My Kind of (Meta)Place

I'd noted the growing excitement around Raph Koster's new company, Areae, but even I was surprised by the scope of the vision his recently-revealed Metaplace displays:

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.

And to do this, Koster is building on openness:

we also committed to an open markup standard for our network protocol - anyone can write a client for any platform they want. We decided to use Web standards for everything we could, which is why you can have a game world that is also a website, or use Web data to populate your world. The scripting language (we call it MetaScript, of course) is based on Lua. You get the idea - no "not invented here," no closed proprietary approaches.

The consequences of adopting this approach sound amazing:

We speak Web fluently. Every world is a web server, and every object has a URL. You can script an object so that it feeds RSS, XML, or HTML to a browser. This lets you do things like high score tables, objects that email you, player profile pages right on the player -- whatever you want. Every object can also browse the Web: a chat bot can chatter headlines from an RSS feed, a newspaper with real headlines can sit on your virtual desk, game data could come from real world data... you get the idea.

So I wasn't completely wrong when I wrote that his new project "sounds like a system of interconnected, perhaps standalone virtual worlds to me" - I just underestimated Koster's ambition.... (Via GigaOM.)

Word of the Day: Ganking

Raph Koster has an interesting meditation on another interesting meditation on, er, ganking:

Ganking is defined as “someone powerful attacking someone weak.”

including this wonderful peroration:

true gankers were rewarded by fading into nobodiness, unable to attack or eventually even interact. Blank-faced, and eventually incapable of interacting at all. Insignificant, unranked, not even recognizable. The thought was, if you ever actually did render ganking as meaningless as its victims call it, the gankers would fade away, snarks and boojums all.

MMORPG in a Box

Raph Koster points out that setting up a MMORPG is pretty cheap these days: even the top-end SmartFox system, which is Java-based, costs just 2000 Euros. Already there's a number of games based on the code. And, of course, all this will run on a GNU/Linux box also costing peanuts. The only downside is that, like many online games these days, the SmartFox approach is to use Flash.

Virtual Citizenship Association

Behold the Virtual Citizenship Association, a move from the people who tried to buy Ryzom:

We spend more and more time in online universes, talking with friends, playing, working, creating... Virtual societies are emerging everywhere, and are becoming more important every day. However, most of these universes are controlled by commercial companies, which isn't without causing a number of issues.

Decisions, impacting everyone's virtual life, can be taken against the interest of the world residents. Privacy and individual rights can be (and are!) easily dismissed, as nobody is looking over the shoulder of the local police - the world owners. Transparency and honesty are often a remote dream.

Our mission, as stated in the Social Contract, is to protect our elementary rights; living in a virtual world gives us the status of citizen there, and our rights have to be recognized and enforced.

Raph Koster, he of the Declaration of the Rights of Avatars, has his doubts.

The Game God Goes Virtual

There aren't many details yet, but Raph Koster, generally regarded as one of the most original minds in the online gaming world, has lifted a corner of the curtain on his new company, with the delightfully erudite - and tricky - name of Areae:

Areae means "many places" in Latin. Depending on who you ask, you pronounce it "Airy-eh" or "Airy-eye" or "Area-ee"… well. It doesn’t matter. What matters is what it means: many places, many worlds.

Areae, Inc. is a company dedicated to taking the tired old virtual world and making it into something fresh and new. Something anyone can jump into. Something where anyone can find something fun to do or a game to play. Something where anyone can build their own place on the virtual frontier.

For me, the real giveway is the logo, which consists of smaller and larger interconnected blobs: sounds like a system of interconnected, perhaps standalone virtual worlds to me. Watch out Second Life....

The Game God Speaks

I am not a gamer. Until recently, I had no idea who Raph Koster was. But the more I read of his stuff, the more impressed I am: he is clearly one of the deepest thinkers about the digital world today. Note that I do not say about games: for what he writes has ramifications far beyond the gaming world, and should be read by anyone with an interest in things digital.

Take his latest post, called "Are microtransactions actually the future?" This pieces ranges widely, touching on all the big issues that intellectual monopolies like copyright throw up. And he really gets it. For example:

since anything that can be seen by our senses can be reproduced, for better or worse, all digital forms of enforcing copyright are doomed to fail. Every form of encryption is moot, because everything must be decrypted in order for us to see it. At some point, the data is in the clear, and then it can be copied.

He then goes further, offering a suggestion about how content industries can and must cope with this ineluctable fact:

The value is in the service, not the content. In the service, not the microtransactions. A digital item is worth nothing. What is of value is the context. People are increasingly not willing to pay for the experience of hearing a song by itself in the abstract. They pay for the concert as a whole (the iTunes experience as a whole, the CD experience as a whole, the movie-going experience as a whole, the EverQuest experience as a whole), and it will be smart venue operators who survive and make the money in the long run.

Amen to that.