Geek Gestalt

With Metaplace, almost anyone can build their own custom virtual world. Its tools make it simple to script any object with various actions. And every object and world in Metaplace has its own URL.

(Credit: Metaplace)

Why play someone else's virtual world when you can build your own?

That's the major premise behind Metaplace, a new browser-based virtual-world platform from, among others, former Sony Online Entertainment chief creative officer Raph Koster.

Built to run inside the browser on any Internet-connected machine, Metaplace employs a simple, 2D, Flash-based graphics system that fronts for a fairly sophisticated set of content creation tools and what may one day be a complex open-ended economy built around user-created content.

In fact, because of the 2D and Flash nature of Metaplace, it's easy to miss that the platform offers users some of the easiest virtual-world building tools that have ever been made available. And while Metaplace has been in closed beta since October, it is expected to emerge into a public and open beta period sometime later this year. See below for an invite to the closed beta.

The company, which was formerly known as Areae, raised a $6.7 million funding round last October, led by Charles River Ventures. In total, it has raised $9.4 million.

Rising to the top
Metaplace has a little something for everyone. For the casual users, it has any number of user-created worlds to play, and there's a basic central Metaplace world that is an easy gathering place. Each can be rated, and the highest-rated rise to the top, allowing users to skip messing around with the system's chaff and instead concentrate on the wheat. But for those who are interested in creating their own virtual world, Metaplace offers a cornucopia of tools and choices that make it quick and easy to get a brand new world up and running.

Of course, as with any user-generated content system, the good creations are far outweighed by the bad. As Koster himself put it, "There are more than 25,000 Metaplace worlds, most of them are empty and most of them are crap."

But if it sounds like Koster is bashing his own system, he's not. Rather, he's touting how easy it is for anyone to start a virtual world that itself can be accessed by anyone on the Internet in mere seconds. Indeed, it's not an exaggeration to say that just about anyone could have a rudimentary Metaplace world up and running in less than five minutes.

A scene from 'Lively,' the virtual world Google launched in July and which it said Wednesday it is closing at the end of the year.

(Credit: Google)

Once thought to be its answer to virtual worlds like Second Life, Google's Lively launched this summer to much fanfare.

Lively was Web-based and allowed anyone to set up virtual spaces, such as rooms, that could be embedded onto blogs or Facebook pages.

But the project never picked up much steam.

Now, Google has decided to shut the project down.

"Despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we've decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year," Google said on its official blog Wednesday evening. "It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business."

The post said that those who were working on the Lively team would be reassigned to other areas within Google, suggesting that the move does not mean layoffs.

Google also said that because the project is being shut completely down, it is encouraging "all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms."

Disclaimer: My wife works at Second Life publisher Linden Lab.

Places, a new initiative from the Multiverse Network, will offer users the ability to connect through Manhattan's Times Square. Earlier this year, the company first demonstrated the Times Square environment, at the time to showcase its graphics capabilities and to explain how many users it could fit on a single server.

(Credit: Multiverse Network)

The Multiverse Network, a developer of virtual world platform software, announced Wednesday that it was unveiling what it calls Places, two related social elements that tie Multiverse users together.

Essentially connective tissue for users of the Multiverse platform, Places has two separate components.

The first is a social networks application that automatically connects people using Multiverse virtual worlds together with others who are also friends in social networks like Facebook.

The second part of Places is a new virtual world centered around a digital representation of Manhattan's Times Square. Now anyone who installs Multiverse's World Browser--the basic Multiverse virtual world software--will be able to enter the Times Square environment and connect and socialize with friends, play games, view interactive entertainment, and meet and greet in personal, private destinations.

This is notable for two reasons, and seems to be a culmination of much of what Multiverse has been working on the last couple of years.

On the one hand, until now, Multiverse has fashioned itself strictly as a platform provider, offering others the ability to build virtual worlds using its software. On the other, Multiverse last year unveiled a prototype of the Times Square environment as a showcase for its ability to host large numbers of people on a single server.

