Social gaming company Playdom acquires Metaplace Inc. originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 12 Jul 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

There.com is closing originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Raph Koster on the future of Metaplace originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 05 Jan 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

As you read last night, the UGC (user-generated-content) virtual environment side of Metaplace is shuttering on New Year's Day, 2010, just a scant couple of weeks away.

"The reason?" says company president Koster. "Well, it just hasn't gotten traction."

Nor should it have at this stage, really. Metaplace only went into open beta in May this year, meaning that it is closing before it really launched. We believe that is several years too soon for traction with its (now canceled) model.

Continue reading Marketplace traction with the UGC model and the closure of Metaplace

Marketplace traction with the UGC model and the closure of Metaplace originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 22 Dec 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Metaplace announces January 1st shutdown originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 21 Dec 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Massively's 2009 Winter Holiday Event Guide

Massively's 2009 Winter Holiday Event Guide originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Metaplace: Halloween, hold the zombies originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Jokay Wollongong, one of the premier promoters and supporters of the educational uses of Second Life, and keeper of the largest single resource for Second Life educators, suffered something of a reversal this week, when Linden Lab decided that that very same resource, sleducation.wikispaces.com, infringed on their SL trademark (which has now only been registered for nine days), and sent Wollongong a takedown notice.

That's something of a surprise considering Linden Lab's ongoing endorsement of the site on the Second Life Education mailing-list. The site, which has been up since late 2006, documents over 100 case studies of educational projects in Second Life, as well as providing key community resources and information for educators who are just getting started with virtual environments.

Continue reading Linden Lab punctures education community with newly registered trademark

Linden Lab punctures education community with newly registered trademark originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Jeffrey Steefel, The Lord of the Rings Online Executive Producer, Turbine:

"It's been fascinating to see how the MMO game has been evolving over the past 10 years... A lot has happened. Games have become more complex, consumers mostly all have faster internet access, are comfortable buying things online and spending time online. Social connections now happen through the network as readily as in person or over the phone or through mail. Mass consumers regularly consume media content in small chunks through the network; whether its music, ppv video, eBooks, ringtones, games or even now television shows.

"Players don't want to 'play' with thousands of people, they want to play with a small group in the presence of thousands. It's like an old-school arcade. You don't want to play pinball with 10 people, but playing by yourself in a crowded room is a lot more fun. Players have more varied play-sessions. Some still play for hours on end, some want to come in for some quick fun. Subscription is alive and well, but it is not the only way to charge for this kind of experience. Microtransactions, premium services and content, free online play are all creeping into the genre.

"In other words, 'MMO' is too confining. 'MMO' was the spawning point for all kinds of new online entertainment. And it is reaching a much wider audience. Not to mention the critical importance of not only the game, but the service and media infrastructure that surrounds a good online experience.

"So I believe what we're really building is entertainment services, that combine the flexibility and accessibility of the network, the appeal of social networking, the freedom of an online persistent universe, and the structured fun provided by video games. So it's hard to say there is one term that can cover all that this can be or become. I think we need to look at the ingredients -- persistence, sense of place, sense of purpose, social connectivity, social identity, social grouping, participatory experiences and storytelling -- and then perhaps try and find a name for it."

Thom Terrazas, EverQuest Producer, Sony Online Entertainment:

"Obviously 'massive' is the main theme to the name, but what was the target number of people online when the term 'massive' was [coined for] MMOs? I'm no expert by any means, but I believe the term first referred to a couple dozen simultaneous players if not hundreds of players existing in a virtual world, interacting between each other. When it started, it was with a lot of passion from many that pushed the envelope of technology that enabled the first dozen to be achieved. That just set the bar for others to improve on and it continues today. Today, it means everything. It's a game and it's a business and everything in between. It's a place you can go and leave everything else behind, but at the same time, it's a place you can visit and be everything you've ever wanted. It means a release from the real world and an invitation to your imagination. ... I think ['MMO'] only needs a new term for those that don't know what it means right now.....or what it was meant to be."

Rich Vogel, Co-Studio Vice President, BioWare:

"MMO to me means the ability to play with thousands of players in a world. This was actually coined by 3DO back in the Meridian 59 days and later adopted by EA when marketing Ultima Online. ...

"It was coined over 10 years ago to convey a marketing message. There were no games that allowed thousands of players in one environment and it was a great selling point. Today, that feature is well understood. It has branched out beyond the RPG genre into others like MMOFPS, MMORTS, etc.

"No [I don't think we need a new term for 'MMO']. I feel it has become its own category and a mainstream term that people recognize now -- especially after [World of Warcraft]. The term 'MMO' can be applied to any single player genre that wants to have a large-scale multiplayer component. ...

"Star Wars: The Old Republic is an MMORPG in every sense of the term. BioWare has a long tradition of making great story driven RPGs and now we are entering into the MMO market for the first time. Our game has all of the traditional components of MMORPGs like combat, exploration, advancement, great loot, and crafting. However, we are going to add another element to the MMORPG genre -- storytelling the BioWare way."

Raph Koster, President and Founder, Metaplace:

"I think now, at this point, now that we've chopped the 'RPG' part off of it and just say 'MMO,' which by itself is a meaningless acronym. Massively multiplayer online... The problem is the very word massive is not particularly useful. Sorry Massively website! But the problem is that "massive" is kind of relative. New York is a massive city, until you go to Shanghai. It's completely relative. ...

"I was never that crazy about [the term 'MMO']. We've been here before. There was a huge turf battle over the term 'MUD'... There were people coming up with MUVE, multiple user virtual environment... random acronyms people were coming up with to describe the field. Several of us kept saying, 'These are just virtual worlds, damnit!' Part of the reason why that was working okay was it was fairly easy to say, and MUDs do have a very specific kind of family tree that we can point at, and they all fall under virtual worlds.

"That was great until people started calling things -- without any games in them -- 'virtual worlds,' excluding MMO-anythings. This is where you get people saying, 'Well, [World of Warcraft] is a MMORPG, it's not a virtual world.' And it's like...errrr. Because the battle has started all over again with people trying to appropriate the term 'virtual world' to mean Second Life or to mean Habbo Hotel. So now you have things like social virtual worlds and generic virtual worlds, and people think it means just Second Life, and that's... wrong. I'll say it bluntly, that's just wrong, because WoW is a virtual world and so is Second Life, and so is YoVille. A lot of people don't want to claim YoVille as being in the family, but it is. I much prefer to define these things by what they are rather than how many people they hold.

"I do still say MMO, because at this point it usually has the connotation of game. If you say 'MMO' people assume you mean a game. ... Even us design types, we still need to know what we're actually doing. The terms, right? We need to agree on a language so we can talk about it. Disclaiming something that is a massively multiplayer, comma, online, comma, first-person, comma, shooter, and saying, 'Well, it's not actually massively multiplayer online'... whatever. That's clearly marketing talking.

"There are people that call them MWOs, people that called them MOGs, and people that call them POGs. There's PSWs which is an art term for a specific sub-set of virtual world so that one gets misused all the time because it means 'persistent state world.' ... There are some others... PIG, I've seen PIG, 'persistent interactive game.'

Massively: I don't think a game maker would like to call their game a "PIG."

"Probably not."

Redefining MMOs: Developers weigh in, part 3 originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Watch "Another Perfect World" live in Metaplace at 3 PM ET here on Massively

Watch "Another Perfect World" live in Metaplace at 3 PM ET here on Massively originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Raph Koster speaks on Metaplace's new functionality and the state of virtual worlds pt. 2 originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Raph Koster speaks on Metaplace's new functionality and the state of virtual worlds

Raph Koster speaks on Metaplace's new functionality and the state of virtual worlds originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Social situations shattered

How many times do we have a young player in our guild who act more like a 30-year-old than the 30-year-olds do? How often do we cross cultural boundaries and forget that we're speaking with someone who might be across the world, in a completely different time zone? To us, they're simply standing in the same room as us, and that puts them in the same place we are.

I know that I don't consciously think about where someone lives or who they really are when I meet them in Second Life or Metaplace. I'm too busy chatting with them about shared interests, because obviously if we're meeting one another while standing inside of a fantasy roleplaying simulation, then we both enjoy fantasy roleplaying.

This is doubly true when I'm playing something like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XI. Not only do we now have something in common, but we can be united with our goals as well. You're here to run Nexus? So am I! Let's work together to get through this dungeon. I don't question where you come from, who you are, or how old you are. I may question you if you're not pulling your weight or bringing down the party, but even then I'm going to help you so we can get through the task together.

"In a weird sort of way, virtual worlds humanize us more than the real world is able to.

In a weird sort of way, virtual worlds humanize us more than the real world is able to. While the condition of anonymity can lead to some really destructive individuals, it can also lead to being able to connect to one another without the hangups of social barriers that exist in real life. We can meet individuals who are very different from ourselves, find common ground quickly, and then learn from one another, rather than avoiding those who are different because it scares us.

Beyond that, the experiences we gain from being in virtual worlds do not exist in a vacuum. We take what we learn and we apply it to what we do in everyday life. With enough time, I have no doubt that this too will help melt some of the social stigmas that we carry in real life, simply because we can come in contact with others in a more controlled online environment.

If you want evidence, look at the decreasing age barrier. We let younger kids and teenagers into positions of power and responsibility in our guilds and online activities, and that in turn has slowly lead to more adults listening to kids when they have something to say. We use to completely bar kids from offering advice to us "more knowledgeable, older adults" but it's been slowly changing. While it may not be the only factor that has lead to this, it certainly is one of them.

