We at RPS like the PC because it gives us a big mess of stuff. There’s more things to play out there than you can fit into a lifetime, and it’s growing, non-stop, like a formidable fungus. We must therefore applaud those people who want us to make even more stuff. Well done you.
Some fun, yesterday.
One such gentleman is bearded theorist (and occasional practitioner) of fun, Raph Koster. He’s the man who directed the development of Jedi-vending system, Star Wars Galaxies (the first time around), and then wrote a book. Koster has decided that all this virtual world stuff needs to be centralised and exploded at the same time. It doesn’t need Second Life, instead it needs a “virtual place” on the web. We don’t want a single, all-encompassing world, says Koster, we just need an appropriate, networked toolkit. We needs something like a Blogspot for virtuality.
And so mr Koster’s company has announced Metaplace – a net-based virtual world toolkit for making mini virtual worlds. You won’t need the equivalent of Second Life or World Of Warcraft clients installed on your machine if this takes off, you’ll just need Metaplace. Anyone will be able to make an online world in five minutes, and dropping in and out of different online spaces will be as easy as surfing web pages. It’s Internet II: The Revengening taken to its logical extreme.
Koster announced this today, the internet went wild, the Metaplace website stopped working, and we all agreed that it’s exciting stuff. Too exciting.
