[...] Jeff Freeman said on November 12th, 2007 at 10:22 pm: Morgan, for a company that’s essentially making tools for game designers, that chart is remarkably designer-lite. [...]

[...] reference, here is Raph Koster’s llst of typical game development roles which I think is fantastic. You can see how teams of 50-100 people aren’t unreasonable in [...]

So it is gonna be Second Life 2?

Every time I see Second Life, I see Adobe Atmosphere. Second Life doesn’t have a leg to stand on when propped up side-by-side with Metaplace. SL is going down!

It’s just that programmers typically make programmer-tools that designers can use, rather than designer-tools that can eventually be cooked enough for anyone to use.

That’s if the programmers have design backgrounds… otherwise without a designer at their elbow to explain just how horribly misused their tools can be… yech.

As I expect the target user is not a professional game designer, but more of the “anyone” sort – well like I said, it left me curious.

Hiring atypical programmers is one solution (which I think you are suggesting is the case), but Raph also has a real knack for utilizing online communities as part of the development process.

Or there might be some wacky plan to field-test it via a contest in which the viewers decide who goes home, and who moves on to the finals and a chance to win a job in game development and a date with Raph Koster. Who Wants to be a Game Designer?

So… those would be more interesting.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Metaplace changes how we use and think of the Web altogether.

So it is gonna be Second Life 2?

Morgan, for a company that’s essentially making tools for game designers, that chart is remarkably designer-lite.

Well, you have to take into account the experience of the team members and the fact that in small firms everyone wears many hats. Raph has a design background. So does John, Thor, and Chapman. Thor also wrote two books on online games development.

If you discount the advisors and investors, and business development, there are around eight direct contributors to Metaplace of which about half are designers or implementors with design backgrounds. In my opinion, that would make Areae quite designer-heavy.

Plus, I think—and I’m only guessing—that most of the design work is already done and what’s left is implementation and testing. I saw an early, early version of Metaplace way back in December ’06 and Raph had already made a virtual world.

I wasn’t impressed with the tools as much as I was with the product’s application. I wouldn’t be surprised if Metaplace changes how we use and think of the Web altogether. There’s more to the platform than what’s been said, and I say that because I don’t feel like the announcement and articles really capture the scope of Metaplace as thoroughly as did the diagram that was on Raph’s whiteboard.

Morgan, for a company that’s essentially making tools for game designers, that chart is remarkably designer-lite.

Not suggesting that’s any sort of unintentional oversight… but it does make me curious about the alternative… intentions.

Compromises in multiple dimensions lead to proliferation. It’s a function of demand over talent and distribution. IMO, the 3D on Google Earth and MS Virtual Earth is terrible but artists with a decent hand at using their editors can make a goodly shekel cold calling businesses and offering to take them out of flatland. As those addresses in the map become the gateways to much better standalone interiors, the follow on market expands. Now the competition for the talent expands as well although prices will fall.

The expanding talent pool will gut the game market pricing. The rest follows naturally. The profit basis has to shift to longer terms. This is what happened in music. The initial burst (a two or three year cycle based on the hits) is followed in the next rehosting cycle when the same content can be resold because it is in a new format or medium. Movie producers screwed up by destroying aging stock prior to Ted Turner creating a new market for old footage given a new means of distribution (cable) and a new audience (college kids up at night after 11 high and hungry and chatty). Similar things happened in the music business. The digital content for single proprietary engines will suffer the same losses. Caveat vendor.

Fortune 100:
big department (associate director) > lone, secret RAD developer to address urgent needs without the mountains of planning and budgetting needed to get a project going. The org in that case was largely just a cloud of folks that I met with but had no clear relation to me other than sharing office space and management. There were whole huge DBA and networking departments that supported my rogue operations but were “out of sight” from my org-chart perspective.

Retail chain with ~500 employees:
President/CEO > CIO > four developers with various strengths leveraged ad hoc to conquor whatever problems and meet whatever needs arise. At that same bottom rung are the two-person helpdesk, one business analyst, the one-man network/desktop support guy and a contract DBA firm.

Small service bureau with ~150 employees:
President > Director if IT > five developers, some of whom are senior and act as mentors to others. At that same bottom run are three network/desktop support guys.

I have this idea that “real” software developers have all these fix roles: UI, business object, data access, DBA, analyst, project manager, etc. But across several jobs and over abous six years in development, I’ve never worked somewhere like that. The team has always been pretty informal in sharing strengths and knowledge. I wonder if that perceived ideal is the “right” way to do it but it’s acutally kind of rare, or if I’m just working with small-sample statistics.