• Richard Bartle Q&A log

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 21 Comments

    The full log of a great Q&A session with Richard Bartle in Metaplace has been posted up on the Metaplace Forums. It was a wide-ranging discussion, attended by over 70 people. Richard’s dry wit was, as usual, on full display.

    A typical, provocative, snippet:

    [05/26/09 13:13:10] gguillotte: I’ve been watching procedurally generated content for a while. Love comes to mind, a PG MMO. What sort of impact is this going to have, where content generation is automated?

    [05/26/09 13:13:45] Richard: it depends if the generation of the content is the game or is filler
    [05/26/09 13:14:11] Richard: procedural content can work – I’ve spent many, many hours playing Rogue for example
    [05/26/09 13:14:42] Richard: using procedural content to create a canvas for virtual worlds seems a perfectly rational thing to do
    [05/26/09 13:15:22] Richard: however, the designer has to put their soul in it somewhere: either this is by modifying the procedural content or by creating the framework that creates it
    [05/26/09 13:15:59] Richard: now the former is the traditional way for designers to speak to players; if a designer wants to speak through the content-generation rules, well
    [05/26/09 13:16:12] Richard: that would be possible but we don’t have the vocabulary for it yet

    [05/26/09 13:16:28] gguillotte: Thanks.

    [05/26/09 13:16:31] Richard: that makes it an interesting time for us

    [05/26/09 13:16:38] gguillotte: Indeed 😀

    [05/26/09 13:17:11] Richard: Metaplace is a similar thing, btw – we’ll see things here that we haven’t seen the like of before

    [05/26/09 13:17:21] Cuppycake: (We already have!)

    [05/26/09 13:17:24] Richard: which is why I’m so enthusiastic for it
    [05/26/09 13:17:55] Richard: I don’t mean new worlds, I mean new ways of communicating through world creation

  • Facebook & virtual currency

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 11 Comments

    I wrote a blog post about this yesterday, but alas, I lost it.  CNN has an article about Facebook’s virtual currency plans, which are already moving into alpha.

    Facebook is researching the idea of creating a unified currency but is “very early” in the process and has not committed to it, the site said in a statement to CNN.

    Currently, applications on the site — which allow users to play games with each other and trade gifts — are powered by currencies made by the application’s developers, not by Facebook.

    These developers are making good money on the system, and Facebook is missing out on profits in that area, said Hudson, of the Virtual Goods Summit.

    — ‘Virtual currencies’ power social networks, online games – CNN.com.

    Now, Facebook already has a virtual currency — credits — which you use to buy gifts. But what is being talked about is opening up an API to their currency system through apps.

    For those who haven’t noticed, the open APIs Facebook is creating are allowing access to data such as login from anywhere on the Net. So in effect, this could lead to a fairly standard currency fo any site that accepts Facebook logins.

    The real play here, as Information Week notes, is to become a “gold standard” of sorts, similar to the way in which Facebook and LinkedIn are already becoming stronger standards for online identity than OpenID is (the flip side is, of course, than you can now use OpenId to log into Facebook!).

    The notion of “customer ownership” starts getting very blurry in a world like this. It won’t be long until you see major MMORPGs allowing you to log in with social networking credentials rather than requiring you to create their own account (we at Metaplace already allow this). And if these currency plans move forward and go far enough, we could see many users just paying their subs or their microtransactions with Facebook credits.

    For smaller apps and websites, this can make a great deal of sense. Lots of other players are trying to establish base virtual currencies that work across sites and apps.

  • Idea Exchange talk on Virtual Economies

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 3 Comments

    I’ll be at this Idea Exchange event on Virtual Economies, which is happening cross-world in SL and Metaplace today at noon PDT (which is a bit over an hour from now). You can go straight to the Interval world with this link, and you can just log in with your Facebook or other credentials if you like.

    On April 17th of this year, Alicia Ashby of Virtual Goods News wrote that based upon performance data released by Linden Lab and despite the current downturn in world economies, Second Life’s virtual economy appears to be growing. (The news was also picked up by CNet.)

    In this second in a series of Idea Exchange events hosted by GSD&M Idea City, we will invite Alicia Ashby and several other virtual world industry insiders the likes of Raph Koster of Metaplace, Richard Acton-Maher of Linden Lab, Sibley Verbeck of Electric Sheep Company, Adrienne Haik of Metaversatility, Robert Bloomfield of Metanomics, and others to join us in an open discussion about the role that virtual economies will play within the context of our real-world economic recession.

  • Metaplace is now in open beta

    Hours Categories Game talk, Gamemaking
    Comments 13 Comments

    Yesterday was a big milestone for me. Anyone can now go to Metaplace.com and register. You get a small world for free, with full access to all the content creation tools. Lately, I’ve been describing it at “the power of Second Life, with the ease of The Sims, on the web.”

    It’s early days yet, of course. There is a lot more left to do. For example, we have not yet released the ability to embed worlds on websites and profile pages, which is a huge part of the story. There’s more to come in terms of web integration, plugins on the marketplace so that it gets easier and easier to make what you want, and so on. We’re not done by a long shot.

    But it’s still exciting. As users create more content and share more, the power everyone has to create will rise dramatically — we’re making the classic bet on users and the network effect that has helped so many websites. I can’t wait to see what develops.

    Here’s the welcome video, for those who have not seen it: