Update: Areae’s Metaplace Revealed to the World

By Steven Crews | September 19, 2007 | | Filed under: News

The proverbial cat is now out of the bag, and, we finally know what Raph Koster and Co. over at Areae have been up to lo this past year:

http://www.metaplace.com/

From the press release:

Our goals are sort of idealistic. We think there are all kinds of things on the Internet that would be improved if anyone could have a virtual place of their own. Right now, there aren’t enough good games, for example, and they all seem to be about elves in tights or soldiers in battle armor. Metaplace allows more diversity. Right now, there are lots of people who want to use virtual worlds for research, or education, or business, but it’s just too darn hard to get one going. Now you can create a world in just a few minutes and start tailoring it to your needs. Basically, we wanted to democratize the process of making online spaces of all sorts.

It now seems that the overall project is not a game, but rather a platform for players to create games of their own and share them with each other through a universal web interface.

Though they did mention that they’re planning on creating a new MMO themselves, using their system:

We fully intend to be customers of our own product. We’ve already started work on our first big game – a “worldy MMORPG” with what we hope will be a ton of fun game play. What’s more, we figure that some of you who have been looking for a game like that might want to help us build it. 

They also have what I believe I would be secure in calling audacious plans… From the FAQ (emphasis mine):

Our motto is: build anything, play everything, from anywhere. Until now, virtual worlds have all worked like the closed online services from before the internet took off. They had custom clients talking to custom servers, and users couldn’t do much of anything to change their experience. We’re out to change all of that.

Metaplace is a next-generation virtual worlds platform designed to work the way the Web does. Instead of giant custom clients and huge downloads, Metaplace lets you play the same game on any platform that reads our open client standard. We supply a suite of tools so you can make worlds, and we host servers for you so that anyone can connect and play. And the client could be anywhere on the Web.

We hope there will be millions of worlds made with Metaplace. It could get hard to find stuff if we’re right, so the portal lets you easily search, rate, review, and tag worlds and games of all sorts. You also get a user profile so you can find each other.

That’s got to be one of the most optimistic goals I’ve ever heard. Most companies would be satisfied with a million players, nonplural, let alone having them go on to create their own worlds.

But, hubris like that has definitely got me interested, and I, for one, have already signed up for the alpha. 

Yet my interest is tempered with caution. A person given unlimited freedom tends to take that freedom to extreme… I pray that Metaspace doesn’t become little more than an online sex toy for perverts and deviants the way Second Life has.