Today is Blog Action Day, an initiative trying to get everyone to write about the same issue today on their blogs. So in observance of that, let’s talk a little bit about that. With the upcoming Metaplace project, it seems it would be quite possible to develop a serious MMO about the environment. The challenge, of course, is how to make it fun. Here are some bullet points of my ideas:

• Overall, a “you can control and change the world” theme, fun would be seeing your actions affecting the world
• Let you play as a meteorologist and study the globe every day
• Let players gather into “regions”, and let them decide on environment measures/ordinances, and then observe what’s the change over time (in an accelerated time line of course)
• Have “bad guys” try to find loop holes in the system and pollute the environment
• Let you be a farmer and experience how climate changes can impact your life
• Let you play as <insert animal> and experience how climate changes impact you
• Let you make choices about your every day life, and give you a report of how you have impacted the environment

That’s just some possibilities, like notes on a napkin. Now, someone go expand and make this because as I wrote the above points I am feeling that I want to play it

Areae, headed by Raph Koster, finally released details about the secret virtual world project that they have been working on for a year now. It’s called Metaplace and it reeks of boundless potential. I am extremely excited about it, and at the same time, concerned.

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.

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