Event Review: Richard Bartle Q&A in Metaplace

by Alphaville Herald on 27/05/09 at 6:53 am

by Suzie Skybeam

Dr. Richard Bartle held an hour and half Q&A session for a packed audience in the MetaGlobe Theatre yesterday, covering diverse MMO-related topics, from government taxation of VW transactions, through "What have current MMO's lost that MUD's had?" to the perennial favorite, "How do you get a job in the gaming industry?" (You need luck, apparently).

A sample of the dialog:

Richard: As for Metaplace, well one of the things I always hopedwould happen is that people would be able to create their own virtualworlds and now they can. I'm very pleased by it.
Richard: not as pleased as if it had more documentation, obviously…
Raph laughs
Cuppycake: We're working on that ;)

As this was one of the first big public meetings to be held in Metaplace since it entered public beta, it also gave us a chance to see how Metaplace performed. I hope Dr. Bartle will forgive me for reporting on the technical aspects, rather than the substance of his talk.

This time, there weren't any complaints about the client crashing, sothe stability issues we encountered during last Friday's party at theHerald offices seem to be resolved. It was also pleasingly low-lagthroughout.

What worked less well was the plan to get people who wanted to ask a question to form an orderly queue for an (imaginary) microphone, as you would do in a real-world conference.

Cuppycake did her best to moderate, but at times there was a disorganized scrum in the aisle for the mic. I think some software support for moderating discussions would have helped here.

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