop me dead in my tracks.
I think it needs more non-programmer features. Ready made scripts to get basic games going. It has some, just not enough for the casual yet. Cool game, or toolset, or whatever you call it.
@Georgia
Enjoy yourself, I’ll continue suffering (losing braincells) from reading all the people who want to develop the next WoW with just LUA in the meanwhile. I’m not saying you want to do it, but public APIs in games bring too many amateur programmers to the surface and are often an excuse for not providing polished built-in functionality (“Our UI sucks? So what, the users have LUA!”).
I don’t need Metaplace or SL to do my own content and to distribute it, I can write my own game and put it on some digital distribution channels today instead of limiting myself to one platform – all the tools are out there for free/cheap. For me there are better games to play and better places to socialize (hello real world).
I didn’t play WoW for more than 12 levels and I’ve never played EQ btw.
Yes Epic I’m planning on creating the next WoW with metaplace.
Tard.
Why the hell do we care that you played WoW to level 12. You’re here. You are a catass one way or another.
The game/game maker is neat. I wish I knew wtf I was doing.
I have no intentions of unleashing my horrible programming skillz on you or anyone else. I like the building aspect of it.
about 1 year ago
I’ve been hanging around Metaplace for a good while now and it has been fun watching it develop. Look forward to seeing what open beta brings (since an awful lot of development is from users)
about 1 year ago
So, is this Second Life without the S&M?
about 1 year ago
Yes, but can we grief people there by flooding their worlds with flying penis monsters? That’s the real question.
about 1 year ago
Nope. You can only flood your OWN world with them.
Unless of course, they made it possible for you to do so. In which case, well, they asked for it.
about 1 year ago
I keep misreading that as “Meatplace”. Is that intentional? Like, a bad pun that is also a really deep comment on the contrast between the potential of the internet and the actual uses it is put to?
Maybe I’ll just shut up and clicky the linky.
about 1 year ago
it’s Furcadia without as many furries.
about 1 year ago
It seemed clever and cute to me. I will be interested to see what kind of games people build. I’d like to ditch the cutesy look though. I hope something different for avatars becomes available. In fact, I’d like to ditch the avatar most of the time too and just click on things. I don’t really need to move an avatar around all the time.
about 1 year ago
MMOs should be competitions with rule sets.
Then you play them and pwn people who add their own artificial constraints to the rule set.
Why would this game be fun?
about 1 year ago
Oh, give it some time.
There’s http://www.eartheternal.com/ for that.
about 1 year ago
I wish I had something interesting to say about Metaplace, but I really don’t. I loaded it up, played the tutorial a little, then never went back. I don’t want that to sound like an indictment because I’m sure the problem is all user-sided. I’m just hardwired for gamey games. All I see in a sandbox is a bunch of sand.
about 1 year ago
The people complaining about the lack of a game at Metaplace are missing the point. Metaplace isn’t a game; Metaplace is where you can make your own VW game, VW chat room, VW market place, whatever.
about 1 year ago
It’s cool to see what people come up with but I’m not really a creator so there isn’t much there for me as of yet. I check in every so often to see what’s new but until someone creates a game I’m interested in playing, I’m not going to be spending much time there.
about 1 year ago
It does feel very much like furcadia. The same “walking around hubs and visit other people’s worlds” thing.
To drey-yeah, that is true, and the features do seem exciting, but most of us suck at creating things.
about 1 year ago
“To drey-yeah, that is true, and the features do seem exciting, but most of us suck at creating things.”
Yup. But that doesn’t seem to stop bucketloads of people from creating bucketloads of crap. I’m still wondering how Metaplace will make its $. Time magazine has a listing of what it calls the top 10 technology flops of the past decade….Youtube is on the list. Not because it doesn’t get traffic but because they haven’t been able to make a buck from it.
I hope it works well, I’d love for Raph Koster to get a huge honking moneyhat
about 1 year ago
Another glorificated chat room? Pass.
about 1 year ago
I remember when Second Life launched and people said the same thing. SL, in it early days, was not a giant red-light district but a rather benign, glorified chat room. Sure, you could fly around and teleport and stuff but there wasn’t much meat. SL wanted its users to fill in the blank. For all intents and purposes, SL and MP are basically just like HTML: a toolset to build something else. So you can either invent Geocities or you can invent Google. And until that blank gets filled it, people yawn and move on.
