The Chicago Tribune's got an article up about a company called Simuality; they help small businesses set up shop in Second Life and other virtual worlds. It seems to be a slightly different tack than the one taken by Metaversatility, who recently talked to us about the work they do building brand outposts for companies advertising in online worlds.

The Tribune piece tells the story of Simuality founder Anthony Van Zyl and how he helped Evanston attorney Omar Khuri build his immigration law business in Second Life, with the help of live support. From the article:

It takes more than a presence to make money on Second Life, van Zyl said. Too many companies have offices or storefronts on Second Life but don't staff them, he said. "When you walk into this virtual reality there should be a person who greets you and directs you where you need to go," he said. "It's absolutely vital that there is human interaction."

But van Zyl knows that having someone available 24 hours a day to greet residents on Second Life is a tall order for many small firms. That's why Simuality, together with a Netherlands company, provides trained avatar receptionists for clients. In the case of Khuri's law practice, van Zyl expects to provide an avatar who can answer questions about the type of legal work provided and understand the preliminary paperwork clients need to complete.

One interesting fact is that neither van Zyl nor his client, Mr. Khuri, use their real names in their virtual business work; van Zyl goes by "Hendry Goldkey" (avatar shown), and Khuri calls himself "Ettorney Stapleton." If the idea is to build a business presence that can translate to the real world, doesn't this seem a bit counter-productive?

When we recently heard that CSI TV producer Anthony Zuiker would be keynoting the upcoming Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo, we wondered whether a crime scene investigation virtual world could be in the works! Turns out a rather intriguing crossover between the show and Second Life is planned -- but there's actually a real-life CSI tool that's about to go virtual.

The Western Mail is reporting that software developers at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, are at work on a virtual world aimed to allow juries to visit crime scenes. Academics believe that letting jurors stroll through the blueprint (still not built as of yet) might help them gauge the "real-life impact" of a crime scene. Jurors could "see" the victim and their position relative to the perpetrator or murder weapon.

Peter Farr, of the Judicial Communications Office which represents judges, told the Western Mail:

“The courts are using increasing amounts of new technology, such as hi-tech evidence from video links with witnesses and CCTV footage,” he said.

“This is the first I’ve heard of this software and if it were to be used in courts in future, it would need to be with the agreement of the Crown Prosecution Service and others, as well as judges.”

[via icWales]

We recently reported that Entropia Universe was turning to Crytek's CryEngine 2 for a graphical boost; now, our sister site Gamasutra is reporting that Korean developer XLGames, founded by Lineage creator and former executive VP of development at NCSoft Jake Song, has announced that it will also be using Crytek's CryEngine 2 for its forthcoming massively multiplayer game.

From Gamasutra:

Crytek's first engine was previously used for NCSoft's AION, an arrangment which XL vice president and technical director Patrick Doane describes as seeing "a lot of success," adding that after seeing CryEngine 2 dmoes, "we just knew we wanted to continue to work with their great new tools and engine.”

XL CEO Jake Song, previously featured on Gamasutra, noted that apart from its graphics capabilities, the engine was selected for "the unprecedented ability it offers to physically interact with the environment," which he says will allow the company "to create entirely new modes of game play which up to now we could only dream of implementing.”

Said Crytek managing director Faruk Yerli, "Jake Song is a true pioneer and legend in the world of massively multiplayer games, having almost single handedly created the original market for them in Asia. To now have his own company select the CryEngine 2 as their middleware, and Crytek as their primary technology provider, demonstrates a high level of confidence in our tools and technology, as well as in our team’s ability to support their ongoing efforts to build a ground breaking new next generation game, not only now, but also for many years to come.”

[Each day, Worlds in Motion will be taking a closer look at individual virtual worlds. We'll start with a nuts-and-bolts overview, then move on to an in-depth tour, to be followed up with a conclusion-- all with the aim of bringing you all the essential info and details on each world in the rapidly-developing virtual landscape.]

This week, we take a look into Millsberry,, General Mills' teen and 'tween-targeted virtual world. Though it's been called an advergame, it still enjoys considerable popularity among the young set -- let's investigate, starting with an overview!

Today marked the first day of conferences at the State of Play V conference in Singapore. Organized by Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, New York Law School, Trinity University, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, the conference on virtual worlds invites experts across disciplines to discuss the future of cyberspace and the impact of these new immersive, social online environments on education, law, politics and society.

As per this SoP’s mandate, panels featured more than just the “usual suspects,” the primarily Western voices which have dominated games scholarship thus far. While both established and upcoming Western voices do seem to be making up a significant portion of attendees to the conference, many Asian countries have come – most notably from Singapore, Korea and China.

