Saw Raph Koster in concert last night. The more conservative among you may want to put some quote marks into that sentence, but Edward Castronova is gradually convincing me that maybe a concert in Metaplace is real enough. After all, the little pixelated person on stage looked like the jolly fellow I've seen in video interviews online, and although the fake little avatar guy was strumming away on a fake little guitar ('little' being relative for both of those things, which of course are too fake to have size), the live audio feed did indeed seem to have a real Raph Koster and a real guitar.

I'll do the rest in bullet points, because I know the internet loves bullet points. In fact, an ordered list, because although I have few if any commenters, if there were some they might like to refer to points by number. There may be precious few potholes: if you were looking for one ask in the comments and I'll put it in.

  1. I'm going to refer to Metaplace as a game. It's just quicker than calling it a 'community-driven virtual-world-building experience' (or whatever they might like to call themselves; I just made that up). It's not a game by most people's definition.
  2. Throughout the post I'm going to try and avoid sounding starstruck. I maintain that I'm not, although I do have a lot of respect for him professionally, having loved SWG and really liked A Theory of Fun. And he seems like a nice bloke.
  3. Metaplace seems quite nice. I'm not there with it, but I see why it should exist and I'm very glad it does (which is more than I can say for Google Wave, but that's another post). I wasn't getting on all that well with the interface, but I was listening to the concert and watching its chat with the window squished over to one side so that I could keep writing for NaNoWriMo and do a couple other things in other windows: if I'd tried that with any other MMO I would probably have melted my laptop.
  4. I was getting lots of their 'coins' all the time. It credits you as an explorer just for hanging around in other worlds, and for being a socialiser just for interacting with people. I know full well it's a cheap trick, but it was one I still enjoyed. Although that shouldn't surprise me: much of my theoretical understanding of what fun is comes from a book by Metaplace's CEO.
  5. Koster is good at guitar, for someone whose day job is CEO of an MMO. He's less good as a singer, technically, but very enthusiastic and I find him entertaining. Edit: Worth noting that he's probably still a much better singer than me, all told. Better at guitar goes without saying. Further Edit: Also, I made the edit above before he commented :-)
  6. I wish I were better at guitar. And I wish I knew more songs. I can probably fix both of those things with some practice; maybe I'll have the nerve to do something as daft as an online concert eventually.
  7. Being 'at' the concert was much better than listening after the fact. The avatars add to the atmosphere a little, but being in a chat channel with loads of other people listening to the same music is really good, especially since the performer dropped by and read it when he had the chance.
  8. The atmosphere in said chat was really nice. It helped that it was a charity thing, compered by a couple of people who run Metaplace worlds raising funds for good causes; it was probably also good that many of the people watching were on holiday for Thanksgiving (I was there at 10pm GMT, but it was early afternoon Pacific time). Raph seemed to have various family in the audience (and the chat), which was cool.
  9. In fact, it was generally really interesting to watch them interact with the players. A lot of other games could do with events like this (although as far as I can tell Raph isn't a community management nightmare, which helps. There's a joke, I think it might be from the West Wing, about how letting the President speak to foreign dignitaries immediately undoes years of delicate diplomacy: I think that's how many CM people feel when their CEO talks to the players).


Anyway, if I think of anything else I'll edit it in. Won NaNo, by the way...