But from the beginning, Multiverse offered the promise of tying users of all the virtual worlds built on top of its platform together. It was never entirely clear how that would work, and to date, there had been no publicly available, completed worlds made using the software.

Now, however, it is clear Multiverse is using the Places model to showcase its technology and demonstrate that its platform is capable of supporting a 3D social virtual world, somewhat along the lines of Second Life.

Disclosure: My wife works for Second Life publisher Linden Lab.

Another interesting piece of Places is that it is, as Multiverse puts it, "an open-source virtual world." This means, the company said, that developers can "access, modify, and add to its user interface, avatar behaviors, menu system, art assets, avatars and--most importantly--its game play or structured interaction capabilities."

This would seem to indicate that Multiverse will be allowing users to make wholesale changes to the Places virtual world along the lines of the kinds of modifications and content creation that is possible in Second Life.

What's not clear is the scope that developers will have with these tools and whether they will be able to make adult content.

This is interesting because one way that Multiverse has tried to position itself to corporate clients wanting to build a virtual world on its platform is that those clients wouldn't have to worry about their own users encountering objectionable content.

In a separate announcement also made Wednesday, Multiverse said that Oscar-winning filmmaker James Cameron--a member of the company's board of directors--plans to use the platform to build a virtual world based on his film, Titanic.

Called Places in Time: Titanic, it will be structured as an educational environment in which users can explore much about the voyage and fate of the doomed ship.

The Titanic virtual world will be a "destination" for users of Places and is clearly meant to demonstrate how third-party developers can expand upon the platform.

The virtual world, There.com, appears ready to reach for some new and broad audiences, announcing Tuesday night that it would finally be offering support for Mac OS X, as well as a new Facebook plug-in and an instant message application that can communicate directly with anyone on the Internet.

In October 2003, There, as it's known, launched to big headlines and heavy expectations.

There.com announced support for Mac OS X, as well as a new Facebook plug-in and the first IM application capable of communicating with those inside the virtual world.

(Credit: Makena Technologies)

One of the first 3D social digital virtual worlds, it presented users with a rich and complex environment complete with a functional economy, the ability to create content and even flying hoverboats for five.

But There costs tens of millions to produce and within months of its launch--after many months in beta--the company behind it nearly folded.

What happened next is rather complicated, but essentially, the There virtual world technology ended up in the hands of early eBay employee Michael Wilson, who kept the service alive and set about to rebuild a user base.

Over the years, it has slowly done that, and now it has a steady user base well into six figures.

There draws many comparisons to Second Life, and indeed it may be closer to that popular virtual world than anything else. But it is aimed at teenagers and has strict limits on what users can create. Anything they create must be vetted by Makena, while Second Life users have almost entirely free reign.

(Disclosure: My wife works for Second Life publisher Linden Lab.)

Now, after nearly five years, Mac users will finally be able to check There out. For me, that's a big thing, as I've been separated from my beloved hoverboat for many years since the PC I was playing the virtual world on became too decrepit to be functional and I became a hard-core Mac user.

And many other Mac users, especially students looking for a fun, social, easy-going environment, will also likely be ready to try it out.

Another big part of the Tuesday announcement is ThereIM, an instant message application that allows users to communicate with others on the Internet, even if they're not playing There.

ThereIM is an instant messaging application that will allow users of the There.com virtual world to communicate with others on the Internet who aren't in-world.

(Credit: Makena Technologies)

And perhaps the biggest most far-reaching piece of news here could be the Facebook plug-in, known as Facing There, which allows There members to present their profiles, on the vastly popular social networking service. This may not have the richness of other Facebook applications, but it could bring some attention to There in a very large community.

Whether these three developments are enough to get There back on the map is hard to say. In some ways, it has suffered because it hasn't put much energy into publicity the last few years, choosing instead to build a strong, loyal user base through word of mouth.