Prior to the panel sessions, we were addressed by a senior official from the Singaporean government. Dr. Balaji Sadasivan, Senior Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and Information, Communications and the Arts, said that the importance for collaboration in games, noting the “drive to tap into the digital age.”

The first session, 'Building Businesses in Virtual Worlds', dealt with those businesses grown inside of worlds, but also those which are being brought inside. Second Life mogul Guntram Graef, said that corporations may need to “exit the magic circle,” in order to succeed. Jerry Paffendorf of Electric Sheep Company also encouraged corporations and developers to look at how they might use unique intellectual property and stories created within games.

Meanwhile, Thomas Malaby answered the predominantly business-oriented tone to the session by asking a question: could game-making be becoming less about gamers, and more about the corporations attracted?

The second session, 'Regulating Virtual Worlds', focused strongly on the different issues inherent to applying nationally and internationally binding laws to game spaces. Charles Lim Aeng Chang, of the Singapore Attorney General’s office, explored the issue of accommodating local governments, an idea which seemed immediately rebuffed.

David Post complained over the absence of in-game legal systems. Addressing game developers as “Ye Olde Game Gods,” he asked when developers would take the issue of online law seriously, most especially by enforcing player-made decisions. Richard Bartle then pointed out that most often, players don’t actually want laws – just as “most people like Gods to not do much.”

'Education, Kids and Teens in Virtual Worlds' examined some of the past, current and future classroom applications to games. Aaron Delwiche presented his courses which brought players into MMO spaces, while Angeline Khoo and others described certain areas where playing games actually taught difficult and emotional life lessons. You know, gank and be ganked. Not mentioned overly in the discussion on education was Harvard University’s Berkman Center, which had premiered at the SoP their initiative to teach essential life skills through the learning of poker.

While many people are exploring games as an educational tool, Dr. K. Pelly Periasamy of Nanyang Technological University asked a simple and pertinent question: “Is it applicable to the real world? The feel among the panelists was that games do hold limits as an educational tool, though there are also immense opportunities.

Connie Yowell of the MacArthur Foundation brought up her concerns, asking whether some ‘new’ game theory may be “replicating rather than pushing the edges,” using established themes rather than exploring the untested. She also said that now is the time to do such research – as worldwide interest, and more importantly the resultant funding, will only last so long.

The final session worked on the topic of 'Connecting East and West'. The prolific Allen Varney moderated. Referring to their rapid growth, he suggested that event hosts “Singapore will surprise us.” Joshua Fouts reminded attendees that while we may all get excited over the numbers in World of Warcraft, it’s still just roughly half as large as its counterparts in Asian virtual worlds.

This was also the first session to include a translator. Judge Unggi Yoon of Korea spoke at length on how Korean culture influenced, but then was in turn changed, by games. He also spoke on the reasons behind the development of the PC Baang, or Korean PC room, saying that many sprung up and were run by individuals and families who had been struck hard by the Asian financial crisis.

What was fascinating about Judge Unggi Yoon’s speech is that a room full of bustling academics fell almost completely silent. Even if only for a moment, it seemed that the vision of this conference had been realized. East and West are sharing with one another.

[The preceding article by Neils Clark originally ran on Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]

Virtual life surprised some scientists recently by behaving just like a real ecosystem, when a plague created to challenge high-level players in World of Warcraft actually escaped its containment and spread among the general population -- carried by travel, pets, and stupid behavior, just as a real germ would.

The episode around the electronic pandemic, called "Corrupted Blood," inspired a Journal Lancet Infectious Diseases report on ways the online world might be useful in disease studies. "The disease had spread to the densely populated capital cities of the fantasy world, causing high rates of mortality and, much more importantly, the social chaos that comes from a large-scale outbreak of deadly disease," the article read.

The difference between virtual worlds and prior disease models is that the somewhat random factor of human behavior and how it contributes to the spread of academics could not be studied in such a realistic way before. For example, "No one has ever looked at what would happen when people who are not in a quarantine zone get in and then leave," said Nina Fefferman, a medical epidemiologist who worked on the report.

Fefferman will now incorporate the similar kinds of behaviors into her model scenarios, and will also continue working with Blizzard to model disease outbreaks in other games.

[Via MSNBC]

The SEE3D group at the University of Wales Aberystwyth is busy innovating! We recently reported that they were working on ways to use virtual worlds to help juries see crime scenes; now, they've developed virtual world technology that will allow town and city residents and council to see how their community will look with a wind farm nearby. SEE3D builds virtual replicas (to scale) of towns considering the alternative energy solution, and then lets residents and local government tour the area so that they can better consider the ways proposed wind farms might impact their neighborhood.

