I wrote a blog post that highlights some of the features that we plan to offer for the Metaplace community. I’ll repaste here for those who don’t read the Metaplace blog (which you all should, because it’s awesome k?).
We’ve talked a lot about how we want Metaplace to be a resource for anyone to make the world or game of their choosing. We have explained a lot of the neat features that we believe separate us from the alternatives, and have shown you our philosophy behind what we’re working on. One topic that we haven’t mentioned a whole lot about is our goal for the Metaplace community.
Although I may be biased, the best part about what we’re doing is its accessibility. Just about anyone will be able to find something to do on Metaplace.com regardless of their technical abilities or interests, and that is something that we are excited about and want to enhance. This means there will be a variety of different types of people all interacting with each other – an advantage of the marriage between multiplayer games and the Web. The user experience is always in the forefront of our minds when we’re prioritizing and making decisions on usability and design because frankly, we’re in this business knowing the importance of community. We understand that the best ways to build an excellent community for your product are to provide plenty of opportunities for people to talk with each other, encourage participation and to make each user feel like they are an integral part of the equation.
One of our plans for providing opportunities for people to talk to each other is though our forums. We already have a forum full of lively participating members, and we will be keeping that rolling after we launch to the public. Forums are excellent for several reasons, the first being the permanence of the conversation. A user can engage in a conversation that will last several days to weeks and gives people time to think up intelligent helpful answers without feeling pressured for a quick response like in an instant chat. Informational resources can be saved for later, and entire conversations can be linked to others much easier than copying and pasting a scrolling chat. Forums are great for pointed discussion on particular topics and for brainstorming ideas and seeking advice – all of which are very useful for builders and players alike. We are also going to be offering individual forums for each world that is built on Metaplace more details on that in the future.
It will also be easy to put a chat box into virtually any world by using a handy chat module. What multiplayer game isn’t improved by a little friendly banter back and forth between the people playing? Knowing that other people are playing the same game as you is unique in its own right – but it’s a lot more fun when you know that you can talk to them.
Badges are a way that we intend on encouraging the participation of our players and builders. We plan to offer icons that represent various titles and achievements (think EA’s Pogo or Xbox Live) that users will be able to earn based on different criteria. Most of the specific criteria has not yet been discussed, but some ideas that have been thrown around are things like “First world to reach 100 simultaneous players” or something like “Player who has played the most unique games.” We want there to be tons and tons of these that people can earn. We plan for world owners to be able to create badges that they can award their players too, so they’re not all just from us here at Areae. Somewhat similar to this is our plan for contests and theme challenges. We will be hosting many different challenges that encourage builders to make something of a particular theme and as a result we’ll be choosing a winner. Some ideas for contests are things like “Best Space Shooter Game” where everyone tries to build one, or things like scavenger hunts across the games in our portal. Prizes could be almost anything, from free premium hosting to a spot on our “Featured Worlds” space on the front page of our portal. Giving people a goal builds a community by encouraging users to come back time after time.
Our comprehensive Builder’s Wiki is our way of showing everyone that we’re committed to the openness of our platform and our desire to help users make what they want to make. From extensive help documents and reference materials, to lengthy tutorials on the use of Metaplace – we do our best to ensure that all information we can give to help the community is there for them. The best part about wikis? Anyone can contribute to them! We hope that the user documentation will be just as helpful and extensive as what we are providing to the public. Feel like writing tutorials and design process documents or helping us organize the flow of information? Have at it – you never know, there could be a badge or a contest to encourage and reward the assistance.
There you have it – a handful of the features we plan to implement to help users connect with other users, meet new friends and build relationships with them online, and keep people coming back to participate in the fun. Have any ideas for community features that you’d like to see? Head on over to our forums and chat about it!
Tami “Cuppycake” Baribeau
Community Manager
Tami Baribeau is the Associate Producer for Metaplace, Inc, currently working on Island Life. She is also the Lead Editor of feminist gaming blog The Border House, and the National Facebook Games Examiner for Examiner.com. She can be reached on Twitter or by email.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }