A few weeks ago, I received my beta invite to Metaplace. Since that time my blogging and twittering have been in steep decline. Kevin Werbach recently tweeted:
"Getting worried that the time I waste on Twitter is taking away from the time I waste on WoW."Replace the word "Twitter" with "Metaplace" and "WoW" with "Twitter" and you have my analog to Professor Supernova's dilemma.
I have around a dozen blog posts in draft and even more images of my observations on Metaplace over the past few weeks. And my general feeling is very positive. I've yet to visit a virtual world that artfully integrates a culture of gaming into the flexibility and openness of virtual worlds. Well, not since Star Wars Galaxies, natch.
I'll start from the beginning. Within the first hour of joining Metaplace I easily built an initial world that pleased my sci-fi wonky aesthetics; I was greeted to my great surprise and given a brief tour of Metaplace by its founder Raph Koster; I discovered the McLuhanesque hideaway for Virtual World Philosopher Peter Ludlow (creator of two seminal virtual world news websites chronicling The Sims Online and Second Life); and wrapped up the evening hanging out at Ludlow's place with the ubiquitous chronicler of All Things Virtual & Beyond, Ms. Tish Shute. I've included some of those images throughout this post.
In the interest of getting this posted, for there will be more Metaplace observations to come, I'm going to close out with this excerpt of my conversation with Peter Ludlow as his avatar Urizenus.
josholalia: What do you think so far?
Urizenus: well its primitive in a way but I'm excited about a virtual world for the first time in a long time.
josholalia: Me too! Trying to put my finger on why. Why do you think?
Urizenus: this is what tso could have been
Urizenus: i think because its fun
Urizenus: its not just cuz its new
josholalia: Raph tapped into a certain transfomative zeitgeist there. And I feel like I can sense some of it here.
Urizenus: cool. I am a total believer in raph
4 comments:
Metaplace is fun, and I only wish I had had more time to play with it. That's what the long academic summer is for, I guess. The low barriers to entry - to getting your hands dirty building things - make it potentially a powerful educational tool, which is my main interest. Well, that and the fun. Looking forward to more of your reports from the Meta...
Hello there!
I'm a disability activist and an original player from launch of SWG (I bailed after the NGE) as well as a long-time user of SL. I also survived Katrina (so I relate to Rita's book).
I am very interested in metaplace and have questions: is it true that you can embed metaplace in a blog? if so, I'd love to mount it on my blog. to what degree is metaplace interoperable with the rest of the web?
Nick
Hi Nick!
As far as I know, once Metaplace goes out of beta you will be able to embed it in any web page.
Yeah Raph is a pretty nice guy. I'm lucky he didn't ban me on sight given my history, which is honestly what I had expected. I think I would have banned me.
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