SEE3D's virtual worlds allow visuals within a 30 mile radius of the proposed farm, and even allow local officials to fly over the site in an airplane, or drive past it in a car, to see the wind farm from different vantage points.

Seems like the aim is to help convince people to adopt alternative energy solutions, perhaps with the hope that a virtual replica of life beside a wind farm might be more appealing than the imagination?

[Via NewsWales]

Business 2.0 recently laid out the "five commandments of gaming," written by Amy Jo Kim (shown) of design firm Shufflebrain to help illustrate how game-like content is helping community-oriented sites like eBay, Digg and Flickr stay sticky, and here's an abridged excerpt:

1. Collecting. Hoarding stuff is a fundamental instinct. That's why one of the first words to come out of a two-year-old's mouth is "Gimme."

2. Points. Earning points is a way to keep track of your nerd score. Points give users incentive to improve their standing and serve as a reward for new privileges, access or power. It's also a big motivation to compete for points when you find out someone has more than you.

3. Feedback. There are parallels between the gaming community and the Digg community. Like gaming, a reward system is used to keep people pecking away," says Digg VP of marketing Mike Maser. "One reason that Digg members are so passionate is because our site gives them a unique way to gain recognition. A user's contributions to the overall community are worthwhile, and it keeps people coming back for more."

4. Exchanges. Explicit and implicit exchanges, like taking turns in a chess match (explicit) or giving someone a virtual Facebook gift (implicit), encourage interactive behavior.

5. Customization. Letting your user have some control over preferences (ie. being able to personalize your MySpace page or Google homepage) increases their investment and creates barriers to exit. The more you let users try to exploit the system, the more interested they'll be in sticking around.

Kim is definitely on to something with this!

[Via Business 2.0, by way of Raph Koster's website]

Charles River Ventures (CRV), who's previously invested in Twitter and Raph Koster's Areae, along with Prism VentureWorks, investors in user product rating sites ExpoTV and RatePoint, have co-led a round of Series A funding raising $5.5 million for a brand-new project. It's the brainchild of Conduit Labs and its founder, Nabeel Hyatt (we read his blog, Brinking) who asks the question, "Why can't we do more together online?"

Hyatt is a veteran web entrepreneur previously of MIT Media Lab spin-off Ambient Devices, and was nominated in 2004 as one of the top 100 Innovators Under 30 by MIT Technology Review. He began Conduit as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Prism's Westwood, MA offices, and in an interview with Worlds in Motion, enthusiastically shared a few details on his top-secret social gaming world in development.

Conduit's project is aimed squarely at what Hyatt sees as a "gap" between MMOs and social virtual worlds. "Right now, virtual worlds and MMOs really fall into two categories. There’s what I call 3D social chat, like Habbo Hotel and Club Penguin -- these wonderful worlds that I spend time in -- but the primary interaction between you and others in worlds like these is really just chat," he explains. "All the games are actually single-player games; the social interaction is only chat. On the other end of the spectrum, MMOs have a lot of complex interactions -- intellectual, social, combat, raiding, and things that you can do with other people.They're built for a fairly hardcore audience, and there's a bunch of barriers to entry for producing and playing in that marketplace."

Hyatt's not ready to offer too many specific details, but did elaborate on how Conduit aims to bridge that gap: "We're trying to do something halfway in between that’s accessible on the web, that feels more like a website than having to enter into a game world, but it is still about social entertainment and playing games; it's very much a game that were building."

Conduit should have plenty of help there; the Conduit team has some gaming industry vets on board. Dan Ogles, Michael Sheidow and Daniel O'Brien, all served leading roles in the building of Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Asheron's Call and the Lord of the Rings Online. "My favorite story about Guitar Hero is that it's still the only video game that's sold in Barnes and Noble," Hyatt says. "They don't even sell [PlayStation 2] in Barnes and Noble, but they sell Guitar Hero!"

He continues: "I think the team’s absolutely critical. I think probably every other day now over the last couple months, I see a new casual MMO or virtual world startup; it's been constant. And before I did it, I was at a VC firm and looked at this industry and what I saw was the same kind of dichotomy -- two types of startups. There're hardcore MMO gaming guys trying to make that experience more accessible, sort of like World of Warcraft meets the web. And the other side of the coin is a bunch of web guys who want to build a web site with virtual gifting and more gaming."

