Metaplace Readies Virtual World PlatformMetaplace Readies Virtual World Platform

The corpse of Google's Lively is barely cold and another virtual world rises to take its place. What comes, however, is almost certain to be more lively that Lively.

Metaplace, a platform for user-generated virtual worlds, is getting ready for open beta testing. The company isn't yet ready to say when that might be, but it has offered information 200 invitations to the closed beta test and agreed to lift the nondisclosure agreement I signed as an alpha tester so I could write this story.

To claim a closed beta invitation, visit Metaplace and enter IWEEK in the box labeled "Redeem your invite key!"

If you're among the first 200 readers of this article to click through and sign up for a closed beta account, welcome aboard. If not, you shouldn't have to wait too much longer before the site opens to the general public.

Metaplace is the brainchild of veteran game developer Raph Koster, once the lead designer of Ultima Online and now the company's president. Its ancestry is immediately apparent: Many of the virtual worlds built on the Metaplace platform use the isometric perspective that was popular in games before technology advanced enough to make mass-market 3-D representation feasible.

Metaplace worlds aren't limited to an isometric view. The prevalence of this view in user-generated worlds is a consequence not of an affinity for the past but of the limits of current browser technology and the complexity of 3-D design. Rather than requiring users to download a dedicated client more capable of advanced rendering -- a design choice what would have meant fewer potential users -- Koster and his company are trying to create a platform for making graphically rich interactive worlds that requires only a Web browser and Adobe's ubiquitous Flash technology.

The isometric view "is approachable, looks 3-Dish without being 3-D, allows greater scope for people to build without being too complicated, and it will scale nicely to 3-D someday when there's a good Web-embedded solution for 3-D rendering," he said.

Koster said that while Metaplace does indeed anticipate a day when browsers will render 3-D graphics better, he's satisfied with the state of the technology at present. "Of course, we're always looking ahead," he said. "But I would say that the browser trade-off -- it's certainly a trade-off because you don't have the same amount of rendering fidelity that you would with a standalone 3-D engine or even a plug-in -- the trade-off has been spectacular. It looks pretty good for something running in a browser, and Flash appears to be on a trajectory to do pretty well."

While Google's late Lively may make a convenient touchstone, Koster doesn't see many points of comparison. "There's common underlying technology, but I don't really see us and them as having a lot in common," he said. "I don't think you can draw conclusions [from Lively's fate] about the virtual world space as a whole."

Koster sees Metaplace more as a medium, like blogging, that enables new forms of expression rather than a product that's easily compared to the competition. That's a view that appears to be informed by his ambition to let anyone create his or her own virtual world.

When text-based worlds were popular in the 1980s and early 1990s, the technical barriers for virtual world creation weren't excessive, and many people did run their own text-based multiuser dungeons, as some continue to do. But as 3-D massively multiplayer games like Everquest and World of Warcraft became the standard, it became more expensive and more complicated for individuals or small groups to create or manage virtual worlds.

But the technology necessary to make virtual worlds and serve them is becoming commoditized. Game authoring systems like Unity are allowing individuals and small teams to produce gaming content that a few years ago would have required more rarefied technical expertise. Koster sees Metaplace as a democratizing influence that will allow anyone to express himself or herself through world design.

"For virtual worlds, the vast majority of stuff has been closed off for decades," he said. "It has been a long time since we had the open ferment seen in text MUDs decades ago. One of the things about closed platforms is that they don't pursue long tail very well. They tend to have a broadcasting mentality. Things like Second Life that started pushing away from that revealed that there are a lot more things that users could want to do."

Metaplace aspires to be the platform where users can pursue those desires.

"The way we approached it is we built a powerful, capable platform," he said. "Full scriptability, all of that stuff. And then we start pushing the capabilities to end users. We are proudly and defiantly aiming at mass market. We are not middleware. We are not a high-end tool. We are aiming at allowing ordinary people to do this."

The results look promising, but it's still too early to tell whether game and virtual world design works best as a populist or elitist medium.

Those who have used Metaplace's tools effectively appear pleased with the platform so far. A beta tester who goes by the handle MonkeyKungFu put it thus in an interview posted on the Metaplace blog: "The framework provides the ability to quickly prototype game ideas, and get instant feedback from other people about what is and is not working/fun. I like to knock stuff out fast and scrap ideas that aren't working before I spend too much time on them, so this is an ideal platform for that."

The Metaplace forums contain thousands of posts from testers and Metaplace staff. It's evident from the engagement of the users that there's a lot to be excited about.