Here's hoping these moves help it get the notice it deserves.

For anyone familiar with The Sims Online, the poorly-received virtual world launched by Electronic Arts in 2002, take note: EA is relaunching it under a new name and for a new price: free.

Born as The Sims Online, it will now be called EA Land.

On Monday, Electronic Arts announced 'EA Land,' the latest iteration of 'The Sims Online,' an online version of its massive hit, 'The Sims.' However, 'The Sims Online' never achieved much success and became overshadowed by other online virtual worlds with economies.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

This is a rather momentous move by EA, since it means it is bringing back from the dead--at least as far as perception goes--a game that, while it never really got off the ground, was extremely important in the overall development curve of 3D social virtual worlds with economies.

And while TSO, as it came to be known, never got the massive audiences of its single-player antecedent, The Sims--which came out of nowhere to become the best-selling PC game of all time--it did usher in and initiate a lot of people to virtual worlds.

In fact, there are, to this day, whole communities of people in Second Life and There.com that began in TSO.

Note: My wife now works at Second Life publisher Linden Lab.

One of the major reasons why TSO never took off is that it really didn't give players very much opportunity to create their own content. And that was particularly frustrating to many players, because The Sims creator Will Wright had promised that TSO would offer open content creation.

But now, according to EA, EA Land will allow players to make their own things.

"Like in the original Sims game, the goal is to let you customize the game completely," EA wrote in a note to former TSO subscribers, "but in EA Land, you can see and buy the customizations of the other players."

That means, of course, that there will continue to be--as there was in TSO--a functioning economy. But because players will be able to make more content, that economy could, in theory, have more complexity and depth than that of TSO.

It's probably too early to tell how EA Land will do, but I do have to say that it's unfortunate EA couldn't come up with a better name.

My guess is that EA Land will have a hard time making too much of a dent in the virtual world space. That's partly because it is hard to see exactly where it fits into the mix. Second Life is well established, though it does not have a huge audience; There.com also has a substantial audience; and then there are the kids' virtual worlds, such as Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin, and the like.

But you never know. Perhaps the biggest question will be how much marketing effort EA puts into EA Land. If it allows the game to exist on its own without a lot of backing from corporate, then it may wither away with as much fanfare as it arrived. But if EA gets behind it full force, it could be something some day.

Over at Wired today, the eagle-eyed Ryan Singel has a story about a new U.S. government initiative intended to root out terrorists working and playing in virtual worlds.

As Singel writes, the so-called Data Mining Report (click here for PDF) from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence includes information about "Reynard," a "seedling effort to study the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games and their implications for the Intelligence Community."

The Data Mining Report continues, suggesting, "The cultural and behavioral norms of virtual worlds and gaming are generally unstudied. Therefore, Reynard will seek to identify the emerging social, behavioral, and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments. The project would then apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world."

This leads me to several thoughts.

First, it is by no means a new theory that terrorists either might someday use, or perhaps already are using, virtual worlds to gather, train, look for love or whatever else might occur to them. Of course, it's only a theory. No one has yet proven anything untoward is happening or will happen.

That doesn't mean it can't happen, but to date there's been no proof.

Still, the possibility is certainly there, and it can't hurt to have the government spend a little time and money investigating techniques for rooting out any potential terrorist activity in environments like World of Warcraft, Call of Duty 4, Second Life, or elsewhere.

Secondly, I have to quibble with the report's assertion that "the cultural and behavioral norms of virtual worlds and gaming are generally unstudied."

In 2003, I wrote my first story about the State of Play conference, a confab held at New York Law School that looked into, among other things, the cultural and behavioral norms of virtual worlds. Since then, there have been dozens of such conferences, symposiums, meetings, and gatherings to look into this exact subject. Just because no one from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence chose to attend those meetings doesn't mean the discussions weren't happening.

Still, to my knowledge, there hasn't been any in-depth study about how to find and eradicate terrorists in virtual worlds, and there's been no doubt in my mind that such efforts would come along one day soon. And I bid the government the best of luck in finding such evil-doers, because who wouldn't?

