Areae Decloaks

Areae has gone public with their much-anticipated product and it is called Metaplace. According to the faq, it is a virtual world platform that is closely tied to web technology. It's using a Lua-like game logic programming language and appears to expose most of its content using urls (xml, stylesheets, rss, etc). It looks like the alpha client will be 2d, with a 3d client still in the works.

The Nature of Exploration

Reading Brian Green's recent post about the nature of exploration games prompted me to think about the core distinctions one can make about exploration. Specifically, I think exploration breaks down into two major types: exploration of things (places, objects, story lines, etc) and exploration of relationships (physics model, crafting systems, talent builds, etc). Notice that this distinction is exactly parallel to the code/data distinction programmers (can) make.

What would the nature of exploration content in a lisp-like world be?

How about in a prolog-like declarative world?

Or a ml-like functional world?

Where does the exploration content of current games fall?