Metaplace Part Two: A Meeting at Rancho Bernardo

As the meal was concluded and the check arrived I found myself facing an ethical dilemma: The editorial policies of this site are such that if I should so much as accept a tissue to blow my nose after a sneeze, it must be disclosed as a potentially biasing gift to me from a developer.

Do I insult his hospitality by offering to go Dutch? Or remain silent and risk incurring the wrath of my editor?

Not wanting to get into an “Oh no, I insist!” argument half an hour after we had met, I elected to keep my mouth shut. After all, I could always just stick it in my write-up to cover myself with full disclosure.

“We’ll let the VCs pay for it,” said Raph, pulling a card out of his wallet.

Now I was starting to feel guilty. We were literally eating his budget. God forbid, should the company ever fold for lack of funds, that Bombay Rice will hang on my conscience as heavily as the proverbial want of a nail for which the kingdom was lost.

I could almost picture him now, laying prostrate on the ground, fist clenching the receipt in rage, his accountant looking down at him disapprovingly, chastely remarking, “If you hadn’t bought that guy lunch, we wouldn’t be in this mess!”

To which Raph’s only response would be to bellow out a black curse from the very depths of his soul: “Damn you, Crews! Damn you to hell!”

Thankfully, for now nothing so melodramatic occurred. Instead, I expressed my gratitude for lunch, and we began the return trip to the office.

On the way, we discussed the irrational hatred the posters on the Fires of Heaven boards seem to harbor towards him, and I revealed one half of the reason for the enthusiasm behind my visit:

“I’m an old MUD guy,” I told him. “I wish MUDs never went away. I see Metaplace as a way to get back into that old Online Creation spirit, when there were a dozen new servers popping every week.”

Raph shook his head. “MUDs haven’t gone away,” he insisted. “LegendMUD is still around. A lot of others are still going.”

“Alright,” I ceded his point, “they haven’t quite gone away entirely, but they’ve been relegated to the same corner of the internet as the NAMBLA website.”

On that pleasant note, we arrived back at the office.

The Good Stuff

No sooner had we gotten inside than Raph beat me to the punch by offering, “How about a quick demo before we do the interview? Might help with your questioning.”

As I was just about to suggest that very thing, I was, as you can imagine, very amenable to the offer.

Before proceeding any further, I would remind you that everything I’m about to describe comes from viewing the alpha version of Metaplace. The odds are very good that by the time you read this just about everything will have in some way been changed.

We took our seats in the corner office (after I’d stolen a chair from the desk of someone who had yet to arrive to work), and Raph fired up his web browser.

First up was a brief overview of the portal—though, this portion of the demo was somewhat inadvertent. They were unfortunately experiencing a few technical difficulties, whereby most of the worlds Raph attempted to load greeted us with an error message, and he spent several minutes clicking around the site looking for ones that worked.

Truly, one of my life’s greatest regrets was being unable to see Cuppycake’s contribution, Ponyplace.

While I was obviously, given the mandate of this site, most interested in the potential online gaming development aspects of the system, one look at the available categories on the Play section of the site and it became clear that Areae had no intention of being pigeonholed into anything so narrow.

They ran from such things as Shops, Lectures, Meetings, and Religious… to the strangest for me personally: Political Campaigns.

All that I can really say about that one is God help the state of democracy in the world when things deteriorate to the point of “Which candidate you would most like to have an imaginary beer with in a virtual world while roleplaying on your Fursona?”

Then, as if on cue, the next page contained a list of subgenres, and I couldn’t help but grin, “I’m sure Goth and Furry will be seeing a lot of use.”

Raph shrugged, “I’m sure they will, too. That’s why we added them.”

After this, he walked me through the process of creating a new world. It took, literally, three steps, 45 seconds, and was so easy that my mother could do it—and she has to call me to ask which button to push any time she wants to check her email.

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