Take a wild guess what this week’s Big Story is about? If you guess Metaplace, you’d be right.

I did a little tiny bit of reporting to go along with it, and interviewed Raph about the just-post-announcement reaction in the office, and attempted to clarify a few things. Interesting stuff.

The Big Story

Earlier this week, for the TechCrunch40 Conference, Areae pulled back the curtain on their project, the mysterious game that veteran MMOG designer Raph Koster has been working on since his departure from Sony Online Entertainment. The name of the ‘game’ is Metaplace. Essentially, Metaplace is going to be a virtual world toolkit. The whole thing is built on open standards, and attempt to “bring virtual worlds to the web,” instead of keeping them boxed away in a separate little garden.

As the site puts it:

“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.”

Virtual World News and GigaOM have writeups of the presentation at the TechCrunch Conference, while Areae’s Community Manager Tami Baribeau writes in a post why gamers should care. Over at his site, Raph just breaths a sigh of relief.

There’s been plenty of other discussion of this topic by now, from the Fires of Heavens board to F13, and you can get a general sense of what the hardcore market thinks of the idea from those posts. Terra Nova examines the idea from the academic’s perspective, while the gaming news sites … haven’t really posted much about it. If you’d like to come to your own conclusions, I can help. First, go check out the demo of Metaplace from the conference.

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