RIP Metaplace.com

This is definitely a sad day for me. One of the most interesting things I've ever been involved in is Metaplace, and it has been announced today that metaplace.com, the User-Generated Content portion of their business, will be closing as of January 1st.

Anyone reading this blog will likely know of Metaplace, for that's its whole purpose; I might have been critical about some of the things in Metaplace, but for the last two years, it has been one of my biggest distractions. It is (was) a platform for which I often thought, "what else can I do with this?", or when a new feature came out, "what can I create with this new feature", or, if I had any idea for a game/virtual environment, the first thought was "how can I implement this in Metaplace?"

From a technological point-of-view, I think Metaplace did it right; I've said to others that it's very much the way that I would have done it, had I written my own engine. I hope the code is preserved for a future project, because while it wasn't "done", it was "right so far".

I realize, as I chat in MSN with KStarfire, a friend I've made from Metaplace, that this announcement has left a larger hole than I realized 20 minutes ago, because so much of my free programming has been around Metaplace, whether in it proper, or external tools. One of the tools that I started working on, as a way to learn Google's Go language, was a tool to download all of the assets of a world. Now it looks like I have two weeks to get this going, to salvage the work I've put into Metaplace, if only for nostalgia.


I sat down tonight to continue work on the bitmap font module, something that I recently picked up again, and was making really good headway with.

I also planned on whipping up a small module for a user on the forums for togglable MP3 music playing, something that would have taken me only an hour or so to write.

Over the last week, as my two-and-a-half year-old daughter keeps asking to "sit the internet" to play her Disney computer games, I've been thinking about how to make some toddler games in Metaplace to let them learn their colours, shapes, numbers, letters; their keyboard and mouse skills.

I was thinking, as I was out and about today, about Ultima Online (as I often do), and how I really need to get back to my Metaplace implementation of it, perhaps tonight after I work on the bitmap fonts and sound player...

And now, after reading the announcement, I think about the four Metaplace clients I've started, now all dead ends. About all of the worlds that I created (I think I hit 102), many which were mere placeholders for ideas that I had come up with, but never got off the ground. I think of the rest of them, most which got a start with coding, seen only by me, and the handful that might be considered worth visiting, mostly demo worlds of the latest Metaplace feature, and one, Sniper, being the only "done" world, which has had a bizarre resurgence of interest lately, getting Favorited once or twice a week. Please, go give it (another) try in the next two weeks, before it's gone.


I think about the people I've met through Metaplace, whether online acquaintances that I only know in Metaplace worlds to those with which I've got a non-Metaplace relationship, through Twitter or blogs or email. And then there are those that I've met in-person through Metaplace - fellow testers Scopique, Chooseareality and Rboehme, and the employees at the time -- some who had since left, some who are leaving as of today, and some who will stay with what Metaplace-the-company will become. I met these people because Metaplace flew me down to meet them, something that spoke a lot about the personality of the company and the people within it, that they would do this for an unknown alpha-tester and some-time pain in the ass. I got to meet Raph Koster. I'm a fanboi, I admit it.

I wore my Areae shirt two days ago.

I use my Metaplace coffee mug every day at work.

And no matter what Metaplace does in the future, it has made its mark on me; on my programming skills, on my programming ideas, on my programming direction. It has stimulated the game designer and game developer in me, from the sideline dreamer to a nascent latecomer.

Thank you, Metaplace.