Raph Koster is “an American entrepreneur, game designer, and author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design.” (Wikipedia) For the past year, his company, Areae has been teasing the launch of a new “metaverse” that would revolutionize virtual world creation. (A metaverse is a generic term for online virtual worlds like Second Life or multi-player online games.)
Today it’s open for business - Metaplace.
The vision
Build a virtual apartment and put it on your website. Work with friends to make a huge MMORPG. Share your puzzle game with friends. We have a vision: to let you build anything, and play everything, from anywhere. Eventually, anyway. We have to finish first.
Our goals are sort of idealistic. We think there are all kinds of things on the Internet that would be improved if anyone could have a virtual place of their own. Right now, there aren’t enough good games, for example, and they all seem to be about elves in tights or soldiers in battle armor. Metaplace allows more diversity. Right now, there are lots of people who want to use virtual worlds for research, or education, or business, but it’s just too darn hard to get one going. Now you can create a world in just a few minutes and start tailoring it to your needs. Basically, we wanted to democratize the process of making online spaces of all sorts.
One of the criticisms of Second Life (and other virtual worlds) is that what you build for them is limited to use inside of that world. It means that someone “owns” the world, and as in Second Life can charge for its use. You have to use their scripts and their tools and their application to “see” the world. If Linden Lab (the owners of Second Life) closed their doors tomorrow, Second Life would be gone.
It’s not like the rest of the Internet, where no one owns HTML, or the standards that make it possible for anyone to launch a website that the whole world can see. In virtual worlds, having an “open markup standard” could mean that as long as you follow the rules, a world built like this could be viewed anywhere online.
As part of that, we also committed to an open markup standard for our network protocol - anyone can write a client for any platform they want. We decided to use Web standards for everything we could, which is why you can have a game world that is also a website, or use Web data to populate your world. The scripting language (we call it MetaScript, of course) is based on Lua. You get the idea - no “not invented here,” no closed proprietary approaches.
Just like HTML means that anyone with a domain can create a page with links to any other page, this concept means that any virtual world can link to any other virtual world.
What’s more, you can link your world to someone else’s world. Put a doorway in your virtual apartment that leads to Pirate Vs Ninja-land! Stick your world in a widget on your Facebook or MySpace profile. Mail it to a friend and they can log in with one click.
What does this mean for education?
It’s really really early. Metaplace was announced 6 hours ago, and it’s in an alpha stage. That’s the real “bleeding edge” of the curve, but that’s what early adopters love, right? Programmers can sign up and try it out. For educators, there are obviously questions about children, security, and open access. But tech-savvy educators have the smarts and experience from all the recent activity with Second Life to jump on this opportunity and figure it out. The research that’s been done on metaverses in education will still hold true. Lots of the concepts and best practices developed in Second Life and other metaverses will apply. The hope is, however, that some of the problems with Second Life being a closed system will be overcome.
We speak Web fluently. Every world is a web server, and every object has a URL. You can script an object so that it feeds RSS, XML, or HTML to a browser. This lets you do things like high score tables, objects that email you, player profile pages right on the player — whatever you want. Every object can also browse the Web: a chat bot can chatter headlines from an RSS feed, a newspaper with real headlines can sit on your virtual desk, game data could come from real world data… you get the idea. No more walled garden.
There are many other unanswered questions, of course. It’s not clear how the company will make money, or exactly how useful these tools are. Will programmers jump on this and create a vibrant, sharing community that will bloom and grow? Who knows?
It’s obviously going to be used for games, but there are certainly enough hooks and hints here about its usefulness for education. In one sense, it’s kinda crazy to talk about these things when in reality most schools don’t even allow students to have an email address. But on the other hand, educators who push the envelope open up a path for everyone else to follow.
Time will tell. It’s certainly a step in the direction of open standards that will allow a whole world of motivated world builders a chance to figure it out. Interested? Sign up to be an alpha builder.
Fascinating, Sylvia. Today in my Web 2.0 club, I asked students what they wanted to explore - music composition, podcasting, filmmaking, blogging, etc. A couple students said, “I want to create games,” and that stumped me. I’m still stumped and, now that I’m pausing to write and reflect on this because of this post, realize I need to put my own search skills to work (and show those students how to deploy those skills too) to find resources that will help those students pursue their goals. This seems like it might be one or those resources, so thanks for that
I saw your Twitter userpic on the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference, by the way - nice to put a face to a name, and what a great smiling photo that was
Hi Clay,
There are some really great links to game-making resources here too https://blog.genyes.com/index.php/2007/04/30/game-making-with-students-resources-rationale-from-australia/
Game design is a terrific activity for students, it’s design, critical thinking, connections to any curriculum area, logic, thinking of audience AND really motivating.
Good luck with that!