While Hyatt recognizes the value in both of those approaches, he adds, "I think they're missing the larger point – which is that there is no interaction on the web that is like a social game. I don’t mean a single-player game, which is based on a legacy of, really, only video games; it doesn't last hundreds of years. There're actually thousands of years of games that are primarily social activities like dancing, or bowling. And those are about you bonding with your friends, and there's nothing like that online right now. And I think the web and social networks provide a whole new medium to create something that’s never been seen before."

"In an offline world, we do all kinds of complex interactions aside from talking to one another. We play pool together, we bowl, we play tennis together -- all kinds of different stuff, and none of those normal social interactions like chatting and posting on bulletins and sending snail-mail has been transcribed into social networks, email and IM. All of that’s moved online, but what hasn't is the ability to do something with someone. To get a bunch of friends together on a Friday night, and go 'out' and do something."

So does that mean Conduit's project will not be a virtual world at all? On the contrary; "It is an immersive world," Hyatt explains. "The reason I made that distinction is mostly because when people think about game worlds, they think of something that feels like—typically, to play WoW or Club Penguin, you separate yourself from the rest of your online identity; suddenly you are a penguin, or an elf. The fact that you happen to be using a broadband connection is the only reason its similar with your other online experiences."

"We spend a lot of time building up our online identity," Hyatt acknowledges. "There’s something to be said for roleplaying – I ran [roleplaying group] One World By Night, which ended up launching in 15 countries with 8 chapters in Brazil alone -- so I certainly think there’s a place for roleplaying and assuming other identities, but whats really missing from that is what Facebook does for non-realtime interactions; it’s me and my friends, and I can see what they’ve been up to lately. What’s really missing is a Facebook that’s all about not asynchronous interactions, but synchronous interactions. Online games are all about you and a friend doing something right now. We think that a game is the way to build that next kind of social network."

What about revenues? "I think in the long-term vision of people who are gonna compete in this industry – the broad answer is that its always going to be a hybrid approach [of ad revenues and microtransactions]," Hyatt says. "For us, we're starting this company trying to reduce barriers between you and your friends having a good time online. And so to put a subscription fee, or a download, or a huge avatar creation process all seems the opposite of what we want to do. So it will be free, in the browser, seconds away from friends online playing together, but from there we’ll end up charging mostly through virtual goods, and some portions might be ad-based, but vitual goods and microtransations will be the core – it's people paying for the value they see in the game. Daniel James from Three Rings said something about subcriptions: 'If you're charging a subscription fee, you're either overcharging or undercharging every single one of your users.'"

And who is Conduit's project for? "In the long-term picture this is really about everyone that uses the web. But to try and make a product for everybody is to make a terrible product," Hyatt says. "If you look at the people who are really active online in social networks, that overlaps with their game playing, you're looking at late teens and early twenties -- basically, the Facebook crowd is where we'll be starting to focus."

It's a place to start, but Hyatt's aim is eventually to build the community from there. "The same way Facebook started with Harvard -- both geographically and socially distinct -- they focused on a small group, and built out from there. And we'll be focusing somewhat similarly on a small group of people; we feel like it will be fun for them to grab their friends and play online and then expand that way."

To that end, Hyatt is making the building process entirely transparent -- there'll be an ongoing blog at http://blog.conduitlabs.com, with regular updates and even podcasts available. And despite all the mystery shrouding Conduit's project now, it won't be long before we hear more details -- more team members will be announced, and Hyatt promises a product in less than six months.

[The following article by Neils Clark originally ran on Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]

Following yesterday's opening day coverage, the second day of the State Of Play V academic conference in Singapore tackled issues like legal precedents in in-world property ownership and saw “Game Gods” from Second Life, There, and MUD creator Richard Bartle speak on building virtual worlds.

Refreshed from the previous night’s safari, games academics from the East and West again convened this morning for the SoP V in Singapore. The first panel of the day addressed the topic of Understanding Virtual Worlds Inhabitants, looking at the ways in which we can understand the gamers online.

“You’re going to arrive as a three-year-old,” said Thomas Malaby, Assoc. Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. The consensus among the panelists seemed to be that every game world today is unique, and that playing inside remains one of the few ways in which we can reach an informed understanding. Stanford’s Henrik Bennetsen said that, “It’s one of those things that’s hard to understand from the outside.” Even so, he later noted that the rewards are, “totally worth it.”

Also in the panel, Ian Lamont put the spotlight on how the popular press shapes many people’s thinking on games. “Their understanding will be shaped by the coverage in the news media,” he said. Many editors only have a couple hours of day, sometimes in which to research four or five different articles. Some journalists also “go for the low hanging fruit,” continued Lamont, provided by PR companies. As a result, there’s not much to counter the seemingly standard overgeneralization and sensationalism in the popular press.

