Online consumer game magazine The Escapist has a new interview with Areae's Raph Koster, in which he discusses the upcoming Metaplace, and the principles of user-generated content he stands so firmly behind.

Among the interesting perspectives on Web 2.0 gaming from the veteran designer's perspective, some technical info, as in this excerpt:

TE: Explain the relationship between Metaplace and the web.

RK: Basically, we always say we work the way the web does and people tend to think that's a metaphor when actually we mean it very literally. When you think of the pieces of the web: You have HTML, you have a browser, you have Apache (and Apache is running CGI scripts), and you have CSS, and you have DNS so you know what webpage to connect to, and you have essentially Google so you can find stuff on top. Metaplace has all of those pieces in and of itself. It has a markup language that can describe to a client anything from Tetris to World of Warcraft. And that is the markup language that anyone can write a client for. Our first client happens to be a Flash embeddable widget, but it could be a stand-alone client, it could be a mobile client, it doesn't really matter.

We actually have written like three clients ourselves. We have a server that doesn't make assumptions about what kind of game you're running on it. And instead, the equivalent of CGI, which is our Lua-based scripting language. So that means the same server can be hosting Tetris or World of Warcraft, and it's all about what modules or scripts you plug into it.

Not a lot has been very publicly revealed about Metaplace yet, so check out the full interview for some cool details. We're also looking forward to having Raph at the upcoming Worlds in Motion Summit, so make sure and register so you can catch him there!