Make love, not Warcraft.

Worlds In Motion is reporting on Raph Koster's talk at GDC 2008, where he revealed a bunch of information on just how his new project Metaplace is going to work.

He began by railing against much of what’s currently ingrained in MMOs. MMO games are now extremely hard to make, and Koster described each project as “a custom-crafted moon shoot.” Despite all the effort that goes into an MMO, Koster notes that they are poorly integrated with the rest of the internet.

In the current space, only the big companies can play because of cost, and there’s a significant amount of reinvention happening throughout the industry. More often than not, designers are told to “make it like WoW” as the huge costs frustrate any attempts on innovation.

Koster looked at how MMOs work today: giant monolithic servers that contain all the services needed, with complex server cluster architectures and a very tight dependency between client and server. “There are virtually no successful reuses of MMO servers,” Riley said.

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[Via Worlds In Motion]