Metaplace Now Open For Your Metagaming Needs

So, is this Second Life without the S&M?

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.

it’s Furcadia without as many furries.

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?

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.

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.

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.

“You can turn it into a cafe for you and your friends.”
“Participate in a protest.”

Fail, get a life, seriously.

EpicSquirt :“You can turn it into a cafe for you and your friends.”“Participate in a protest.”
Fail, get a life, seriously.

Yeah, go kill pixels in a REAL game eh?

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.

EpicSquirt :
@JuJutsu
No, go to a real cafe with real friends and talk about how you killed pixels in a real game.

My friends don’t stop being my friends when they live in a different city.

@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?

“People playing SL or Metacafe are just idiots (yes, that many idiots out there in the world).”

:rolleyes:

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.

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?