Metaplace Unfortunately A Bit More Meta

Nothing against Raph, but maybe this will finally nail down some of the over-wrought and over-blown emphasis on player-made content.

Yeah, it can work. No, it’s not guaranteed. No, most people in the market for electronic entertainment do not have the capacity to entertain themselves with the digital equivalent of two rocks, a stick and some dirt, and no they will not appreciate the opportunity to spend a lot of time doing it or paying for it, especially if it leaves them with the impression that they are easily frustrated and/or inadequately creative.

I think that was all understood, but now you can add, you can’t make player-created content a hook that a plurality of money-spending entertainment consumers will appreciate. You have to put your handcrafted stuff created by experts who know how to help you have fun and do interesting things, first.

Just make a game. Something that’s fun. We need more of that.

That was my estimation. There’s a lot of graphical quasi-building services out there, and they’re already so low profile that a lot of people would never have heard of the majority of them.

I was hoping he’d have some kind of major influx of players, but exactly how they’d stumble across his service out of the dozens of others is hard to say. Even if it so happened he had the best (which I’m in no position to judge) the initial problem of people finding it remains.

If I may offer a few theories (caveat: I never played it):

1) Lack of visibility/promotion, and I’m certain that it would have gotten less without Koster as designer. Just a stroll over Google returns 117,000 hits, which is quite low. Compare this to Mortal Online, which isn’t even released, but which gets 419,000 hits, mostly through word of mouth, and most of the news surrounding Metaplace can be split into three categories (a) Raph Koster talks about it; (b) Metaplace launched; (c) Metaplace will close.

2) It’s impossible, at first glance, to even tell what it is. From Wikipedia: “Metaplace is a software platform intended to democratize the development of virtual worlds.” Just what the hell is that? It sounds more like something you license off to other companies than a virtual world, and perhaps as a b2b service it might still be worth pursuing, if it’s that revolutionary. But it is not a game, and I would suggest that this is perhaps why it’s not visible. You could create anything with it, but that perhaps led to there being nothing deserving to be talked about. A customized chat room with a virtual world build around it — which is what it seemed to me — is the wrong way to go about it, if you ask me.

3) Who was Metaplace marketed for? The name was unfortunate and confusing; even while writing this, I inadvertently typed “Metaspace” and “Meatplace”, which bring up a lot of connotations. Second, to echo #2, what was Metaplace? A Second Life for Kiddies? The visual appearance of Metaplace just screamed of that, a chatroomy thing for kids; and really, isn’t “Second Life, but for kiddies” synonymous, for most people, with “Pornography, but with kiddies”?

4) Why should I build my own virtual world when I’m still indebted to you for the platform? Shouldn’t that be your job?

Normally I’d sing my usual song here, but because it’s Raph, I won’t.

I dabbled in Metaplace a little in its earlier days. I think the problem was that the concept of Metaplace was far more interesting than Metaplace itself.

But really, I think the very premise of Metaplace was somewhat flawed.

In a virtual world, a player can pour their identity into many things. Typically, it’s their avatar. Their name, their appearance, the way they act around others. Creating your own little world or game is a great form of self-expression, but the problem is that it’s a very passive form of self-expression. You can build it, but once you have, it just kind of sits there and waits for people to come and look at it. If you have a unique avatar or you believe yourself to be a personality, you can go around and force yourself upon other people.

It’s pretty hard to force your house upon other people.

I think there is a place for open/open-ish building games, it’s just in how you balance player freedom within the structure of your world. This is one more art than science type of balancing acts. I also think there needs to be more than JUST building stuff to attract and then retain your players.

Building in SWG (launch SWG, that is) was very strict, yet open at the same time. You had to be a fair distance from any NPC buildings and the terrain frequently made you its bitch when trying to drop anything larger than a resource collector, but when you finally managed to find a sweet suite spot you could really go to town…literally. My village was on the other side of Theed (IIRC) from the original Goontown and at both the macro and micro scale the tools allowed for some pretty fun, attractive and functional displays.