The problem that places like this run into is you wind up wanting people to come and you begin to look at where most of the traffic goes and come up with one word: sex. At which point you world begins to slowly devolve as people begin to compete for traffic and, thus, begin pandering to the lowest common denominator. Hence you get SL in its current form.
MP seems to have avoided the issue for now because all the avatars are of the chibi variety and probably can’t be scripted to the degree that SL can. I’d also bet the TOS is a bit more strict as well. It’s also private worlds which means you don’t run across it by accident. It should be interesting to see how Koster avoids the long term problems of devolving content and how many people build successful non-sexual content in MP.
about 1 year ago
@Tmon: I was in the closed beta and didn’t do much with it either, sadly; the new WoW expansion launched around the same time I got in. /sigh
@JuJutsu: I think at least part of the way making money is intended is through the marketplace to buy widgets and what-not to world build with. I’m sure Raph has lots of other ideas or he wouldn’t have begun the company.
about 1 year ago
The avatars — indeed ALL the art — can be changed completely.
Scripting is both easier and more powerful than SL’s.
And finally, the TOS is looser, not stricter, and based on the Rights of Avatars stuff.
BUT, it’s a segmented world, with private areas, and you cannot take your creations to other people’s worlds. Which pretty much resolves most of that.
about 1 year ago
What this really looks like to me is a game that appeals to those who may have enjoyed The Sims Online. The video reveals what looks to be a very similar control scheme and props.
On top of this, they grant players the abilities to invent their own games and introduce their own content. Lets face it: that’s way better than anything The Sims Online had.
Strictly speaking, that Second Life is 3D may actually be a point against it here: where user-created content is concerned, 2D content is much easier to create and make look good.
What would be my lead concern at the reigns? First, I’d want the game to catch on. Second, I’d hope that the copyrighted and/or obscene content doesn’t prove the primary draw to the point where overlooking such a travesty proves the shortest route to success. Second Life managed to catch on, but it devolved so drastically that I suspect some people on the payroll secretly wish it didn’t.
about 1 year ago
“You can turn it into a cafe for you and your friends.”
“Participate in a protest.”
Fail, get a life, seriously.
about 1 year ago
You know, the Second Life it is a glorificated chat room, the issue is that become a glorificated ADULT chat room. If we dont see it as a game (thai it isnt) and we see it as a place when sexually frustrated people with fetishs can interact between each other, then i believe that its fine.
Will MetaPlace devolve in teh pr0n? Well its less realistic, an isometric 2d world with chibis is less sexually atractive, if you cant show everybody your fetishs and if theres isnt that competition for “who got more visitors” that flourish in Second Life…well it can hold. Like Habbo Hotel.
about 1 year ago
Yeah, go kill pixels in a REAL game eh?
about 1 year ago
@JuJutsu
No, go to a real cafe with real friends and talk about how you killed pixels in a real game.
People doing cafes or protests in REAL games are wannabe role players. People playing SL or Metacafe are just idiots (yes, that many idiots out there in the world).
about 1 year ago
User-created content tends to have a lot of fail and a lot of sex, but historically it hasn’t taken terribly fancy protocols to allow users to find usable quality and to find whatever level of sexual content they’re looking for, including nearly none. E.g., I don’t know all that much about Usenet, but my impression was that its protocols aren’t so complicated underneath. Admittedly Usenet didn’t completely cope all that well with enormous scale and spam-related issues, but if Metaplace scales up as far as Usenet and only degrades as much as Usenet did, that sounds like a success to me. HTTP has scaled up to a good fraction of the world population, and people can still find content. Modern HTTP is pretty complicated, but the underlying navigation architecture largely dates to prehistoric versions of HTTP which were not very complicated. Wikis and IRC servers reward care in thinking about community management, but they don’t require rocket social science to be useful.
