Wired magazine reports on a trend in the massively multiplayer online (MMO) game field: the open-source metaverse, "an infinitely extensible virtual world with few rules and no oversight from corporate overlords." The metaverse is built on the idea that MMO games can be developed in an open source manner, not just by big corporations -- kind of the Firefox model, compared to Microsoft Internet Explorer. A college professor named Peter Ludlow is featured prominently in the article; he was apparently partly driven to push the metaverse idea after being kicked off Sims Online. Ludlow is quoted as saying that he believes that because thousands of people are working on the metaverse will almost certainly result in quality games being created.
The article notes that several other related efforts are also underway: The Open Source Metaverse Project (OSMP), the Croquet Project, and Multi-User Programming Pedagogy for Enhancing Traditional Study (MUPPETS). For MUPPETS, which is used as a teaching aid at the Rochester Institute of Technology, students are given a blank "plot" of 3D space in which they can build objects and interact with other students' objects however they want, reports Wired.
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