Metaplace Part Two: A Meeting at Rancho Bernardo

As a word of forewarning to any new readers: I am a subscriber to the Hunter S. Thompson school of reporting—though, mostly without the drugs. Which means, in a nutshell, that I am given to verbose first-person narrative, which reads more like a pulp novel than a news piece.

Far be it from me to force you to wade through multiple pages of setup and exposition if all you came here for is new Metaplace information (or, at least, as new as a months-old office visit can provide), so, should that be the case, you may feel free to click right here to proceed straight to The Good Stuff.

Also, for anyone unfamiliar with the basic concept behind Metaplace (which I will not be largely not be getting into, as this article is long enough as it is), we have an extensive interview on the subject you can read right here. Or, for those who prefer a slightly more visually stimulating medium, you can also watch the official presentation given at TechCrunch.

As for the rest of you…

A Meeting at Rancho Bernardo

George Orwell once wrote: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” In a time of near-universal evolutionary and derivative game design, the same could be said of attempting to innovate.

I make no great secret of the fact that I’ve been around the block my fair share in the online gaming genre. I started out on MUDs in the early nineties, before moving on to the harder stuff, like UO, and EQ, and haven’t looked back since.

Suffice it to say, in this day and age it takes a hell of a lot for any new project announcement to get me to sit up and take notice.

In the case of Metaplace, I not only sat up, I just about leapt right out of my seat, and was shortly thereafter yelling into the phone at my editor like the clichéd police chief in an old hardboiled detective drama: “Get me Raph Koster!”

In the world of gaming in general, and in the MMO genre in particular, I’d watched, for over a decade, as team sizes ballooned from the dozens into the hundreds; budgets from the thousands, to the millions, to the tens of millions, and rising still with no end in sight, as players demand ever-more polish, ever-more content, ever-larger worlds, and expect it all to be delivered to them in free patches on a monthly basis.

Those of you who took economics (or read Marx) in college will likely recognize this as a pattern of unsustainable growth.

Something had to give. Either games had to start becoming cheaper and easier to make, or, the only people left making them another decade down the road would be the vast, faceless corporations, churning out the same bland sequels based on their stables of licensed properties every six months into perpetuity.

That was where Metaplace would come in. Or, at least, so I hoped after reading the announcement.

But, I’m not one to stand on hope for long. I wanted to know for certain whether this thing was going to be panacea, snake oil, or, more likely, something else entirely in between… which meant that I had to get down there, and see it in person.

So it was that one fine Thursday morning in October I found myself driving over a hundred miles south to Rancho Bernardo, an exurb on the outskirts of San Diego.

There, in a nondescript office block (so nondescript, in fact, that I passed right by it the first time), within earshot of a major freeway, the team at Areae are at work on something that, if successful, should cause everyone to sit up and take notice.

I’ll allow Raph to explain in his own words:

“The whole point of Metaplace is to get more people making more kinds of games and virtual worlds—everywhere—and to make it easy.

The barrier to entry has gotten too high, and we’re tired of seeing the same game getting remade over and over again with shinier graphics. We’re out to fix all of that.”

All that was left to do now was to see if reality would measure up to the words.

The door was closed and the shades were drawn as I knocked—though, this was not practically surprising, as it is a well-known fact that developers are allergic to sunlight—with only an unobtrusive placard on the wall announcing the presence of Areae, Inc within.

After several long moments had passed with no answer forthcoming, I glanced at the placard again just to make sure that I was indeed in the right place, when I noticed that I had already committed my first faux pas of the day, reading the subscript that I hadn’t earlier: ENTRANCE IN COURTYARD. I was knocking on the back door. That would certainly help explain the nondescriptness.

I had just turned on my heel and taken two steps towards where I assumed the courtyard to be located when the door sprung open behind me.

“Sorry,” said a tall and rangy man with a goatee standing in the entryway. “This is the slow door.”

He motioned me inside, into what could only be described as the bachelor apartment of development studios. To call it spartan would have been an insult to Spartans everywhere.

Even the ubiquitous cubicles which seemed to be mandated by law for every office I’ve ever set foot in were conspicuously absent, replaced by an open bullpen layout, consisting primarily of a single room, with rows of desks forming an island down the center, and flanking the walls on all sides.