ATITD is ridiculously open and gives players tremendous freedom. But there’s a hellacious learning curve to overcome. I tried to get a friend of mine to try it out when world-2 started up, but he was just overwhelmed with the scale of getting from point A to point B technologically. ATITD is still successful because it’s most likely better off with a smaller and closer-knit community of players. If you dropped the average WoW server population into Egypt the place would probably asplode spectacularly as 6.02*10^23 bricks went into production simultaneously.

“I think that was all understood, but now you can add, you can’t make player-created content a hook that a plurality of money-spending entertainment consumers will appreciate. You have to put your handcrafted stuff created by experts who know how to help you have fun and do interesting things, first.

“Just make a game. Something that’s fun. We need more of that.”

This sums up my feelings exactly. Build a compelling, polished game and you’ll get me to come, and then maybe if there are content tools available, I’ll take advantage of those too. But first I need that interesting game to hook me, so make that.

I’m not sure what a “raph-like MMO” would be, but if it was supposed to be something like UO or SWG, I think you need at least $20M nowadays to make that kind of game, and that’s probably a very low estimate.

The thing about user created content is that a lot of the people who would actually make content are already doing it elsewhere. They’re modding existing games or making their own Flash games, etc. These people already have their own communities; they don’t need a new one. About the only answer Metaplace seemed to have was the hope of monetizing their efforts. You can’t really make money off a Neverwinter Night mod or that really interesting fantasy mod for Civ 4, but you could come to Metaplace and make something and hopefully sell it. I don’t think that lure was strong enough to attract the critical mass of users.

Player added content might be the egg of the instant cake mix world, but does this really apply here? It sounds more as if it were the cake without the egg, the flour, the sugar, the milk, or the flavour; everything beside the bowl. In which case, just call it a bowl.

My condolences to Ralph. I can’t say that Metaplace appealed to me personally but I do admire Ralph’s vision and innovation. It’s not something we see enough in this industry!

http://bit.ly/4bdhmr
“Good modding communities are the sprinkling of cinnamon upon a delicious trifle, and hence relying on user-made content is like eating heaped spoonfuls of cinnamon neat from the jar. … All you’re ultimately doing is creating a great big blank wall for people to scrawl giant cartoon cocks on.” – Zero Punctuation, “Little Big Planet”.

And then there’s the “so what about all the stuff people created?” question. And a rather rant-y rant on the subject:

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2444

Sorry, but MetaPlace is a really poor example of what is or isn’t possible with User-Generated Content because they made terrible development decisions from the get-go.

Almost all of the features they placed in-game were about allowing you to make your own shitty clone of Habbo Hotel. They figured that this vast market of ‘casuals’ were where the money would come from. I’d get announcements constantly in beta of new Habbo-y features they were testing out.

But things like a basic, functioning combat system? Top-down WASD movement that felt anywhere close to ‘right’? The sort of features that any Random Joe with dreams of make-your-own-MMO bliss might instantly click around for?

Nowhere to be found. They didn’t exist. A very talented amateur programmer was working on a fully-featured combat system for MetaPlace because the devs had no interest in churning one out, and he still hadn’t finished it by the time the cancellation announcement came. Whoops.

Look at the number of people who’ve made missions in the City of Heroes Mission Architect. There’s money to be made off the player’s desire to create, in much the same way that vanity presses turn a profit.

But Raph didn’t want to do a goddamn thing for them. Not even the most basic, rudimentary set-up. Instead, he thought a third-rate Habbo that you could customize with advanced programming knowledge would peel off tweens from the actual Habbo. But wait, it gets better! They were going to snare this fickle, superficial audience with some of the most generic ‘stand-in’ graphics you could possibly imagine.

Business planning 101 Fail. Whoops.

Sorry to be harsh, but if we draw the wrong lessons from MetaPlace’s failure it’ll be a bad thing for the industry. And most of the posts above are doing just that.

