Last year veteran MMO designer Raph Koster (LegendMUD, Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies) teamed up with production guru John Donham (EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, EverQuest II and others dating back as far as 14 years). Together they formed a company called Areae, with the ambitious mission of totally reinventing the MMO landscape. For months we all speculated what they were up to. Was it a game? A technology? A service company?

Turns out it's a little bit of everything. The secret project is called Metaplace (the website might be a little sluggish thanks to all the press coverage), and it was just unveiled at the TechCrunch 2007 conference. In short, here's what it is: it's an open platform for anyone to develop a virtual world and post it on the web. They view online worlds like web pages: the language should be public, anyone should be able to make and share them. From the website:

"Our goals are sort of idealistic. We think there are all kinds of things on the Internet that would be improved if anyone could have a virtual place of their own. Right now, there aren't enough good games, for example, and they all seem to be about elves in tights or soldiers in battle armor. Metaplace allows more diversity. Right now, there are lots of people who want to use virtual worlds for research, or education, or business, but it's just too darn hard to get one going. Now you can create a world in just a few minutes and start tailoring it to your needs. Basically, we wanted to democratize the process of making online spaces of all sorts."

Reading this reminds me of the old days where people would create MUDs -- you know, those text-based Multi-User Dungeons. It was easy for anyone (anyone relatively technical, at least) to create a MUD; you downloaded the source code, you compiled it, you posted it, and people could explore your world. Then you could go in and create your own locations or your own monsters or your own game systems. There were thousands and thousands of MUDs built, most of which were pretty bad, but the really good ones bubbled to the top and formed dedicated communities. Often they were wild and experimental ... more importantly, those old MUDs became the framework on which modern massively multiplayer games were built.

More from the Metaplace website:

"We knew it was all coming together when one of our team made a game in a day and a half. And then stuck that game on a private MySpace profile. You can inherit someone else's world (if they let you) and use it as a starting point. You can slurp whole directories of art and use them as building blocks. Cut and paste a movement system or a health bar from one world to another. Use an RSS feed for your NPCs. We made puzzle games, RPGs, action games... and set up doorways from one to the other. Basically, coming to work in the morning is a lot of fun."

In my estimation, this is one of the most interesting experiments going on in game development today. (It has some similarity to Three Rings' Whirled project, which I blogged about in April.) That said, I've got some lingering questions that temper my excitement. The website claims "We supply a suite of tools so you can make worlds, and we host servers for you so that anyone can connect and play..." If Aerea is hosting the servers, won't that be a massive expense as the project grows? Or will the server code also be made public so that anyone can run a server? And how does Aerea make money from this? Perhaps, once they develop some cool technology, they're looking to get purchased from a big portal -- Google would love something like this.

The mystery deepens. We'll be following this one closely!

      -Fargo