Embedding

A week or so ago, Metaplace released the ability to embed your Metaplace world into pretty much any webpage. As long as your page can support the IFRAME tag, you're probably set; there has been mention of various modules for Wordpress and other blogs, and I now regularly sit in chat from an embedded version of the PlainOldChat world inside an iGoogle gadget. You can also see the PlainOldChat world embedded at the bottom of this page (I'm too lazy to figure out how to change the blog's template to make it fit up near the top).

The main purpose of this embed, I suppose, is to allow people to share their worlds in a different environment: instead of having people "go" to Metaplace to see your world, they can find it right at your blog, or your company's website, or on your guild's page. This is a nice way to get people with common interests together in a "live" setting, giving a virtual environment that's a little more interactive than your flat webpage or forum.

Not long after the embed was introduced, there was talk about using them as banner ads. I'm surprised we haven't seen this yet, actually. Of course, it would be nice to get rid of the little bit of non-world stuff from the embed, like the Help/Logout stuff, so that JUST the world is shown. Also, there's currently no automatic anonymous or guest user support as yet, so only people who choose to create an account, or choose to log in, are going to be subjected to the advertising.

Adding support for anonymous or guest access would also allow for mini-games to be added to a web page; nothing as elaborate as a full virtual world, but just a casual game of slot machines, or a shoot-em-up, or sudoku, or a little RPG.

But the one thing I think will make embedding fun, cool, and powerful is that the surrounding webpage can communicate with the embedded world, by using Metaplace's design of every world being its own web server. In this way, the encompassing website, using AJAX or something similar, could display information about the world or about the user, right in the page instead of in the embedded view. You could have your health bar outside of the play area, the high score list, the help commands, your character's inventory...

Why not just put these things inside the Metaplace world, you ask? Because they take up screenspace. But don't they still take up screenspace, just in the webpage portion, you ask? Yes, but: one of the great things about the embed is that you can finally force a size for your world view; back in alpha, we started off with a 640x480 view, and could expand to fullscreen, but now it's the other way around, and there's no way to make someone leave fullscreen view. Some world- and game ideas can rely on the player only seeing a certain amount of the world, and while we do have a little bit of distance culling in Metaplace, it's done as a radius distance instead of a square, and it doesn't affect tiles. Being able to restrict the size of the world means that every player is on even footing, and no one benefits from having a 30" widescreen monitor over those of us with just a 20".

Displaying information from the world is only the beginning of what can be done with the embeds and the web triggers, but I'll save other ideas for another post. For now, I'll enjoy being able to chat in Metaplace alongside my Twitter feed alongside my email, all in one browser tab, and will save the interesting embed tricks for another day (one in which I've brushed up on a some Javascript).