Metaplace Part Two: A Meeting at Rancho Bernardo

The only décor of note were various whiteboards coated in multicolored marker scrawl, and posters from games that members of the team had worked on in the past—some of which hadn’t even been hung up yet, propped limply up against the walls from the floor.

One wall in particular was dominated by several whiteboards in a series, which were in turn covered by hundreds of neon-hued Post-it notes. Their scheduling system, they explained. Finished items on the left, items left to do on the right. The right outnumbered the left by roughly ten to one.

Raph waved me over, and greeted me from what could be called the corner office: A desk up against the wall with windows, and only a single neighbor to his left.

After shaking hands and saying our hellos he proceeded to make introductions around the room, identifying everyone by name and a little something about what they did prior to their arrivals at Areae.

Their backgrounds and experience ran the gamut from a man who literally wrote the book on MMO game development, to a recent grad student of UC San Diego.

Most of them glanced up briefly at this new interloper in their midst as Raph came to them, gave me a wave and a nod, and then immediately turned back to their screens. I chalked this up as either a sign of supreme work ethic, or that the delay in opening the door had been due to a hasty secreting away of the slave driving whip and drum into the back room.

With the exception of one or two people who were out of the office, it took under five minutes to meet the entire company. Then, Raph announced, it was time for the tour.

He waved an arm across the room and said, “There’s basically this, a meeting room, and a lounge that nobody uses. That’s it. Just turn 360 degrees, that’s the tour.”

I was suitably impressed. If you looked up “agile development” on Wikipedia, there would be a photo of Areae for illustration.

I was eager to get down into the finer points of Metaplace… but, before we got to business, Raph and I came to a mutual discovery: We were hungry.

Him, because he had seen the dentist that morning and had been unable to eat breakfast; myself, because I had been up until 4AM helping a friend put the finishing touches on her resume, and had gone directly from bed, to shower, and into car, with a brief stopover to put some clothes on, in order to make this noon interview on time.

Aside from which, even if I wasn’t hungry, what the hell kind of MMO gamer would I be if I turned down lunch with Raph Koster?

So, after whittling down the hundred-odd restaurant options within walking distance and settling on Thai, we set off out the door.

As we went, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to pick his brains… which is something I rarely get to do to a person in his position without someone from PR there to ensure that I don’t ask anything even remotely interesting.

Among the varied pearls of wisdom I gleaned during the walk, SWG is evidently properly pronounced “swig,” and he does not relish people blaming him for NGE, as he was off the project a year beforehand; “Before CU, even,” he reminded me.

Also, you should never, ever, ask him about Trammel.

After we’d sat down to eat (I accepted his recommendation of the Bombay Rice), our conversation ranged to everything from handicapping the presidential race, to discussing whether YouTube was making the youth of today stupider, or if they had always been this stupid, and YouTube merely provided a broader window with which to view it.

Well… everything, except for Metaplace.

I know a number of people who don’t like to discuss work over lunch—which tends to be one of the few times of the day they don’t have to discuss work—so, I never brought it up, and neither did he.

The closest we got was when I regaled him with an anecdote about my contribution to the Pitch Your Game panel at GDC San Francisco earlier in the year.

My pitch, coincidently enough, was an MMO utilizing player created content to stay ahead of the “no developer can ever produce faster than players can consume” curve.

One of the panelists was unimpressed, and responded that he was pretty sure that Raph Koster was already working on something along those lines.

To which my retort was, “I’m not sure if Raph Koster is the right guy to do player created content. I believe he was the one who once said, ‘The client is in the hands of the enemy.’”

Raph didn’t seem to find quite as much humor in that as I did. Instead, he seemed more interested in learning the identity of who had been spilling his beans, as there were only supposed to be a few people who knew at that time what they were up to. So, Raph, if you’re reading this, it was that guy, right over there:

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