How to use Mytopia in the context of the Video Game Industry

Hey again! Zhuge here. Today I’m going to go over a little site I found – Mytopia, a gaming/chat website.

Mytopia’s interface is fairly simple – you long onto the site and you’re presented with a cartoon-ish landscape full of buildings. Each building represents either a separate theme of games (e.g. the casino is all gambling games, the clubhouse is all table games like dominoes, backgammon, and so on), a chat area, or your own house that you can add on to.

Each of the separate games tracks your skill level, noted by your level in that particular game, and it keeps track of your progress both to rate you against opponents and highlight you in the high scores listing. In games you can wager either silver or gold, this currency of which you use to buy into games and purchase upgrades for your avatar and your house. Unfortunately the shop for buying stuff isn’t functional right now, but by the looks of the registration process (which has you create an avatar) it looks and feels very much like the mii from nintendo’s Wii, except with an ever-increasing array of user choices.

The chat functionality of Mytopia is multi-layered. First off you can just join in on a game and chat with whoever’s in there, but for those of us who aren’t always playing games (or who just want to talk) we are provided with the Bar area to go and talk in. Unfortunately, the Bar section of Mytopia isn’t live either, but in theory its to be like a general lobby where anyone can go to chat. Aside from straight chatting there’s also a mail service and a forum you can post to – in other words, there are multiple ways to chat aside from live person-to-person.

This is all well and good – and still under construction – and by this alone it isn’t much of a unique or surprising website. What gets me excited about it, though, is its multi-portal entry.

You see, you don’t have to log onto Mytopia just through the listed website. Mytopia can be added on as a facebook application, part of a Myspace page, or any number of other social networking sites (currently only four, but it looks to expand that in the future). And while normally such separate instances of the game truncate the interface or generally just feel like a separate entity with the brand name slapped on, Mytopia applications on the other social networking sites actually provides user interface with the rest of the Mytopia gaming community.

In other words, you can be logged onto Mytopia through the main site, your friend can be surfing Facebook, and you can both hit up one of the games in there and talk to one another.

Is that crazy or what? That just gets my mind going on the possibilities. Take the game Crysis, for instance. Right now its only released on the PC but if memory serves its also looking to release on the PS3. Could you imagine turning on your PS3 and jumping into a multiplayer game with your friend using his computer? Such multi-gatewayed interface doesn’t exist right now (outside of the game boy advance/gamecube technology that Nintendo experimented with last generation) but it very well could be.

Even more, we could take it one step further and address the gameplay issues – or rather, possibilities – that open up with this discovery. What if the mechanics changed depending on which platform you were playing the game with? Take a WWII game, for example. The PC Gamer could be the gunner on a ship, the Xbox or PS3 player could be sailing the ship itself, and any DS or PSP players could be directing radar.  Wouldn’t that be so exciting?

That’s what gets me about Mytopia and how it works – it’s still in its formative stages right now, but its mechanics and interface, if adapted by the greater video games community, could change the face of gaming forever.

Well? What are you waiting for, Sony? Get a move on, Konami! Let’s Get these mechanics out there!

-Z

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