Raph Koster and company are proceeding at a fairly rapid pace with their next generation online space, Metaplace, designed to allow anyone to create their own multiple-user online environment (whether it be a game or an application), no matter their ability level. In recent weeks, they’ve held two stress-tests of fairly simple games and applications in an effort to give the environment a “shakedown flight”. Of course, “fairly simple” doesn’t really do it justice, as evidenced by this screenshot of one of the functional games available in the Alpha test…Uberspace.

And now, we have the first application that’s (mostly) ready-to-go…Metachat.

Metachat is, as you can imagine, a chatroom. However, it’s the first chatroom I’ve ever seen that allowed Keen and I to have a snowball fight (even though he kept trying to use tomatoes instead…I think he’s addicted to blood-like effects).

Admittedly, I haven’t tried to have a snowball-tomato fight with Keen before, but I’m sure it’s a fairly unique option.

Metachat is a MySpace application that isn’t a MySpace application. You see, it…well, you can….oh, hell, I’ll let Raph explain it.

This is not a MySpace specific app! It’s the standard Metaplace client you may have seen before in our stress tests. The same client you played Uberspace and Wheelwright in. Since Metaplace is client-agnostic, you can serve up really different sorts of worlds via the same standard client. The stuff around the client itself is leveraging OpenSocial to transparently log in MySpace accounts into Metaplace. The web-embeddable client comes with a Javascript container that lets you do stuff like that when you embed it on your own pages (eventually).

One of the main features they’re working hard to implement is the ability to use Metaplace to design your own games and applications (like Metachat), no matter what your level of design experience is. For example,

This world was mostly the work of us in-house, but a lot of pieces were actually made by alpha testers!

And my personal favorite part:

The kicker: because so many pieces were off the shelf, this was put together mostly in a week.

In all seriousness, the phrase “If you don’t like <insert MMO here>, why don’t you go make your own?” is about to morph from “snide comment” to “valid suggestion” for almost everyone. Trust me on this one.

“What’s all the fuss,” I hear you saying, “It’s just a chat program.” Well, find out for yourself. I’ve got it installed on the Lag-O-Myspace (on the lower-left sidebar)…click on it and join us.

I’ll save a snowball for you.

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Tags: games, gaming, Metachat, Metaplace, mmo, mmorpg, Raph Koster