So I think it's time to give credit where credit is due. Virtual worlds, online games, and the Internet are bringing us together, and many of us are slowly finding out that we're really not so different from one another after all. We're learning about culture, gender, age, and sexuality, and it's certainly about damn time.

---

Colin Seraphina Brennan is the weekly writer of Anti-Aliased isn't that different from anyone else and is darn proud of it. When she's not writing here for Massively, she's rambling on her personal blog, The Experience Curve. If you want to message her, send her an e-mail at colin.brennan AT weblogsinc DOT com. You can also follow her on Twitter through Massively, or through her personal feed, @sera_brennan.

Anti-Aliased: Virtual worlds as the great equalizer pt. 2 originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Anti-Aliased: Virtual worlds as the great equalizer

Anti-Aliased: Virtual worlds as the great equalizer originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading A closer look at revenues in free-to-play MMOs

A closer look at revenues in free-to-play MMOs originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

MetaPlace open beta is on originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 17 May 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

• Social RPGs
• Sports RPGs
• Casual games
• Word games
• Virtual villages, or mini virtual worlds
• Casino games
• Just for laughs, or silly games like the versus games on Facebook
• Ownership games

The social game roundup originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 21 Mar 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Metaplace offers new round of beta keys originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Massively interviews Raph Koster on the State of Metaplace

Massively interviews Raph Koster on the State of Metaplace originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Raph Koster on Metaplace part 2

Raph Koster on Metaplace part 2 originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Massively is giving away 100 Metaplace invitations!

Massively is giving away 100 Metaplace invitations! originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Metaplace: Now accepting beta applications originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Kevin Hanna, creative director of Google's Lively, said at AGDC that he hopes that Lively will become an online gaming platform that will challenge the status quo in a game industry he says is currently dominated by a "corporate mentality" that is "sucking the life out of what should be the most creative and innovative medium out there."

He said that game developers and publishers seem eager to be "first to be second." That is, they have no interest in creating anything genuinely new. They just want to capitalize on ideas that have already been proven. His hope is that Lively will lower the barrier to entry so would-be developers ("passionate startups and kids in college") can experiment with new ideas with less risk.

So far, the aspects of Google's vision for Lively as a game development platform that we've seen have looked like a greatly scaled back, poor man's version of MetaPlace; just the tools for creating simple arcade-like games, without any of the loftier purpose. But Hanna's comments suggest that at least some folks on the Lively team have grander ambitions after all.

Online gaming on Google's Lively to take on "corporate mentality" originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

AGDC08: Devs on why MMOs have a web-based future originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Picking apart the MetaPlace Bill of Rights

Picking apart the MetaPlace Bill of Rights originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Raph Koster on the Metaplace idea originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

MetaPlace closes in on first beta stage originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Massively crew has spent a little more time hammering away at Google's new virtual artifice, Lively. By now, you've probably seen all sorts of news reports calling it a rival and competitor to Linden Lab's virtual world, Second Life. Technically, that's what we call bollocks.

Describing Lively as a rival to Second Life is like calling a conference center a rival to a library. They're just not servicing the same needs, and the comparison is fundamentally nonsensical. Lively is tightly focused, and fails to intrude on the bulk of virtual worlds space.

So, what's the deal with Lively? Let's take a look ...

Continue reading Look Lively!

Look Lively! originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Open to the public just today, it seems hard to believe that Google's new Lively service is the much-vaunted virtual world product Project Snowcrash aka MyWorld that has been in secret beta-testing for some time.

Lively is a series of web-embeddable virtual spaces (think Metaplace) that function as a series of otherwise disconnected chatrooms (think IMVU or Twinity). You download the browser plugin for Firefox or Microsoft Internet Explorer (both Windows only, sorry folks), sign in with your google account, create a room or join one and you're ready to go. Just make sure you've signed into the Lively website at least once -- otherwise you'll have the Joining Room message forever.

A selection of 'hip' human and furry avatars are available, along with an assortment of clothing. There is no user-created content at this time. We'll have some more impressions for you once we've given this a once-over around the office, so stay tuned.

Google's Lively: Live public beta originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 09 Jul 2008 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Koster: MMOs removed more features from MUDs than they added originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 28 Jun 2008 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Metaplace designers seek users' advice for badge system originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 27 May 2008 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Gallery: SmallWorlds beta

SmallWorlds announces open beta originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 21 May 2008 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Gallery: ION 08: MMOs in 2013

Continue reading ION 08: A five year forecast for MMOs

ION 08: A five year forecast for MMOs originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 15 May 2008 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Playboy hints at creating their own virtual world originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 10 May 2008 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Metaplace stress-test and community spotlight originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Dragonlings invade Metaplace! originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 13 Apr 2008 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The future of VastPark looks bright originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Metaplace Community Spotlight: Life of the Party originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 05 Apr 2008 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Pump up your local forum with Metaplace! originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 02 Apr 2008 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Metaplace sends Metachat live on Myspace originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.