Space, Place and Culture inside Virtual Worlds primarily flitted around the idea that locations and architecture can have a marked influence on how players act. “Architects structure spaces, and those in turn then structure us,” said Kevin Collins, a Law Prof a penchant for architecture at Indiana U. He and Eric Champion of the U. of Queensland looked at how space then creates culture, at times having an intense influence over our daily lives.

At lunch, Harvard University’s Charles Nesson discussed the use of gaming as an educational tool, most specifically using poker. He hinted on an idea that, while not new, is very compelling: games could be used to revolutionize the educational system. Nesson’s Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society has apparently been “inundated by requests,” from schools looking to join.

After lunch we looked at the Wealth of Virtual Nations. Panelists discussed the current legal precedents, and the stumbling blocks ahead of developers looking to make property ownership inside of virtual worlds more robust. Nick Abrahams of Australia’s Media and Telecommunications Group said that we have to “craft a bargain that is somehow fair.” And then there are cases like Bragg vs. Second Life, where a SL user is looking to reclaim his original property after having been pegged and banned for unfair land buying. Balancing these problems among many jurisdictions is difficult, and as with many new situations, Abrahams said that “you gather precedent wherever you can.” Countries have been, and will continue to learn law from one another.

In one of the real highlights to the conference, Judge Unggi Yoon again amazed the conference. Korea’s legal system is already in the process of passing laws to regulate the trade, sale and taxation of virtual goods. Their current plans are to implement a system wherein virtual properties are going to be considered “public,” which is to say real properties with regard to tax laws on transactions. Korea, however, won’t be regulating small trades between two people, which they are considering “private.” Yoon said that the system would be in place by the end of the year. This lead to a great deal of speculation: to what degree will the East lead regulation inside of online spaces?

The final session dealt with Building Virtual Worlds. The panel featured CEOs and Executives from Second Life, There.com, the Chinese counterpart to There and SL: HiPiHi, and gogofrog, a take on 3-D internet using the Flash engine. And Richard Bartle was there, too. Where these “Game Gods” primarily discussed the specifics of making virtual worlds work, on a number of levels, Bartle brought us back to the dawn of games programming. He walked us through the process of using punch-cards and databases and compilers to create the coding behind virtual worlds. When the process was finished, he then only needed “a little bit of imagination at the top.”

Today, he said, most people just sew together coding and make a database. Bartle looks forward to a point in time, a few years from now, when all that will be needed is that little bit of imagination at the top. “We don’t need to understand a combustion engine to drive a car,” he said, though most of us cannot imagine living without today’s vehicles. And yet his clear excitement was tempered with an apprehension. “I’m afraid that people are going to take away my toys,” he said. It does follow that when the real world endorses the journalists who propagate generalist and sensationalist images of gaming, some fears are warranted.

The problems, hurdles, and possibilities given game companies won’t be solved by ignoring research, beating the same themes or gameplay to death, or leaving the respective East or West well enough alone. The companies who make and take ground will show an earnest understanding and compassion for both the worlds that they create, and global audience which plays them.

Charles River Ventures is a firm with keen eyes on the virtual worlds, social gaming and social networking spaces -- in particular, with an eye on entrepreneurs seeking to bridge gaps and coordinate elements from all of these kinds of ventures into a single integrated product. One such company in which CRV has invested is Raph Koster's Areae, and successful real-time networking tool Twitter is another. Worlds in Motion recently spoke with Nabeel Hyatt on his Conduit Labs project, the latest startup to receive CRV's vote of confidence. We chatted with CRV's Susan Wu, who focuses specifically on working with these products (she also was special advisor to the first Virtual Goods Summit), and got further comment from her on bridging the gaps in the space that Hyatt mentioned earlier.

"The distinction between what Facebook and an MMO looks like is going to disappear," Wu says. "All social interaction online will be driven by game mechanics. My goal in doing these conferences and blogging about this subject and trying to find companies to invest in is, how do I bring these two segregated universes together? There are all these Web 2.0 conferences, and Web entrepreneurs basically talking amongst themselves in this insular environment, and I see the same thing in the gaming industry, which has always been a cottage industry and very segregated. I see so many different parallels going on in these two communities, and my goal is to bring them more closely together."

Wu elaborated on where these two key industries are failing to connect. "There're a lot of virtual gifting apps and lightweight casual games developing on Facebook. And I spoke with a lot of these Facebook developers and they're all trying to reinvent the virtual economy," she explains. "And there’s a limitless body of empirical data out there – it doesn’t make sense for Web 2.0 folks to invent it from scratch. It results in an inferior customer experience. There’s been virtual economies and mass market since Ultima Online; that’s 12 years of learning that these guys just aren’t picking up on. That sort of frustrates me."