But what's important is that virtual worlds not be painted with the brush of terrorism before there's any actual evidence that such activity is going on there.

So, I'd like to urge the people working on Reynard to tread carefully and be sure about what they're looking at. If they're not familiar with virtual worlds, they will certainly encounter behavior that is well outside the norm--and it could be tempting to categorize someone dressed as a jihadi as actually being one. Yet it may just be a 14-year-old from Dubuque having some (admittedly poorly expressed) fun with his or her friends.

For years now, the popular virtual world, Second Life has been available only for PCs, Macs, and Linux machines.

There has always been talk about whether SL might ever make it onto consoles like the Xbox or PlayStation 3 and some scattered discussion about possible mobile phone implementations.

Last year, in fact, I saw a hack that allowed someone to access SL, albeit in a very, very superficial manner, on an iPhone.

But now, according to a press release I got Tuesday morning, a company called Vollee is planning on releasing technology that will make it possible to run Second Life on 3G handsets via Vollee's streaming media service.

I have to admit, I'm skeptical. Second Life is difficult to use, is very graphics intensive, and requires a huge amount of streaming data. To run it on a 3G network might work, I suppose, but it would depend entirely on that network staying up, staying high-speed, and on the device being capable of presenting the SL environment in a pleasing, useful manner.

Or not. I suppose it's also possible that someone could use Second Life on a handset and not need all the graphics. Essentially, it could be little more than a communications medium, allowing users to chat with their SL friends, to move around to various locations, and to do some small tasks. Would they be able to use the building tools? I doubt it.

Basically, this is a workaround. I haven't seen it, though, so I can't say for sure. But given the constraints that SL presents, I'm just not sure how well it translates, even onto a device with a big screen and a high-speed connection.

Still, it's noteworthy that this company is trying, and that it got someone from Linden Lab, the publisher of Second Life, to offer a quote for the release. That implies coordination between the two companies, and that always makes something like this more likely to have been thought out.

But only time will tell.

Update (5:19pm): I went over to the Game Developers Conference this afternoon and got a look at Vollee's mobile SL implementation. And I have to say, I was impressed.

While the mobile version won't allow users--at least at first--to conduct any kinds of transactions or to use the building tools, what they have got already is pretty cool.

Mostly, it's because what they've built is fairly smooth, and the look and feel is consistent with the original version, albeit much smaller.

But, for example, the graphics--say, when you're flying--look right, as it does when instant messaging with someone in-world or looking at your contacts list.

This is clearly the result of an actual partnership with Linden Lab rather than a do-it-yourself type of workaround, like the one I saw last year.

And while this is no substitute for a fully working version, it's certainly enough for what many SL users do on a daily basis.

The virtual world Second Life might be a household name today, but back in 1999 when its founder first brought a small group of developers together in a sketchy San Francisco alley, changing the world wasn't looking like much of a possibility.

In Wagner James Au's new book, The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World, readers are treated to a glimpse of those early days, when Philip Rosedale, formerly the CTO of RealNetworks, rented a warehouse on San Francisco's Linden Street and started Linden Lab.

As a fan of process and a longtime writer about Second Life myself, it was nice to pick up Au's book and get a look back at the halcyon days of Linden Lab. Over the years, I'd pieced together some of the stories myself, but here, for the first time, Au has managed to narrate the real origins of this well-known virtual world.

For those not familiar with him, Au has been writing his SL blog, New World Notes, since 2003, when Linden Lab hired him to be the official embedded reporter in its newly launched environment, a gig that allowed him to work part-time in the Linden Lab offices and therefore to witness, firsthand, many of the goings-on that preceded Second Life becoming what it is today.

Much of the value of this first part of the book, in fact, comes from Au's recollections of the thought processes of Rosedale; early investor and Lotus 1-2-3 inventor Mitch Kapor; and (now former) CTO and former naval intelligence officer Cory Ondrejka.

