Despite occasional things like EVE and Puzzle Pirates, by and large they play mostly the same. To my mind, Galaxies had a different vibe to it, and part of the thing here would be to see different vibes. I think if we can open up MMOG creation to a wider array of people and influences, I think we'll see a much more interesting gaming library.
TE: From your alpha so far, I've read that you're already shocked with what people are building. Can you give me an anecdote or example?
RK: People are just doing crazy stuff. We've got a chat world, it literally looks like an IRC world. We have one tester who has added automatic language translation to it, using Google translate and the like. It happens transparently and automatically. When I think about the amount of effort we go to put that stuff into a commercial project, and to have an alpha tester add it in live a day and a half, it blew my mind.
Because of that interoperability with the web, it's going to make it possible to do a lot of surprising stuff. Because there's all kind of web stuff out there. Streaming video just went online yesterday, so people can open YouTube videos in their world.
TE: Explain the relationship between Metaplace and the web.
RK: Basically, we always say we work the way the web does and people tend to think that's a metaphor when actually we mean it very literally. When you think of the pieces of the web: You have HTML, you have a browser, you have Apache (and Apache is running CGI scripts), and you have CSS, and you have DNS so you know what webpage to connect to, and you have essentially Google so you can find stuff on top. Metaplace has all of those pieces in and of itself. It has a markup language that can describe to a client anything from Tetris to World of Warcraft. And that is the markup language that anyone can write a client for. Our first client happens to be a Flash embeddable widget, but it could be a stand-alone client, it could be a mobile client, it doesn't really matter.
We actually have written like three clients ourselves. We have a server that doesn't make assumptions about what kind of game you're running on it. And instead, the equivalent of CGI, which is our Lua-based scripting language. So that means the same server can be hosting Tetris or World of Warcraft, and it's all about what modules or scripts you plug into it.
