Metaplace

» see metaplace.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

metaplace was the kind of thing an engineer respects and never actually gets to use. in 2009 i was doing my own work in ankara, a long way from california, and this was a small platform most people online never heard of. it did not reach turkey in any real way. it barely reached anyone. that, more or less, was the whole problem with it.

the man behind it was raph koster, who had designed ultima online and later star wars galaxies, two of the big virtual worlds of that era. his company areae, later renamed metaplace, wanted to take world-building down from the big studios and hand it to regular people. you would get a small world of your own in the browser, built with their tools, and every object in it carried its own web address. worlds could link to each other the way pages do. for a designer that is a genuinely lovely idea.

the trouble is that a lovely idea for builders is not the same as a place people want to live in. metaplace opened to everyone in may 2009, and by that december koster wrote plainly that it was not gaining enough traction to survive as a consumer product. it closed on the first day of 2010. i read about the shutdown years afterward, going down a list of dead virtual worlds. i never had an account. from where i sat it was always a name inside someone else's postmortem.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

the pitch was that anyone could make a world without a studio behind them. no download and no client to install, just a browser and their toolset, and out came a little 2d space you owned. giving every object a url was the clever part. it meant a world was not a sealed box but something woven into the web itself, linkable and addressable like everything else out there. people who saw the demos tended to come away impressed.

impressed is not the same as signed up, though. the folks who wanted to build worlds were a small crowd, and the folks who just wanted to hang out in one already had places to do that. metaplace sat in between, waiting for an audience that did not really turn up.

~ what got buried with it ~

when the consumer service closed, the people who had built worlds on it lost access to the assets and the code they had made. that is the quiet cost of a hosted platform. your work lives on someone else's machines, and when those machines go dark, so does the work. it is a lesson every generation of these tools seems to teach again.

~ the long tail ~

metaplace inc. did not vanish with the platform. the company turned to building social games on facebook for a while, chasing the money where it actually was around 2010. koster himself kept thinking about the same problem for another decade, and in 2019 he started a new studio, playable worlds, to take another run at large online worlds. the idea that anyone should be able to make a world never really died. it just kept looking for a body that could carry it.

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