So she zeroes in on those ventures she feels "get it." "I try to bridge this gap -- Raph gets it, and Conduit does too—I've seen 100 or so startups in the space in the last year or so, and as Nabeel said, there’s such a dichotomy in the two communities, and there are very few teams that have been able to merge both disciplines in immersive gaming environments."

How to start bringing these teams from different sides of the field together? "When I put together the Virtual Goods Summit, it would have been easy to populate all of the speakers and attendees from the gaming industry," she recalls. "There's a lot of established success in virtual goods there. But I made sure there was a panel around mainstream virtual gifting -- companies like SixApart and Dogster and all of the folks who are experimenting with virtual goods, and I wanted to put them in an environment with folks from places like Neopets and Nexon so they could have a real dialog about what's going on on both sides of the fence."

She continues: "One of the hallmarks of a successful Web company is -- if you look at the track record of the most successful companies that have stayed independent and sustainable, like eBay, Google or Amazon -- they have built platforms [which can] foster entrepreneurs. There are ecosystems that spawn innovation from the community members themselves, and Facebook is falling in with that too, with the new platform launch. Few gaming people understand this intuitively -- though, Xbox Live Arcade really fosters an entrepreneurial ecosystem, too. That's something Areae is trying to focus on – how to build an actual ecosystem and a real web platform for people to work in."

Wu elaborates further on the Conduit and Twitter investments on her blog, reality.org.

The Guardian has made an interesting future prediction -- that in the future, the number of avatars living in virtual worlds will eventually outnumber humans living in the real one. The projection, in an article by Victor Keegan, is based in Gartner research that says that over 80% of internet users will have avatars in about four years' time -- and most people have more than one virtual self.

Keegan says that despite the rough days Second Life's been having of late, the race is on to see which virtual world space (or spaces) will emerge the biggest; the article points to Entropia's new deal with the Beijing municipality to allow it to handle 7 million users simultaneously, as an example. As for Keegan, he's betting on Google Earth, which as he says, "recently added photographs of streets to its zoom-in model of the planet. It already has 250 million users who add content and interact with each other. It doesn't take a big leap of the imagination to envisage your avatar talking to friends and strangers in your own street in a few years' time."

[Via The Guardian]

The ever-expanding world of Nexon's MapleStory, which Worlds in Motion recently explored, has added two new towns: the mountain village of Mu Lung and the seaside Herb Town. The New Leaf City area, itself announced not too long ago, now has its own Free Market for players to buy and sell goods.

The Mu Lung area will also have a salon where players can customize their avatars' coifs with new haircuts, and brand-new monsters swarm the Herb Town area, ready to be slain. Finally, a new White Scroll item offers single-slot protection for a weapon or item.

[Each day, Worlds in Motion will be taking a closer look at individual virtual worlds. We'll start with a nuts-and-bolts overview, then move on to an in-depth tour, to be followed up with a conclusion-- all with the aim of bringing you all the essential info and details on each world in the rapidly-developing virtual landscape.]

Let's continue our trip into Millsberry,, General Mills' teen and 'tween-targeted virtual world.

A giant in multiplayer gaming in the East, Nexon’s accessible-to-all MMOs have garnered considerable success here in the US. Worlds in Motion recently visited the singular, stylish sidescrolling MapleStory world, and we have the upcoming American launch of the multiplayer racing game KartRider to look forward too, too. Already one of the top-selling online games in the world on the heels of its success in the Asian market with millions of users, rumor has it that we could see an open beta in America as soon as early October.

We asked Nexon America’s Min Kim about KartRider’s appeal. “I think it’s really a global type of product,” he explains. “It’s a racing game; a lot of people say the art style is ‘very Asian,’ but it’s really very universal. It also spans across various age groups. The thing about it is, a lot of people have grown up playing these console-style games. It’s definitely not hardcore; it’s more of a casual experience where people can socialize and race, and I don’t think they’ve been given that opportunity before.”

That traditional console-style gameplay combined with multiplayer elements is one of the things we noticed about MapleStory, whose 2D world is lush with the fervor of its community. We asked Kim what role that community element might play in KartRider. “The community factor drives all of our products,” Kim says. “That same element that drives MapleStory drives Kartrider. There’s no real single-player experience; you could play by yourself in MapleStory, but a lot of is creating social experiences.”