(Credit: New World Notes)

One thing that struck me was a long passage of Au's about how much Rosedale's 1999 visit to Burning Man, the annual countercultural arts festival held in the Nevada desert, influenced his view of what the virtual environment he was building should be.

"'So you'd lay on the pillows,' Rosedale recounts, eyes twinkling at the memory," Au writes, "'and you'd feel like an exotic Asian king, and you're looking out on the parched (desert); the line of sun starts at the edge of the rugs, and you see that hot desert, and you imagine you're Kublai Khan on a bender...They were just structures of the mind...It reinforced that idea that what we believe in or what we make of things is all that is real. It was unreal because everything was clearly made of found materials and was transitory. But it was real, because when you were there, it was real to you...It had this mystical quality that demolished the barriers between people.'"

Rosedale's epiphany? There was a magic going on out there in the desert--a way that people dealt with each other and laid down their disbelief--with which he wanted to imbue his virtual world.

"Though it wouldn't exactly fit in a business plan," Au continues, "it was an intuition he'd pursue in building Second Life into a full-fledged online world."

One thing I enjoyed about this anecdote was that it was in the book at all. Over the years, Rosedale had mentioned to me personally many times how important Burning Man was to him. Honestly, though, I'd always thought he was kind of buttering me up, because he knew I'm a long-time attendee and participant.

But I also know that Au has never been to Burning Man, so for this to make it into the book, to me, lends it a veracity I never thought it had.

The first part of the book is full of the behind-the-scenes stuff that I had long wanted to know. About groundbreaking meetings, such as the one where a Linden staffer began making an evil snowman in the middle of a presentation to investors, a moment where everyone's collective light bulb turned on and they realized that the key to what Second Life would be was giving users the ability to create content.

For process buffs like me, this stuff is manna.

But come chapter 3, the book suddenly--and to me, unfortunately--veers away from this.

Instead, Au turns to stories from inside Second Life that were clearly adapted from his blog, and to lengthy discussions about their social, intellectual, and sometimes, technical, consequences.

It's not that there's anything wrong with this. In fact, the book is jam packed with these discussions and as a Second Life scholar, it's invaluable to look into Au's mind and read his thoughts on what the various developments were and what they meant, both to SL and to the outside world.

Rather, the problem is that I wanted a lot more behind-the-scenes-at-Linden stories, especially in a book called The Making of Second Life.

But you can't always get what you want.

In fact, Au's book is full of rich details about some of the most important people, communities, and events in the history of Second Life. And certainly, there is no one better situated to tell those stories than Au, whose SL blog has been going longer than anyone's and who has been on hand for more of the seminal moments in this virtual world than anyone.

Of particular importance to readers is Au's ability to tell a story and then delve into its significance, both to Second Life users and to the world at large. Which might surprise the critics who say nothing significant ever happens in SL, let alone anything that might matter elsewhere.

Among his many observations, one that struck me as particularly meaningful had to do with the ways that SL can be a rare avenue to true person-to-person communications for people with debilitating illnesses or conditions like paralysis, Asperger's Syndrome, or many others.

One illuminating anecdote is Au's conversations with the nine people behind a single avatar known as Wilde Cunningham. Titled "The nine souls of Wilde Cunningham," the passage examined how a care provider at a facility in Massachusetts helped nine of her charges, all but one in a wheelchair, use SL to reach out to a world much larger than the one they had previously been restricted to.

As you might imagine, having nine people behind a single avatar can make things complicated, but even that dynamic provided an opportunity for structured negotiation, democracy, and cooperative creation.

"I ask them how they decide what to say," writes Au.

"'Well,' they reply, 'members of Wilde, together with (the care provider) toss out ideas and everyone chimes in when they agree, or choose not to answer, which is also OK. Mostly we vote and take group census on things.'"