Koster is, of course, optimistic about Metaplace's prospects as an accessible platform. "If you've hopped around a lot of the worlds, you've seen a lot of things done by programmers and things that are just meeting rooms or pretty apartments," he said. "Those don't take a lot of sophistication. They're ordinary folks who have been given a tool that they never had before. There's one world devoted to hot dogs. It's just hot dogs imported off Google 3D Warehouse."

In December, Metaplace added a tool to import 3-D models from Google 3D Warehouse, an online repository for 3-D models. "That has led to just an explosion of building," said Koster. "It made bringing in an enormous quantity of high-quality art very easy."

It's the availability of tools like this upon which Koster's vision depends. Programmers and other technically savvy sorts should have no problem scripting items in Metaplace or developing custom behaviors for objects. But for those who just want a stylish online chat space to call their own, just grasping the creative possibilities of such an ambitious platform could be a challenge.

Metaplace provides a strong set of tools to help would-be world designers. World generation is menu-driven and there are standalone tools for building animation strips and the tiles that carpet worlds. It's very easy to create an appealing personal space -- placing furniture, for example, involves nothing more than clicking and dragging -- but coming up with a compelling game concept and implementing it is harder than one might wish, just like writing an engaging novel or short story.

At the same time, the unfettered nature of the platform shows that openness invites unexpected excellence. One world, for example, starts out like many others, with a virtual space and furniture, but it transforms into a 2-D approximation of Milton Bradley's Connect Four. The table graphic that launches the game exists as a standalone object that can be imported into any Metaplace world.

Koster recounts how he arrived in one person's world to hear the sound of people talking. The programmer responsible, said Koster, "had hooked up text-to-speech so that characters could use TTS voices. As you typed, people could come out as TTS voices as voice chat. I was just floored because it never occurred to me that a user would be able to come along and do something like that on his own. After he did that, he took that part and put it on the marketplace so that ordinary users can [plug it in]. That's where the power gets really amazing. Another guy set up a world where you get to watch the same chat happening in multiple languages at once, so you start learning the languages by osmosis." As for the business model, Koster anticipates that the emerging market for digital goods in Metaplace worlds eventually will represent a source of income from object designers and for his company. He also says the company may offer certain premium services to world builders in the future. At present, the items in the marketplace -- creatures, vehicles, natural objects, furniture, architecture, and plug-ins -- are free.

Free too is most of the software upon which Metaplace is built. The company relies on the open source LAMP stack -- Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. The server is written in C++ and uses Lua as an embedded scripting language. It runs on a few dozen Linux servers.

To avoid the technical challenge of running a virtual world simulation across multiple machines as Second Life does, Metaplace has been designed so that each process manages a virtual world of up to several thousand people. Koster says he's confident the system will be able to scale to handle popular worlds with thousands of active people, but the expected use case at the moment is thousands of worlds with hundreds of people.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Metaplace's openness is its terms-of-service agreement. Virtual worlds tend to be among the most restrictive in terms of the rights granted to their users. But Koster is breaking the mold. "We actually adopted the declaration of the rights of avatars that I did years ago," he explains.

In plain language without the usual legalese, the terms of service spell out user rights and responsibilities in a way that conveys respect rather than the desire to restrict. So long as users obey applicable laws and respect the end-user licensing agreement, they can look forward to controlling their own intellectual property, to the right to earn and extract economic value from created worlds, and to the right to establish new rules that apply to their worlds, for instance.

It would be a mistake to see Metaplace exclusively as a game environment. The platform also has a strong social component, even at this early stage with its limited audience of testers. When the doors open, Metaplace may end up competing not with the likes of Second Life or Habbo but with Facebook. To imagine how that might happen, consider how some Metaplace testers have been streaming music into their personal worlds using programming hooks to Last.fm. Others are trying to implement music composition in their virtual spaces. Really, if data is available online, there's probably a way to access it and present it on Metaplace. That means that worlds can duplicate many of the functions of Web sites, albeit with a different user interface.

According to the Metaplace documentation, "Every object has a URL [that can be queried] from outside, every object can post to a Web page or browse the Web." Not only that, but Metaplace worlds can be embedded on any Web site through a Flash client using JavaScript embed code. Metaplace, thus, is likely to appear in many places, on many Web sites.

Betting on the masses, as opposed to the technically proficient, to produce compelling virtual worlds might seem like a risky decision. There are still people who can't accept that an army of amateurs has produced something as useful as Wikipedia.

But Koster is undaunted by such concerns. "If we give people access and freedom, we're pretty sure they're going to surprise, shock, and astonish us with what they go do," he said. "Honestly, it's been happening to us on a regular basis."