Building a Community
He continues, “I’m finding that these days, for a lot of the teenagers and people playing, it’s now a different experience when you are in the game, and visually in the same place with others. On top of that, what adds community to it is the competition and the customization -- the ability to be unique and create your virtual identity. So you can represent who you are and communicate that.”

MapleStory takes socialization seriously – one of the things we found on our trip inside was that there is even a system by which characters in the MapleStory world can get married. “We thought our players really needed that,” says Kim. “One player has met her real-life husband on MapleStory; there are a lot of people finding people they have things in common with, they’re getting closer relationships. Of course, not everyone that gets a MapleStory marriage is in love, but it’s a fun type of way to be close within the game.”

A Unique Look
When we think of virtual worlds these days, everybody thinks 3D – but MapleStory distinguishes itself through brightly-colored and uniquely designed 2D graphics for that console-style feel Kim refers to. “One reason MapleStory was successful is, when it first came out, it was at a time when lots of South Korean games were going 3D,” he recalls. “It’s not about pushing the graphics to the edge. They found that out a few years ago; we didn’t want it to look like everything else. When MapleStory came out, we wanted to make it different and turned it into a 2D game, and that was refreshing when everything else was 3D.

But what about KartRider? Kim explained how an accessible look helps make some of Nexon’s biggest games more appealing to a broader market. “KartRider is more like cel-rendered 3D racing, but the art style is very crisp and clean and inviting for both genders, and a lot of girls play it in Korea, too,” he says. MapleStory and KartRider both lend to that; they’re more skewed female than online games in the past. The demographics are something like 30-70, 20-80 female-male. There’re also a lot of girls playing MapleStory; I’m amazed to see that. Because the gaming market in the states is different than the Korean market, and there’s a new generation of gamers, things are balancing; gaming is second nature to the new generation.”

Bringing in the Girls
How to continue this trend toward balancing the audience and attracting more female players? “One of the things is, we try to make as many points of socialization as possible and we’re constantly figuring out how to make it easier to communicate with each other,” Kim explains. “I think when we make games it depends on the genre, but with games like MapleStory and KartRider, we’re trying to net as many people as possible, so we concentrate on fun and community and that social factor -- and we definitely want to get both sexes involved. Part of that is, also, if you have girls in the game, the boys are gonna wanna play too.”

Are there specifics involved in getting girls in the game? “I don’t think we ever try to make a game boy or girl-centric, but I think there are fun features that lend themselves to both genders,” Kim says. “Everyone can appreciate the type of games we make. It’s the genre as well; whether or not we think it is female-centric to begin with, certain games are more male centric – for example, if we open a soccer game, we know it will be more guys than girls, but for MapleStory and KartRider, I think we knew there would be a lot of females playing. In Korea we heavily marketed to the female audience.”

Elaborating on the universal appeal, Kim pegs one of the biggest trends in online multiplayer gaming and online social worlds. “Also, it is a casual game – but these are gamers that don’t know they’re gamers,” he says, “so there are girls in there who wouldn’t classify themselves as gamers but are on there for hours. When MapleStory came out, we ran a poll asking how many MMOs the users had played in the past. I can’t remember the specifics, but it was like only one third had played one, a third had played two or more, but a third had never played an MMO before, or even knew what an MMO was. So it was that a lot of people were bringing their friends in.”

Getting Local
With so many localized versions of MapleStory, a lot of specifics need to be customized. How will KartRider’s appeal be tailored to the US market? “Every game is different, but what we are learning in MapleStory is that people here really like customization, so we will try to create content that works for the US market,” Kim explains. “The wedding system in MapleStory was designed in our LA office, because we wanted to make a wedding system that would make sense in the Western audience. They had an Asian version that we tweaked. So as we release KartRider in the states, it is more of a universal product – it’s just racing with cartoons. But as we roll things out and add more cars, we might try to look at the market and see what fits better.”

One way that MapleStory gets audience-specific is with holidays and events. “If you look in MapleStory during Halloween, Thanksgiving or Christmas, there are events they wouldn’t be running in Korea and vice versa, that are culturally centered. We will try to run events in the game that speak to the local audience.”

Making it Big in the Market
Nexon’s also had big success with the multiplayer dance-off Audition; it’s one of the most successful online games in the world, holding the number two slot in China, and it’s playable in the States right now. We asked Kim to explain Nexon’s magic touch, and how working in the Eastern market first might provide beneficial experiences for the North American market. One thing Kim says has been helpful is getting experiences with microtransactions – a new revenue model for many current online games in the West, but something Nexon’s games have been working with since the late nineties. “It’s not something you can just create a formula for,” he says. “We had the benefit of running a lot of products early on, and taking those learnings and translating them into better gaming experiences.”

