So yesterday there was a brief announcement by a certain Raph Koster.  If you’re not familiar with the name, Raph has acted as Sony Online Entertainment’s Chief Creative Officer for the past few years working on titles such as Star Wars: Galaxies and Everquest II.  Before that he was the lead designer for the highly successful Ultima Online at Origin Systems.  Raph left SOE last year to found a company called Areae, and has been tight lipped about what exactly he was doing there, at least until yesterday when the cat ran screaming out of the bag.

Metaplace is a next-generation virtual worlds platform designed to work the way the Web does. Instead of giant custom clients and huge downloads, Metaplace lets you play the same game on any platform that reads our open client standard. We supply a suite of tools so you can make worlds, and we host servers for you so that anyone can connect and play. And the client could be anywhere on the Web.

The platform should allow you to set up a world with basic chat and a map to work on in under five minutes.  Although it’s not clear how the content generation will work, the platform seems to be designed to integrated tightly with the web, allowing objects to script content feeds from outside of the game, thus allowing users to shatter the walled garden which is typical in most video games (Missing since January anyone?).  While I find it instinctively unlikely to occur in the near future, Areae claims one could build a game bigger than World of Warcraft on Metaplace.  While clients are currently limited to forms of 2-D graphics such as 2.5D Heightfields, isometric views, top-down 2D, etc., the expectation is that a 3-D client will continue to be developed.  Areae is itself developing an MMO based on the Metaplace platform, but nothing is known about it presently.  Pricing information doesn’t seem to be discussed, the flavour of the language indicates cheap as free is not out of the question.

I see really interesting potential for ARGs developed on this platform.  A game with tie-ins to dynamic content generated from real-life events based on RSS feeds (fully supported) could be very interesting.  I’m extremely curious as to how well this platform will work.  At the end of the day, much of the difficulty in broad-based game design is in the creation of content and assets which require specialized skills.  XNA tries a related problem that Metaplace is attacking, but neither seems to intuitively deal with the issue that asset creation is difficult for normal humans. 

If you’re not convinced, having Cory Doctorow on the advisory board is a sufficient condition for being awesome.