Metaplace Part Two: A Meeting at Rancho Bernardo

The first step comprised choosing a genre from three categories: Games, Social, or Serious. We stuck to Games, which opened up such options as Fantasy Roleplaying, Science Fiction Roleplaying, Arcade, Puzzle, and Sports.

Following this was a page to select the builder’s skill level, with options for“Noob,” “Bring It,” and “Hardcore.”

We went with Noob—which was presumably the reason for both the ease and speed of creation—and, on the final page we were prompted to choose a base style sheet which sets the starting look and feel of the world—whether you want it to be Tetris, UO, or Zork—and then enter a name and address.

This last bit was the part that worried me, as at the moment it seems that whatever you choose ends up as metaplace.com/worldname.

Anyone who has ever tried to find an unclaimed domain to register can tell you there are only so many appealing combinations of words in the English language… and the good ones go fast.

Unless a subdomain or category system is implemented—something along the lines of metaplace.com/fantasy/worldname, etc.—I could easily see the addresses devolving into obscure acronyms or nonsense within the first few months.

Of course, it is supposedly possible to ignore the portal entirely once your world is made, distribute your own client, and run your own website completely independent of Areae. So, should that be the case, what address you acquire will likely be a moot point.

After receiving an update as to which worlds were working and which were not, Raph fired up the first: The now-familiar cartoon girl and her cheerful apartment (featured in the lead story image for this article), which, if I recall, was headlined on the front page of the portal as “Shortiez at Metaplace.”

Based on appearances, I wondered idly if Shortiez were some manner of Bratz-esque line of dolls designed to relieve the parents of tweens of their hard-earned paychecks, but, a quick check of Google later on revealed nothing of the sort.

Raph pointed out various features to me, such as magazines on the coffee table that pulled up RSS feeds for various sites (with raphkoster.com topping the list), or the NPC who could be instructed to read off headlines in chat bubbles.

Next up was what was described as “Our Subspace clone,” a top-down shooter which he touted as having, “a dozen pickups and full physics,” which, “basically took one guy a week to make.”

As there was no one else playing at the time, Raph didn’t have much else to do aside from making a lap or two around the map before moving on.

The final demo was the stick figure shooter mentioned in the interview, Josh-fu. Like the space sim, there was no one else playing, so, after moving around the map and shooting a few walls to demonstrate basic functionality, he decided to take the opportunity to show off the editor, loading it with a single click in the same browser window he had been playing in a moment prior.

Once again, I was impressed by the sheer simplicity of the system. The basic level of the editor was, to borrow Steve Jobs’ favorite catch-phrase from his days at NeXT, “total WYSIWYG.” Point and click, drag and drop, and copy and paste seemed to be all the skills necessary to create a relatively simple game.

For those interested in going deeper, editing of the bare code down to the basic elements was available with a few additional clicks, with human-readable scripts broken down into blocks of functions designed to be easily transferred between games.

And, if you want to go deeper but are unsure where to begin, there was also a full Wiki, with articles covering everything from standalone client creation to the fundamentals of Lua.

Raph was now starting to move out of show and tell territory and beginning to discuss some of the more underlying aspects of the system, so I switched on my voice recorder. I have a fine memory for conversations (such as everything you’ve read up to this point), but technical minutiae goes right in one ear and out the other.

In hindsight I wished I had turned it on sooner, as I’m sure there were many other things I would have liked to have quoted him on.

Case in point, much of the article from this point on will be essentially one long direct quote. Call me self-deprecating, but I think most people would prefer to hear the systems explained straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were, rather than filtered through the lens of my own admitted biases.

So, I’ll allow Raph to take it from here:

“The markup language is the basic thing. We use that for the network communications. It’s not XML, because XML would be four times too heavy, way too data intensive, just… too much. We wanted something which was still human readable—you could literally write it by hand if you really wanted to—and you actually do describe the whole world with it. You don’t describe assets, which is key. All assets are links on the web.”

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