Introduction

Abstract

The Betaville platform was initially developed as a specifically informatic response to the need and potential for broadly distributed and sustained design collaborations that could effectively include the full range of expertise and stakeholders in situations calling for changes to the physical built environment: massively collaborative design software. As the research/development fields of “serious games,” e-governance, open data, and distributed collaboration evolve in parallel, Betaville has become more broadly relevant to the performance requirements/expectations/future development path of open massively multiplayer online (MMO) engines, raising in particular questions about the possibility (and necessary development in informatics) for interactive representations of physical spaces across a very wide domain: scaling from interdisciplinary teams to entire communities in practical problem-solving and creative future-making.