Now it’s MyMetaChat
(Visited 4107 times) Gamemaking
Mar 172008
If you tried out Metachat on MySpace, you may notice that now it embeds a personal world — as in your own chat room — on your profile. If people stop by, you’ll see them as past visitors, they can leave messages in the chat history, and of course, if you both happen to be there at the same time, you can chat live… and of course, it links to the main Metachat world as well.
22 Responses to “Now it’s MyMetaChat”
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“We had trouble connecting to the server this may have been caused be the internet. Please retry.”
Looking forward to being able to use it. Now if you tell me that re-skinning the app will be the next feature, I’ll be a happy man.
Oh, I should note, that error (Error: 2048) is only on the profile page.. not from the app central page.
I still get that error with Firefox on any page.
Could you try clearing your cache and trying again?
I tried again after a few 12 hours away from the PC, works now.
Still happens.
Have you decided that spaces are worlds, now, Raph?
Or let me put it this way:
Have you decided that my attention on an application is a world?
I don’t think size of the space, or representation of the space, can be used as the criterion. So I fall back on the things that I always have: spatial simulation, persistence, proxy representation of users (e.g. avatars).
Metachat — even the teeny tiny version — meets all of those criteria. Heck, it even has physics. 🙂
Really, the gap between Metachat and, say, Habbo Hotel, is mostly one of graphics.
It might be worth adding one more criteria to that if we want to define things as “spaces” and “worlds”, namely that the Worlds have to have more than one location. If in a text based game, the “world” would consist of a single room, perhaps space *is* more appropriate.
Metachat has a bunch of rooms. MyMetachat doesn’t. They use exactly the same codebase — the difference is in data. One is a world, the other isn’t?
Yep. Just like the HTML that makes up a single page would be referred to as a Web Page, but a series of web pages would be referred to as a Web Site. Sites are made of pages, Worlds are made of Spaces. The code can be identical, the only difference is scale. It’s a useful distinction, even if it doesn’t inherently mean much.
To clarify, because I can’t edit my previous entry, I’m not trying to say that a Space should be treated differently than a World per se, so this is mostly a semantics thing. It’s just that to many people, the term World is going to imply something that isn’t necessarily being presented in a single location. When we talk about a world, we are usually talking about something that we can move from location to location in. If there’s just one location, we’ve got a space, we move around *in* it, but we never actually move away from that location into another one. So this is really about a hierarchy of spaces in the way that you’ve got a hierarchy of HTML (or whatever we’re using to code webpages). Page, Site, Network, Web. Something similar for Virtual Worlds would be Space, World, Network (Metaplace would go here, though, if you want to be technical about it we’re probably starting to break the metaphor a bit, since Metaplace steps away from being spatial in the same sense), Multiverse (or whatever you want to call it, this would be where there are many Metaplace like services all connected in some fashion).
Again, it’s not a big issue, since this is all semantics anyway. But I think that as a hierarchy it does work to categorize things like that.
So Eve and SL are not worlds, just spaces. 🙂
Nah, EVE has multiple systems, even if they’re contiguous and seamless, they’d still be described as being separate. SL, same thing. It’s not the technical aspect of them being zones, it’s that a normal person would describe them as being different locales
So your definition is whether you can see the whole space at once? We’re getting into some mighty fine distinctions here. I can go make Metachat have scrolling rooms if you want, would it qualify then? 🙂
Again, sorry for the multiple posts, I’m a little zoned out… to make this even more clear, if you can move such that you can spin in a circle and not see the same environment that you did before (using normal zoom distances, and not some sort of God client that lets you zoom all the way out), you’re in a new location, and then you can start looking at the term World. If you can never really get far enough away that you’re in a completely different area, the term space is probably more applicable. There’s a level of subjectiveness here though, since it’s based on the concept of “location”. The above allows for a more objective viewpoint, but most people will view a room that’s large enough that you can lose sight of it in that same manner, but still follows a single theme that in the real world would constitute a single location as a single location and would probably be more comfortable referring to it as a space rather than a world.
So there’s two ways of defining it, the latter of which is a bit more subjective, but either of which would make SL and EVE into worlds. Either you can move far enough away that you can no longer see where you were before or you have “rooms” that are themed differently enough that they do not seem to be the same location. EVE has this, SL is based on this. MyMetaChat does not have this, but MetaChat *does* as long as you can hop from room to room, though if you want to be stickler about it, you’d have to do so by moving through space (opening a door, walking through a portal), otherwise you could define it as a bunch of instanced spaces rather than a world.
Yeah, would fall into that second category then Raph, so still no go. I was trying to make a more technical way of dealing with the situation, but that’s not always workable. I’m really not feeling so great, head’s kinda fuzzy. 😛
As long as my room connects to *another* room, and it doesn’t have to be zoned, there just has to be some sort of obvious transition that lets me know I’ve moved from one room to another, then I’ll call it a world. But my threshold is low. Some peopele could make an argument that you need X rooms, but then you get into a really tricky discussion about why X and not X-1 counts. Hence the proposed minimum of two, since you can’t have 1 minus 1 and still have a space.
What’s with the black and white definition of a world anyway? Is that even useful? Metachat is world-y, a bit world-like. It’s on the boundary.
I participated on an RP channel on IRC a long while back… we had a bot for persistence and character descriptions. The spacial simulation was in our imagination. It was more of a world to us than Metachat could ever be but again it’s a boundary thing. Isn’t it MORE useful to discuss these things as transition objects?
Depends on what you’re trying to define. That RP channel is very subjective in terms of meaning. You can have the exact same mechanics and have it be “world like” to a group of players, or just text to a different group. If you’re trying to define the terms to use for the mechanical aspects, you can’t rely on something as subjective as the response that the users have to it. That’s useful for other things, but it’s not so useful when trying to examine how the mechanics interact.
Black and white definitions are very important when trying to build terminology that can be used for analysis. It’s no good to have to describe exactly why you’re using a term if you’re trying to have a high level discussion. The only reason why I’m having this conversation with Raph at all actually is because we lack that lexicon.
I understand the need for terminology and a shared lexicon. Undoubtedly some things are worlds (MUDs) and others are not (plain IRC). I guess what I don’t understand is the obsession with drawing a precise line. Isn’t the very fact that some things straddle the boundary more useful to analysis and actually very interesting in and of itself? Why not define another term for these boundary objects so we can talk about them specifically?
I guess I’m saying, why not study the subjective nature of these boundary things instead of just arguing about whether they are or aren’t?
I have been thinking more about this though, (sorry about posting so much, really) and I think that the definitions of World and Space in this case would probably end up being mostly academic in practice. Most people use web page and web site interchangeably, so the distinction only really comes into play when you’ve actually *got* the bigger of the two and are using the term to describe a sub-section of it. So while a case could be made for it being technically more accurate to refer to a single location space like MyMetaChat as a Space, in practice the difference simply isn’t going to matter much. Worlds are made up of Spaces, but it’s probably fine to use the terms interchangeably, especially if you’ve got only a single Space. And we’ve been using the concept of Spaces for a very very long time, just calling them either rooms or zones. Kinda breaks down in terms of seamless worlds, but the concept still applies to them too, the border lines are just harder to define (sometimes anyway. WoW makes the transitions very obvious)