“We’ve definitely had the benefit of time, as well as a great player base, that we’ve learned a lot from,” he adds. “Not just from game to game, but through the life of the game by listening to what the customer is looking for, so a lot has changed from the days that we opened them. The other difference, I think, between us and others is that I think a lot of people want to do this whole microtransactions-and-free-to-play thing, and these business models – we’ve had the benefit of time to figure out how to do this, but many people develop games they think will be fun, but they don’t keep the business model in mind, or they don’t understand the business model. That’s gotten a few companies in trouble in Korea. And a lot of companies do that, and they will continue to do that – have a game concept that at the end of the day, they’re like, ‘how do I make money off this?’”

Securing distribution deals for pre-paid cards also works very well in terms of monetizing the game content and increasing accessibility. “We’ll be getting very wide distribution for the prepaid cards,” Kim says. “When we first launched the product, everyone needed a credit card to fully enjoy the content. What that did is it basically curbed potential players who wanted customizability, because more than half were 13 to early 20s, so without that payment vehicle they couldn’t fully participate.”

Fun at the Core
But for Kim, the business model is step two. “In terms of our products doing well, it’s that our games are very fun, and I think that’s the core to all games that are going to be successful in terms of the business model we’re in,” he says. “It’s one of the most competitive markets out there, because we’re selling free. So unless your game is good, nobody’s going to play it. There are a lot of free games, so your game really has to be very good. And once the game concept is good, then you build the business model around it. So those business models never took off because the games weren’t fun. We all understand we're working with a hit-driven market and we're fortunate. I think in Korea, there are only four products that have broken the 200,000 concurrent user level. Three of those games are ours.”

Nexon also stays successful by balancing the expertise of experience with the input of the users – teams check the user forums regularly to take a pulse on player experience. How do they keep them engaged? “A lot of thought is put into how we can make this better for the players,” Kim says. “A lot of the items in-game are very creative, so even in our commercialization we have an in game store where a player can sell items to other players in the game. Most games have trade between users, but we found players wanted to open a store -- which is fun for them -- and price items in the store, and facilitate the process. Little things like that -- I think we inspect our game and say, ‘how do we make this easier to do?’”

Looking Ahead
Nexon’s games also keep things fresh with new content introduced constantly, and KartRider will follow the same pattern. “I think within the open beta there will be different releases,” he says. “We’ll start, for example, with a fixed number of maps and then as time progresses, we’ll add new maps. All our games patch monthly, and KartRider will patch even more frequently than that, maybe every two weeks or potentially even weekly. So there will be new content for players; that’s a critical thing for a business model. We say that our business is more like a soap opera, versus a movie release. Where a console product makes all its money in the first few weeks and a huge launch, our games last 3-7 years -- so who will play that long unless you’re updating content?”

There are more announcements just on the horizon for Nexon – keep your eyes peeled for KartRider, and stay tuned to the upcoming DigitalLife event in New York on September 27th for some more news. Until then, the residents of Nexon’s long-lived game suite are looking forward to the events of the holiday season, new every year -- and keeping them coming back.

A neat new BrandWeek article talks about major brands' efforts to move into the online social networking and virtual worlds space, and why some have succeeded -- along with why others have failed. It mentions appeal for niche audiences and perks for invested members -- using BarbieGirls as an example, with content that becomes accessible with the purchase of the BarbieGirls' MP3 player. From the article:

With brands ranging from cars to tequila to retail setting up community hubs, The Coke Show joins a growing list of cautionary tales, including Wal-Mart's ill-fated social network The Hub and Anheuser-Busch's Bud.tv, showing it is far from easy to tap the same kind of sharing vibe that's fueled the rise of MySpace, YouTube and Facebook.

Those that have succeeded either tap into the existing passionate audience of a niche brand or offer some functionality that cannot be found already on popular social media sites.

"There's been a me-tooism on the social-networking front of 'I need to create a MySpace of my brand,'" said Pete Blackshaw, CMO at Nielsen BuzzMetrics. "Every brand needs to do some element of it, but do they need to go all out? It's not clear."

[Each day, Worlds in Motion will be taking a closer look at individual virtual worlds. We'll start with a nuts-and-bolts overview, then move on to an in-depth tour, to be followed up with a conclusion-- all with the aim of bringing you all the essential info and details on each world in the rapidly-developing virtual landscape.]

This week, we spent time in Millsberry, eating a balanced diet and doing our civic duty in General Mills' the teen and 'tween-targeted virtual world. Here's our conclusion!