“Look at the number of people who’ve made missions in the City of Heroes Mission Architect. There’s money to be made off the player’s desire to create, in much the same way that vanity presses turn a profit.”

Same with NWN mods, but in both cases they had a critical mass of players. There wasn’t any real game to play in Metaplace from what I saw in my brief visits there, just a collection of small games to play. Didn’t Raph say they were working on their own MMO that would be part of Metaplace? I thought I remembered him mentioning that.

Thing is, the only funding I recall reading about was $6.7M, and that’s not enough to build an AAA game these days.

“I’m sure a lot of people stayed away just because they weren’t interested in playing something in a beta format. I typically stay away from betas.”

I’m not sure of that anymore. Just consider the players who pay for beta access to a game by pre-ordering it, like Mortal Online (and dare I say, that’s one thing Mr. Jennings did not talk about in his “Annus Horribilis”, beta as a cash grab pretext), or those perpetually-in-beta (or even alpha) games from small developers that people still play (Dwarf Fortress).

I almost feel like checking Metaplace out before it’s too late, but was there anything in it that reminded people of its beta status?

Heh.

“”To Joe:

I don’t think combat would have mattered. Who would play Metaplace for combat? Even if you had a decent combat engine (and I agree, movement and combat sucked hard in it) you’d be saddled with a 2.5d engine and could maybe make something inferior to a flash game, but harder to search out.”"

This proves my point, actually.

Metaplace did top-down 2D and side-scrollers, too. They were supposedly key parts of the package, on an equal level with the 2.5d Habbo crap.

…The fact that you didn’t even know those features existed says something about MetaPlace’s strategery.

I just spent maybe 30-40 minutes this morning trying out Metaplace, and while I understand it was on Christmas Day at 8:30, I was struck by the fact that not only was there nobody around, but that even if there had been several users online, I would probably never have noticed them.

What I found was a disjoined virtual world that seemed, the more I played it, like a cubicle farm. You were provided with your own little space, with which you could theoretically do whatever you wanted. But no matter how many photos of your wife and kids you get to pin to the wall of your cubicle, it’s still a cubicle. What didn’t help was the loading screens when you wanted to move from one place to the other, only to discover that there was nothing more original or appealing than the place you had just left; because no matter how much you decorated it, it was just another cubicle.

Visually, I can’t deny that there were some nice touches; I liked the squirrels and such, and the objects were quite nicely done. So I am not exactly an enemy of “cutesy”; after all, I quite enjoy Puzzle Pirates’ quaint artwork. But what overwhelmed me in Metaplace was not so much the “cutesy” as the terminally trendy. Avatars looked equal parts Zwinky, Bratz and anime, with bell-bottom legs, dressed in clothes that would have been an embarrassment to look at just five years from now.

Just another example of that terminal trendiness: I managed to find my way to some kind of virtual café whose name I forget, and it seemed to be sort of a hub for various places by clicking on hearts. There was a song playing there, which I later identified as Owl City’s “Fireflies”. It’s a chart-topper, apparently, but I had never heard of either the band or the song before looking them up. Perhaps I am out of step with the times, but it made me aware that it wasn’t a place where I’d want to hang out much.

I have to bring back my previous question: Who was Metaplace for? Teenagers? Don’t they already have Habbo and all those other places where they can go? What did Metaplace offer that those did not?

Also, looking back at my previous post, I now understand why it was still in beta, even though it had been for six months or so. During that brief period of time spent playing, I encountered a few annoying bugs, such as a level-up window that would not go away (it had you select the colour of your jeans, but there was no way to close it), or a camera that refused to center on my avatar, who was by then in the upper left corner of the screen. In both cases, I had to leave the “world” I was in to solve the problem. The interface wasn’t better; once I had toggled a type of terrain when I wanted to fool around with my little place, I never could figure out how to untoggle it, because my old reflex of right-clicking doesn’t work in a Flash game.

