Make Your Own Fun
Raph Koster: The Escapist Interview
by Dana Massey, 29 Jan 2008 13:44

continued from page 3

It's built to be a distributed system, so you could have servers running anywhere, pretty much, and clients could be embedded into a webpage or not. And for that matter the assets or the art isn't based into the game; it literally points to an asset on the web. It works like a browser in that sense; it fetches assets from anywhere. It talks "web" in and out. It submits forms, you can access remote database you can talk to any web service. So your script can go fetch YouTube videos if it wants to; it's easy, it's not hard at all. Because of that it, works very differently from how a standard MMOG does. If you think about it there are almost no successful reuses of an MMOG server; it almost never happens. Whereas in our case we reuse it for radically different purposes all the time, and it's designed that way from the get go. Because it is designed to be a network of worlds, there is that Google-ish aspect that sits on top so you can find worlds, which may not even be in the same place from time to time.

So we have essentially a portal that lets you find worlds, that lets you link them, that lets you review them, they have forums, wiki, all of that kind of thing, right out of the box. So it's kind of like having a Yahoo/Google/Alexa service sitting there from the beginning.

TE: What about content, will you monitor it? Like, can people make a porn world or a plagiarized game?

RK: Especially for assets, by and large we don't even host the assets. That means that it's just a link; we don't even know what you're pointing to most the time. We are not looking at what people are making in their worlds. If you go to cash out, then we will verify that what you're doing is legal.

TE: So there are no content restrictions?

RK: No, none except for whatever the law is. Really, Metaplace is a system, and then we have a hosting business, and that works using standard DMCA takedowns and all the rest.

TE: Are you worried about the name of the game - Metaplace - given how people on the internet like to change things, in this case, by moving the "T" and the "A"?

RK: You know, we're not that worried about people changing Metaplace to "Meatplace" or anything like that. I think as time goes by people will settle on something, and I think it will probably be the thing that most people use is going to be the real name. The more you work with it, the more you play in it, the more obvious it becomes that the name is actually quite literal; it is the place of places.

Dana "Lepidus" Massey is the Senior Editor for WarCry.com and former Co-Lead Game Designer for Wish.

Issue 134: Make Your Own Fun