To you and me, this might not seem groundbreaking, but to a group like the Wilde Cunningham nine, having a virtual world to use as a bridge to meet new people is entirely eye-opening, and something SL is particularly good at.

And throughout his book, Au peppers us with little anecdotes like this. He is a thoughtful and erudite writer, yet someone with a keen appreciation for the technology and the technological context Second Life fits into.

And while he was a Linden Lab employee for a while, before taking his blog private, he is no apologist for the company. Often he relates some event or occurrence and uses his pen to offer reasoned criticism. And to be sure, there is plenty to criticize.

As anyone who has used SL knows, it is buggy, inconsistent, and has a horrid interface. Yet, despite this, it has attracted hundreds of thousands of regular users and has engendered a healthy economy. And so a book like Au's--which goes in depth into some of the history behind SL and uses story after story to paint a picture of why the virtual world matters--is a crucial addition to the growing bookshelf of books on Second Life and other virtual worlds.

To date, most of those books, including my own, are guidebooks. Only one, Peter Ludlow's and Mark Wallace's The Second Life Herald, have gone into any kind of depth about what SLreally is and what it really means. But that book is much more about Electronic Arts' The Sims Online, so it's nice that Au's tome focuses strictly on Linden Lab's creation.

All in all, I found the book to be enjoyable, well-written, and thoughtful. As I mentioned above, I do wish that it had lingered more on the behind-the-scenes tales from Linden Lab, but then, if that's the book I want to read, I suppose I should just write it myself.

Absent that, Au's book gives us the most complete picture we've had of how this complex and valuable virtual world came to be, what has happened since then and why the world should care.

After three years of running its own system to let some players of EverQuest II conduct trades of in-game assets for real money, Sony Online Entertainment is turning it over to a new partner, Live Gamer.

In 2005, SOE, the publisher of the groundbreaking online game, EverQuest, as well as EverQuest II, Star Wars Galaxies, and other titles, decided to try an experiment that took its industry's traditional approach to players buying and selling in-game assets for real money and turned it on its ears.

Previously, the industry standard was to scream loudly that such activity was illegitimate and prohibited and that players caught doing so would be banned. Of course, thousands of players ignored the warnings and conducted such trades on sites like eBay, IGE.com, and elsewhere, usually with little or no repercussions.

But with the launch of its Station Exchange service that year, SOE decided to embrace the so-called "real money trade," at least provisionally, and see where it might lead. The company allowed such trades to take place on two EverQuest II servers, and gave players the choice of being on those servers or not.

Over the first year of the service, SOE said it made about $250,000--with almost no costs--and reduced the kinds of customer service complaints that it said came regularly from players claiming they'd been defrauded in under-the-table transactions outside the company's auspices.

Since then, Station Exchange has hummed along, neither making big waves nor disappearing. And for the most part, the online game industry has stayed away. No other big publisher of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) has gotten onboard, though Linden Lab's Second Life--a very different kind of virtual world from, say, EverQuest II--has long allowed real-money trades.

Now, SOE is turning the operation of Station Exchange over to Live Gamer, a start-up that launched in 2007. The move is expected to be complete by the end of March and should mean that the resulting service, to be called Live Gamer Exchange, will be entirely Web-based.

What this means for players is unclear. It also doesn't appear that the move means SOE is abandoning the experiment, though it does mean the company will not have to expend as many resources on Station Exchange going forward.

What isn't clear is where the revenue generated by commissions on trades will go. But one can assume that by taking over the service, Live Gamer will probably be getting a big piece of the pie.

Is this a good thing? A bad thing? I'd say neither. I'd say it's an interesting move on SOE's part. It's probably about them deciding they don't need to run it anymore, but that they liked the experiment enough to continue allowing their players to engage in real-money trading.

As before, the big question is whether any other publishers, most notably Blizzard Entertainment, which makes World of Warcraft, will ever follow suit. And so it will be interesting to see how Live Gamer runs with this. It may set a precedent that would be hard to avoid following.