Most of those worlds, by the way, were without interest, and often they were clearly abandoned before completion. Which is a pity, because the part I enjoyed most about The Sims was when you had to build your house. When it turned into the equivalent of a reality show, where you had to remind your character to do such things as use the bathroom, was when I uninstalled it; but I could go around building houses forever, if the game clearly had not been designed as a paean to mindless consumerism.

Speaking of which, and I know I’m about to fall into my moralizing moneychangers-in-the-temple pose, I saw so many objectionable things mentioned in the Metaplace promotional video, the Amazon storefront, those commercial ventures which, as much as they might be understandable from a game design viewpoint, bring down everything around them to their level. And “participate in a protest”… sheesh, nobody pays attention to those online petitions already, but a protest in a virtual world is supposed to be more meaningful? Sounds like the type of things that computer-literate children of hipsters would embrace, though; but the sad reality that Metaplace failed to account for, as did too many blogs, is that the attention seekers are many, but nobody else cares. Build your own virtual world, but keep in mind everyone else probably has one, and few people will care to visit yours.

I understand I was not part of the target demographic for it, but I still can’t make sense of what Metaplace was supposed to be, and I think that this, at its core, was a design problem.

@EpicSquirt

Actually, I’d love to open an inn or something in a virtual game and see it become popular. But that’s not something which Metaplace allowed, because it was neither a virtual game, nor a cohesive world. It was just a series of instances, randomly connected to one another through a menu, with no sense of a hub or of popular destinations within it. I moved from one “world” to another, and my reaction was pretty much “meh” all this time. Like jumping from one cubicle to another, when they’re all similar in their essentials.

As someone mentioned above, there is space for player-made content, but it must be vetted and supervised. When everyone gets to create it, you either get the lowest common denominator taking over quickly (I reread that thread in May where you posted, and what everybody seemed concerned about was the sex industry having taken over Second Life), or you get crap which interests nobody except its maker.

The entire approach seemed to be: “Here’s your virtual world, you take over.” No, it does not work like that. A sandbox game, much as I may despise the genre for pandering to troglodytes, might get away with it, because there’s a game, and what makes it dynamic is not so much player-made content but their actions. The developer provides the content; the players do the rest. But Metaplace almost seems, as I noted above, as something you license out to others and don’t publish yourself.

Joe:

Well, I saw some of the games early on. Raph made his ship one, and I looked through the visited places function. A few people tried to make RPGs. I even tried to make a top down shooter like Galaga, but I only got as far as making a background starfield.

My point was more that even with a robust toolset, the main draw was always to me for people to make things. You may not think Habbo was the best choice, but it was better than trying to be Kongregate imo. It’s just that they only worked on tools as opposed to attract people to socialize enough to get people in the door.

The irony was like 500 people came to hear Richard Bartle speak there, most I ever saw play it. They needed to get enough people in and staying, and then they would have seen success.

I understand the lure from a developer’s standpoint of wanting the players to generate the content, but that may not be a realistic goal. The vast majority of players simply want to play something that’s already there.

To an extent, it’s natural that players generate “content” simply through their presence, and I can see why the idea that you can just give them a bit more flexibility is a good one. However, it seems there’s a certain bare minimum of fun you need to provide. The thing is, players need a reason to hang around, perhaps even incentives to build.

Take, for example, a game like Shadowbane or Darkfall Online. Now, nevermind that they were not very solidly built hardcore PvP games, they did do at least one thing right: provide some tools to build and give good incentives to do it by integrating it into the core gameplay mechanic.

Sure, you could ask the players to come up with their own core gameplay mechanic, but the bottom line is that there’s a reason why they’re the players and you’re the game developer. Most people have yet to cultivate a sense of what makes playing games fun – they prefer to cut directly into instant gratification and be completely clueless as to why it seems so unfulfilling.

I never even HEARD about this game.