[...] : Morning Sunshine http://ferryhalim.com/orisinal/ (games fun design art) Bookmark  [Discover] Raph’s Website » Tracking Areae http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/12/19/tracking-areae/ (mmo raphkoster areae gamedev) Bookmark [...]

[...] Raph’s Website » Tracking Areae Pingback on Dec 20th, 2006 at 12:18 [...]

[...] This turns Linden wealth into real-world wealth. And it also takes an enormous stride towards turning Second Life residents into real citizens instead of mere customers. Citizens get to petition for redress of their grievances from a state that represents them; customers can only take their business elsewhere. Customers only ever get to love it or leave it. Citizens get to change it. Brilliant. I’ll continue to horde my Linden dollars until Mr. Trump comes knocking at my door. Yes, I’m a real-world and a virtual miser (giving it up to the Freecycle posse).And while this news has taken precedence, there’s another very exciting development in virtual worlds news. Raph Koster, designer of MMOGs since Ultima, officially announced his much anticipated project, Areae, late last year. I’ve been struggling to find the best place to put this information, and unfortunately it’s landed at the bottom of this post. James has an interview with Raph. The development appears to converge multiple universes into one game-centred Web 2.0 bucket. The list of advisors is seriously kick-ass. More from Raph (and others) is here. [...]

In faketown you can do a lot of these things being discussed on this board, explore as a guest and sign up (for free) to create your own expression.

So… it ain’t magical because it’s SketchUp, per se. It’s magical because it will be attached to Google, which is attached to everything. It’s part of the great Monster Mashup. Google also bought Writely, which has been turned into Google Docs; YouTube; JotSpot (an application wiki provider). They’re getting into the content creation biz, so that when you make stuff, it’ll go into the great google brain in the sky. The better to crawl you, my dear.

Not that I mind. It kinda tickles.

The Smiths hire an architect to design thier new McMansion, they want a change to a room but cant explain it, they can use sketchup to design the change and sent it to him, or embed it into a site for viewing and adjust it on an ongoing basis

What you describe is what’s good about sketchup. (It’s not unique by the way; There are a few house design programs, and I have even written my own that I’m using for my virtual world development kit.) However, why is “sketchup + google” so magical?

The same holds true of the Wikipedia. It is built by many people, but it does not enable, at its core, social interactions. I’m still dorking around with a blog post on this subject, where I’ll talk about the difference between what I call “social function” (the heart of a dating service, for example) and “social features” (what Wikipedia and AdSense have).

Try the term.”social transaction” works well to differentiate.

@Mike R

“Why does everyone keep referring to “Google and/with SketchUp”? I must be missing something, because I don’t see why the combination is so magical. Can anyone explain?”

Because:
1. Its an easy UI
2. Low barrier to entery
3. Can be aquired easily
4. Lets not-technical design people create 3D enumerated objects.

Use Case Example:
Example 1:
I have a logo but dont know Flash to animate it, I hire a flash designer, using sketchup I can create a 3D of the logo quickly and distribute it to him via the web.
Example 2:
The Smiths hire an architect to design thier new McMansion, they want a change to a room but cant explain it, they can use sketchup to design the change and sent it to him, or embed it into a site for viewing and adjust it on an ongoing basis

When me and some of my boys went about building PlayByWiki, we wanted to come up with a lightweight text-based RPG system that would support travel between worlds explicitly. The one we worked on for a bit and got into kind of a beta stage is called Ninth Sigil.

JB, my main compatriot in all that schmoo, and I talked a lot about how powers, spells, abilities, skills, etc. would translate from world-to-world. ‘Cause, like… whaddya do when a kid from a steam-punk world/plane/whatever with a raft of cybertech skills makes the leap into a high-fantasy realm? What we came up with was a system based on almost archetypal stats — sigils — that describe what a player can do not so much in specific, technical terms, but in outcome terms.

There were some meta-sigils — mage for magic, for example — that are necessary in order to do certain things. But you always need to match those with elemental or other sigils to make stuff happen. And it would be up to the GM to decide, when moving characters from world-to-world, how to translate meta-sigil use. So, for example, a fire mage might have the sigil of Mage and Fire, and when they travel to a non-magic world, the GM would substitute Craft for Mage, making that character a powerful blacksmith, weaponsmith or chemist. These are heroes after all, eh? Step between worlds, spend a couple minutes getting adjusted to the domain — spend some time adventuring to get used to your new skill orientation — and a good chunk of your elemental wisdom comes to the fore, but through a different focus.

It’s the difference between what you *are* vs. how you do what you do. A healer might use magic on one world, medicine/surgery/tech on another, herbal lore on a third, runes on a fourth, intercession with the gods on a fifth, etc. But the root sigil of healing would always apply.

There is a point here related to Areae, I swear Raph…

A true “multiverse,” I think, needs to make some kind of allowance for “what atoms pass through from world-to-world metaphorically,” and “what atoms pass through literally.”