On Hiatus

I am training for the Happy Valley Sprint Triathlon so will not be blogging for awhile. I'm turning 40 in the fall and this is my first triathlon. I'm still not sure how my wife talked me into this.

In the meanwhile, there are plenty of new blogs about Metaplace popping up now that it has gone open beta. So enjoy!

Village Idiot Suggests: The Day The Earth Stood Still

This is always fun: rent both the new and old versions of The Day The Earth Stood Still, then watch them. It's a hoot to compare the differences. I find that watching the new one first works better. It's almost impossible to get your kids to watch a boring black and white movie with a lot of dialog, so you'll probably end up watching the old version alone. Your youngest child might stick around and watch it with you, just because they feel sorry for you, but that's OK.

Appreciative Intelligence

I find it interesting how some people can look at an acorn and see the mighty oak it will eventually become, while others just see a nut.

There's a book about this which is a pretty good read:
http://www.appreciativeintelligence.com/about.html

Pictures Are Worth a Thousand Words

So my 11 year old kid comes and kicks me off the computer. He needs to get past a level on the video game Zelda, Princess Twilight Blah Blah. He's fighting Aragog-hooby-whatever. So I fire up IE and say “Cheatcc.com or what game cheat site?” and he says “YouTube”.

What?

So we go to YouTube and he searches for the Aragog-hooby-whaty Zelda thing and he pulls up a 9 minute video that walks him through the game level. What happened to game walkthrough books? And even game walkthrough websites? What the heck is going on?

Maybe pictures are worth a thousand words...

Village Idiot Suggests: Go Lay In Your Closet

Have you ever been on the floor in your closet? Go try this: lay on your back under your clothes. Look up at your clothes. It's really cool. You should try it.

It's even better if you hang your clothes in ROYGBIV order. And that says a lot about a person.

Breaking the Rules

So about game design and game mechanics: the veterans know the theory. They've seen what works and doesn't work for game controls, player skill advancement, etc. There are all kinds of resources for how to develop well functioning games.

Metaplace opens up game development to folks who don't know the rules. That means we're going to break a bunch of them and make a lot of unplayable games. But the cool part is when that occasional rule-breaking mechanic is a good thing, or maybe even revolutionary.

In case you do want to follow the rules, check out http://www.theinspiracy.com/400_project.htm

Simulated Reality: which of you are the NPC's?

So everybody is having fun creating their little Metaplace virtual worlds. We set them up and then populate them with non-player characters (NPC's), allowing real players to interact with the NPC's. It's a lot of fun.

I recently found this wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality

Did you catch section 5.1? I know I'm not an NPC. Are you?

Village Idiot Suggests: Go Climb a Tree

So when was the last time you climbed a tree? Go find yourself a decent tree with low branches. Climb up it a bit. Climb until you feel a little nervous being so high off the ground. No, really, go do it.

When was the last time you felt those sensations? Fun, isn't it?

Indie Game Development

Indie game development refers to Independent Video Game Development:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_video_game_development

So my experience with developing independent games is probably very similar to many hobbyists out there. I started by exploring the oodles of game building tools currently available. After several sessions with game engines like Allegro, Torque, and A7, I settled on XNA (a Microsoft engine). I banged out some game prototypes that had potential.

But at that point, how do you get your game distributed? And what if you want to build your game in an agile fashion, adding game features one at a time across several weeks? What if you don't want to commit a lot of time before finding out if the basic gameplay is fun?

With Metaplace, you can put a game out once it's roughly playable, and get near instant feedback. You can even allow folks to stop by and chat while you are coding it up on day one.

In Metaplace, I am building a tower defence game. After getting the game roughly playable, I posted to the forum for folks to review it. Within days I had several suggestions about how to make it better. I can now incrementally add those features and change the gameplay, then get quick feedback on it. If the game is fundamentally broken, it can be scrapped quickly without wasting a lot of energy.

Also, this doesn't apply to just developers and their games. An artist on Metaplace created a world just for the purpose of having a place to critique her trees. People would stop by the world, check out the trees, then post comments and suggestions.

So this, then, is one of the benefits of Metaplace. Rapid prototyping coupled with active feedback loops for the developers. And for the players, the ability to influence the game while it's being created.

Meta Hooby Whaty?

Virtual Worlds are all the rage. Indie Game Development is on the rise. And everyone is flocking to the Social Web. Metaplace is the confluence of these trends.

From their website, http://www.metaplace.com/information/about ...



"Metaplace is the world's first open platform that harnesses the power of the Web to allow anyone to imagine, build and live in their own unique virtual world.

Our vision is to enable users to build a network of worlds - from community to games to education to business -- creating an ecosystem where they collaborate, socialize and conduct commerce forming new societies and economies as we do in the real world today. "


Game development and virtual world creation have learning curves. Metaplace provides a low barrier to entry and opens these fields to wider audiences. You don't have to know computer science or any gamer jargon. You can just build and create. Or play.

To get up to speed on Metaplace, visit the many blogs that are springing up. I have listed several.


About this blog:

Every village has an idiot. 99% of the time, they are blabbering fools. But every once in a while, they say something truly insightful.