This afternoon I was on a panel on mergers and acquisitions in the social games market alongside a bunch of great folks. It was the last session of the day, and they asked me to go “all designery” so I did.

You can find a liveblog here:

ISA 2011: Live-Blogging the Mergers and Acquisitions Landscape for Small and Mid-Size Developers.

And a news article here:

ISA 2011: Small Developers Don’t Need to Sell Out Yet

You can also get the highlights of the entire conference by simply reading the search results for the #isa2011 hashtag on Twitter.

Here’s the official press release:

Playdom Announces Acquisition of Metaplace — MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., July 8 /PRNewswire/ –.

Coverage also popping up in a few more places, like TechCrunch and Games.com.

This is going to be a lot of fun.

To say goodbye to Metaplace.com in style, there’s a party scheduled at noon tomorrow January 1st, probably running all the way until the lights go out at midnight. Please come on by and hang out!

I am also going to do one last, final farewell concert, after some users asked me to. It will be at 2pm Pacific (or Metaplace time) in The Stage, and I will embed it here as usual.

Today we announced that the consumer-facing Metaplace service, the one you all know as the user-generated worlds website at Metaplace.com, is closing on January 1st. There’s a FAQ and an official letter on the site.

The reason? Well, it just hasn’t gotten traction. I have many thoughts on why, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t go into all of them right now. It is a sad day for us here, and I know many users are going to be very disappointed by this turn of events.

Metaplace Inc isn’t going away – in fact, we have some pretty exciting plans. But those plans are best shared on a future day.

If we have to sunset the service, we want to do it right. So for the next two weeks – come visit, and enjoy and celebrate all of the amazing creativity and work users put into their worlds. We’re providing a way for users to grab the data that makes up their worlds. We’ll be opening a website for the community so that you don’t lose touch with your Metaplace friends. And we’ll have a big party on the last day – because Metaplace.com will not go quietly, but with the sound of meeps and music and laughter.

It was a wonderful world full of wonderful people, and I will miss it more than I can say.

http://www.metaplace.com/TheStage/play

Head on through the doors on the second level of the lobby to the stage proper.

Edit: event over. Log not yet available, but I will update when it is.

I first met Jesse at an event at MIT, where we had a mutual fanboy moment. Now every time his name pops up on a TV screen I get to point it out to the kids. He’s a big thinker on transmedia — the ways in which stories can cross between many media and be “read” at different levels. And today, he’s going cross-media again, with a live chat and Q&A at the Metaplace Stage today at 2pm Pacific. I’ll have it embedded here.

Where: TheStage

When: November 17

Duration: 2:00pm – 3:00pm PST

Jesse Alexander is a former co-executive producer and a writer for the show Heroes. Alexander joined the crew immediately after the pilot and has served as co-executive producer on the first three seasons. In addition to his work on the episodes of Heroes, Jesse also wrote several graphic novels, and worked on the story for the webisode The Recruit.

Jesse previously served as an executive producer and writer on Alias and as a co-executive producer on Lost. He co-wrote the screenplay for the film Eight Legged Freaks. Jesse also helped develop videogames for Alias and Apocalypse. In May 2009 NBC announced that their fall lineup would include a new series, Day One, in which Jesse serves as an executive producer and writer.

(Information from the Heroes Wiki)

Jesse will be holding a Q&A session in Metaplace! You don’t want to miss this!

via Metaplace – Event Details.

A collective of Metaplace users led by the intrepid MacZ have set up a huge Halloween event tomorrow. It kicks off at noon Pacific time in the world Riverbeer with costume contests, art displays, and a bridge to similar events in SL., proceeds to hayrides and world tours at 1pm, then Superbad supplies DJ music in The Lotus Room until 4pm.

And then comes the SCARY part. I’ll be doing a 2 hour live set of music selected to fit the spooky theme, just me, my guitar, and as many creepy laughs as I can muster! It runs from 4 to 6pm Pacific in The Stage, and I will have it embedded here too. I set up a special version of the venue all decorated up for Halloween.

After my set, we’ll have more DJing, in the same venue, from J-Digital.

This will be the first time I have done a formal virtual concert, and I am terrified. Come share my fear.

I was lucky enough to be part of a podcast for Global Kids’ Digital Media Initiative, the RezEd podcast, alongside Daniel Livingstone and Joe Castille, who are two of the educators using Metaplace. It was a great conversation! Check it out here.

RezEd Podcast Episode 42 – Metaplace and Forecasting the Future of Virtual Worlds

(WORLD) The forty-second RezEd monthly podcast, produced by Global Kids.

Raph Koster, President of Metaplace, and two practitioners discuss the advantages of using Metaplace within the classroom, and an In Focus with Nic Mitham of KZero, discussing their new chart forecasting the future of virtual worlds.

I don’t know if I have raved about Matt Sturges’ work in comics here before. House of Mystery (available in two collections to date: Room and Boredom and Love Stories For Dead People) has vaulted onto the list of my favorite ongoing series. He’s also involved with the Eisner-award-winning Fables universe, particularly through Jack of Fables.

But I am a bit biased — I knew Matt back in the days when I lived in Austin, when were both caught up in the variously overlapping writers’ circles around Turkey City (the writer’s workshop best known in SF/F circles for its widely-used lexicon). Matt was a member of the Clockwork Storybook collective, from which several writers of note have emerged.

I’m super happy to have Matt cornered on the Metaplace stage today at 2pm Pacific, to get grilled about comics, writing, and whatever else attendees want to hear about!

Edit: the event is over, but the chat log is available here.

I did this interview for Game Breakr while I was here… a fun conversation!

Game Breakr – Raph Koster Interview Austin GDC on Vimeo on Vimeo