dreamshovel

The collection started when I pulled a thin, translucent sliver from the battery compartment of a holiday toy. It had been placed there in order to insulate a battery terminal from the battery during shipment and thus help assure that the toy was ready, literally, out of the box. Now it had become a forlorn bit of exotic garbage, placed at the corner of my desk to be admired.

It was soon joined by: a narrow strip of tape holding a set of underwear in a bundle, a jagged tear from a jasmine tea packet, a small, fragile and ripped anti-static bag, a twist cap from a water bottle, some remnants of shrink-wrap, a blade guard from a safety razor and a millimeter long fragment of red tinsel garland.

Only the water bottle lid is marked with a plastic identification code (#2, high density polyethylene) indicating recyleability. All the rest, every dinky bit, is without any obvious further use, destined for the garbage sack and dim points beyond.

Perhaps they will migrate far away, down the hill across the valley and out into the Great Pacific Trash Vortex, a mass of plastic crap twice the area of Texas. Perhaps they will drift evil and help choke a pelican or a turtle.

At best they will just be passive parasites, adding noise to food identification signals and taking up space until something comes along that can digest them. Will it be something that is friendly to the human-sustaining ecosystem? Maybe a microbe that sinks some carbon and excretes some water and oxygen along the way. Can we wait? Do we have to?

It seems that the potential of crap to commodity (”C to C” ?) processing should be a multi-billion dollar business, even with the current fledgling state of bio-engineering. Waste farmers armed with tweaked-out microorganisms, wielding digestion for the greater good.

Or perhaps the little bits of plastic crap are here to stay, a secondary life form condensed by an enzymatic action of human industry. A quiet organism whose replication and adaptative core is completely external to its form, residing instead in human memes. These controlling and facilitating memes are in turn parasitic aspects of human adaptation which must be culled in any long-term human future. A subtly toxic grey goo, independent of nanotech.

But likely it’s just a lot of garbage, produced by ignorant meat-sticks in their haste to earn a cheap buck. And the first generations of waste farmers will taste a new and hyper-lucrative arbitrage game thus far undampened by serious competition. Perhaps too, waste farming/mining will be the coming-out event for bio-engineering, as the science quickly begets the tech that begins to suck up all those discarded commodities.

For the moment however my little pile of resin orts requires a trivial immediate personal cost to discard, against an equally trivial near future return. The reversal of that time-valuation calculus will truly represent an economic revolution.

For a long time I had a Metaplace invitation in a lonely corner my mailbox. I’m exactly not sure why I neglected it for so long but around last June, I finally logged in for a look around and quickly began spending a lot of time in Metaplace.

So several months later and I have gained a measure of fluency with the Lua-based toolchain and the art and gameplay idioms, met a variety of amazing and creative people, produced a number of effect and tool plugins via the MP commerce marketplace and have made a couple of well-regarded worlds.
Yesterday morning I finished a new, large and richly-scripted snow sport world that I’d been working on for a few weeks. It immediately filled up with enthusiastic and complementary players, and rocketed up the ratings charts. Good Times.

So when I popped over to the MP forums to post the official release announcement and saw the sad sad news that Metaplace.com was closing up shop Jan 1 2010, I may have stopped breathing for a moment. All worlds, all content to be lost to the winds.

And of course a big gut-wrenching loss is to the staff who lost their jobs in the middle of the holiday season.

Now, businesses come and go and the loss of a web platform is not unprecedented, to say the least. Various web sites and services have been lost in the past. But while basic web such as text, images and video are common media forms which may be copied to a variety of archival platforms, when a proprietary platform like MP goes down, the “content” may well go with it. Sure we can do screen and video captures, but the live part of the environments, the actual magic of metaverses, just evaporates.

And while it’s easy to smug sagely about the eeeeevils of proprietary platforms and walled garden architectures, the loss of all that creativity is deeply painful. It is not, after all, as if the ‘free’ time was spent watching TV or some other passive dissipation.

True archiving would preserve the platform as well. I know an audio engineer whose priceless archival recordings of live jazz are accompanied by the tape recorder(s) and monitors used to make them. Perhaps this trends to the obsessive audiophile stereotype, but for metaverse preservation it’s a fair bet that preserving the physical server platform is essential.

Perhaps in the future the Internet Archive will expand into the metaverse preservation domain, after all it would seem to be a logical evolution for them. But for now it’s a matter of well, loss mostly. Someone with deep pockets could simply buy the MP rackfuls and employ some curatorial staff to keep them running, but I doubt that will happen.

So, it ends: the venue, the domainful of art and assets and the friend/buddy cohort. And we’ve got just a few days, right in the midst of a major holiday/vacation season, to make our screencaps and videos, assure our scripts are saved locally, revisit our favorite places and exchange contact information.

And to recall some highlights that will probably fall outside of the rough archiving processes:

• The first screening of the excellent (best yet, IMO) virtual world documentary “Another Perfect World”.
• The groundbreaking “Rockin the Metaverse” series of live music performances., featuring (among several others) Grace McDunnough, Doubledown Tandino and Raph Koster himself.
• Various industry ‘celebrity’ speakers holding forth generously at The Stage world.

There are also a couple of things whose loss will only reinforce their importance:

• A soon-to-be-dissipated vibrant and creative community. Some of the more hard-core are likely already present in other metaverses, so they may well just change channels, so to speak. But the easy-access web-based MP platform was really good at bringing in fresh metaverse users who will find few acceptable substitutes at the moment. Their “outsider” perspectives are extremely valuable.
• The open User Created Game platform domain for which the loss of MP leaves a large and damaging void. Although in any such open system there is a lot of crap, there were also more than sufficient gems to compensate. So also tally up a loss to gameplay innovation.

As for my own modest contributions I’m most proud of the Multim0d “script sequencer” tool and API that allowed non-programmers to assemble in-world effects and manipulations into complex composites (e.g., disco floors, swarms of angry penguins, simulating snowboard-style avatar movement and all manner of tile animations.)
I also made a popular set of animated fire, the web-embed Isoasis and Regionware places and of course my comically ill-timed “SlideMountain” world, released literally hours before the closing announcement.

But the real talent of Metaplace can seen in these amazing, entertaining and insprirational works:

Happy, Dark City and Wonka (by Xuemei, probably my favorite MP creator)
Kyoto, Steampunk (Dalian)
Space1599 (TheBeeKeepers)
Thousand Rooms, Atlantis (J9scarborough)
GeoQuest, ZooEscape (John)
Fishing, Metapark (Legend)

And well, a great many more. Metaplace is still for the moment a living thing, full of creative expressions. Check them all out while you can