Rock, Paper, Shotgun

In this interview we talk to Raph Koster, the founder and president of Areae, about why MMOs must be free to play, how he wanted to make an Ultima Online expansion where the players made their own shards, and whether games have reached the end of graphics. Areae is the company with an unusual vision for PC gaming: the DIY MMO. They’re calling the project Metaplace, but it’s just the latest instance of Raph Koster’s contributions to the MMO genre.

Yep, Raph Koster knows a thing or two about MMOs. He started out in the realm of text-based MUDS, graduated to the class of Ultima Online, where he was well-known for creating features that many modern MMOs still lack, and then he had a good crack at creating a Star Wars MMO with the first incarnation of Galaxies. Since then Koster has written a book about game design, A Theory Of Fun, and has now started work on his build-your-own-MMO project, Metaplace. With the browser-based game-toolkit now close to its beta stages we thought we’d have a chat with one of MMO gaming’s finest beards and see where his head is at.
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Here’s Raph Koster talking about his proposed wikification of MMO’s, Metaplace. The more I look at this stuff, the more I fear for how much random pseudo-gaming material I’m going to have to look at in the next couple of decades. “Jim, can you give us a round up of the best twenty spaces on Metaplace?” Cut to me scrolling through 73,000 incrementally different fantasy parlours. Gah.

What I’m trying to say is: I think this will probably be very big indeed. If Koster’s team can get the toolset right, or even half right, this is going to be a very important aspect of how the web will working in a couple of year’s time. It might not even be Metaplace the does it successfully, after all, we had There before Second Life swamped the web, and Everquest before World Of Warcraft became the best thing since sliced undead.

Anyway, take a look. It’s pretty brief, but the idea is in motion:

Via the essential Alice.

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.

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