There are lots of ways that Metaplace could fail. Even if its design and implementation are technically very solid, it is hard to design something that is flexible and understandable and supports something that people actually want to do and aren’t doing already. (Revealed preference can be a lot more revealing in hindsight than in foresight.) It is also hard to launch something in such a way that it catches on (or, alternatively, hard to target precisely the right niche at precisely the right time so that catching on will happen relatively naturally). Avoiding being swamped by too much sex and garbage doesn’t seem terribly hard in comparison.
about 1 year ago
It’s kinda neat. Little slow as my connection sucks atm. But I do love sim type/ builder games, could care less for the chat aspect.
I’ll play with it somemore when I have time. Though someone stole my name!
Epic….stfu.
about 1 year ago
My friends don’t stop being my friends when they live in a different city.
about 1 year ago
It’s interesting how some people will see no issue with correspondence via instant messaging over phone, email, or instant messengers, but the minute you invite people in to play with virtual world tools, it’s “get a life, loser.”
about 1 year ago
@geldonyetich
Generalize more. Did you ever open a cafe in a virtual world and did you protest against too high coffee prices? With your so called friends?
about 1 year ago
I sure didn’t.
I’m not nearly enough of the extroverted social butterfly to find those activities appealing.
For me, messing around in virtual Metaplace space threatens to pull me out of my shell, not provide an avenue to retreat further in.
That these so-called friends of mine might be mincing pedophiles or proud animal fornicators is second to the concern I’d probably not be socializing with anybody at all if left to my own devices.
about 1 year ago
“People playing SL or Metacafe are just idiots (yes, that many idiots out there in the world).”
:rolleyes:
about 1 year ago
Seems like a pretty uneducated statement to me. Perhaps you should log in and check it out instead of blindly lashing out
Metaplace has a brilliant back-end that supports some pretty good scripting. I was capable of writing some nifty little games in very little time. The scripting is LUA-based, so it’s easy to learn so long as you follow their API wiki, which is very well documented if you ask me.
This isn’t WOW or EQ. That’s not what it was meant to be. You should probably stop judging it as such, since it will get you nowhere fast.
about 1 year ago
I sat there this weekend glued to the damn game. And I can’t even script…yet. (though it motivated me to start reading thier wiki tutorials)
It’s pretty wild, especially if you have a collection of skills including photoshop, or 3d modeling, but for the people that enjoy world building with no art skills, just import other peoples models, which I did as I tried to figure out the toolset.
I’m curious how smooth it will run though, I was trying to get a car game going. Built the world, but couldn’t find any behaviours that fit, and when I tried to do it myself, the car kept dissapearing.
My lack of scripting ability did stop me dead in my tracks.
I think it needs more non-programmer features. Ready made scripts to get basic games going. It has some, just not enough for the casual yet. Cool game, or toolset, or whatever you call it.
about 1 year ago
I really like the idea of Metaplace.
Unfortunately I’ve not yet managed to get enough free time together in the one place to have a good shot at building a world yet.
One of these days hopefully….
about 1 year ago
@Georgia
Enjoy yourself, I’ll continue suffering (losing braincells) from reading all the people who want to develop the next WoW with just LUA in the meanwhile. I’m not saying you want to do it, but public APIs in games bring too many amateur programmers to the surface and are often an excuse for not providing polished built-in functionality (“Our UI sucks? So what, the users have LUA!”).
I don’t need Metaplace or SL to do my own content and to distribute it, I can write my own game and put it on some digital distribution channels today instead of limiting myself to one platform – all the tools are out there for free/cheap. For me there are better games to play and better places to socialize (hello real world).
I didn’t play WoW for more than 12 levels and I’ve never played EQ btw.
about 1 year ago
Yes Epic I’m planning on creating the next WoW with metaplace.
Tard.
Why the hell do we care that you played WoW to level 12. You’re here. You are a catass one way or another.
The game/game maker is neat. I wish I knew wtf I was doing.
I have no intentions of unleashing my horrible programming skillz on you or anyone else. I like the building aspect of it.
about 1 year ago
Amp, I’ll see if I can get the car movement from Raphshooter and the boat movement from HighSeas on the market, how’s that?
about 1 year ago
wicked…thanks Raph!
That will help alot even if I can just look at the code and manipulate the variables and stuff to start off. Much appreciated.