Habbo has announced the kickoff of its very own film festival, using the Habbowood MovieMaker tool. It's a comprehensive editing device that allows users to select from a wide range of virtual sets, props, special effects and mood music; cast Habbo "actors" and script dialogue to build scenes. Up to ten different scenes can then be combined using the MovieMaker tool to create an animated film up to five minutes long."

With the tool, Habbo is launching the "Habbowood Digital Movie Awards 2007". Aspiring filmmakers can take the director's chair and create, star in and share their own animated movies in hopes of winning a Habbowood Award. For the next ten days, the Habbo community, which numbers more than 15 million registered users in the United States, will select the ten top films through a combination of page views and scaled ratings. Each day, the Habbo staff will choose a winner from this top 10 to comprise the final nominees which the Habbo community will vote on to select the Habbowood Award winner.

The winner will be announced and special awards, such as Best Director, Best Writer, Best Actor and Best Actress, will be presented live in Habbo's Theaterdome during the virtual Habbowood Digital Movie Awards gala, on September 21.

Habbo.com opened its doors to Habbowood three years ago. Last year, the hugely popular US movie contest garnered more than 140,000 animated short films. On a global level, Habbowood generated more than 700,000 movies last year. For the first time, the winning film will be entered into a global contest against the winners from 18 other Habbo communities around the world to compete for a grand prize trip for two to Hollywood.

An expert panel from the fields of animation and computer generated visual effects (VFX) will judge the competition, including Matt Johnson, VFX supervisor at critically acclaimed visual effects and digital imaging house, Cinesite; Antti Jokinen, celebrated director of music videos for Will Smith, Missy Elliott, Celine Dion and Shaggy; Tim Searle, award-winning 2DTV animator and Jim Thacker, editor of 3D animation bible, 3D World

"The Habbowood Digital Movie Awards will prove that teens can create imaginative, successful movies, just like their Hollywood counterparts," said Teemu Huuhtanen, EVP, Habbo Business and president, North America. "We are challenging teenagers to write the script, choose the location and direct the actors in their own movies to create a winning film that will demonstrate a combination of originality, timing, and artistic flair."

Our sister site Gamasutra has an interview with CEO Hubert Thieblot and general manager Wilson Kriegel of MMO-focused gaming portal Curse. Since its founding in 2005, it's developed from an add-on database into its current fourth iteration - a fully fledged community touch-point, complete with social networking aspects, game-specific Wikis, and user submitted videos.

The venture attracted investor interest toward the end of last year, with $800,000 raised in an angel funding round in December. More recently, at the end of July, Curse announced that it has received $5 million in Series A funding from French venture capital firm Private Equity and investors. From the interview:

GS: What do you think are the most important elements in making the business a long term, global prospect?

HT: We have a few focuses. First is working much closer with game developers and publishers. We want to position ourselves into a service company, where we provide a service for them and the community. We build websites for them, we apply our knowledge about building a successful website with multiple services, which they do need for the game nowadays.

We are also building a huge sales force, so, again, making money is a huge part of Curse, and it’s what we do everyday. We’re also building a premium site, to combat against Gamespot, FilePlanet, IGN, and so on. It’s going to be a monthly subscription, and I think we have some pretty neat ideas about how to sue the social network and the add-ons and downloads, and all of this will tie together. We’re adding an application into this.

WK: I think the root and the essence of what Curse is, more than being a social network site, is the development of web technologies and innovations. I like to consider us a web technology site, in that regard – a lot more like Photobucket and Digg and YouTube, where technology is the essence of user generated content or what’s most pertinent or relevant to that particular individual or particular IP. We intend to stay in the MMO space, and there are many contents to cover in that space. It’s very mature in Asia, which will enter the US market, and we intend to facilitate that.

The premium subscription, ecommerce – it’s all in line with what our community and user base is accustomed to, and is willing to transact on. I think, at the heart of that, is innovation of product and services, and value added services, both to the user base, and potential partners, like publishers. I think Apple is a good example of a company that is successful because of innovation around products. I hope that we – not to compare ourselves to Apple – but I hope we can stay within that philosophy of innovating for the consumer for a great product and great value adds.

I think that’s the key to why we’ve been successful, and why we’ll continue to be a viable, profitable, innovative company.

Millions of Us has hired Second Life economist Peter Phillips -- creator of the LindeX virtual currency and former "central banker" for that world -- as technical director. Inc., an agency specializing in virtual worlds, has hired Peter Phillips as Technical Director.

As it develops trading systems for virtual goods on multiple platforms, Millions of Us says it hopes to benefit from Phillips' experience. He will also lead the technical team at Millions of Us, helping the company's clients as they aim to bring virtual assets like goods, celebrity avatars and themed content into various virtual worlds

Prior to Linden Lab, Phillips was Live Team Lead on Ultima Online at Electronic Arts where he coordinated the development, quality assurance, operations and customer support efforts to grow the player base and keep the service running smoothly.

"We'd be lucky enough to have Peter for his technical skills, but he's also proven himself as a virtual economist," said Reuben Steiger, CEO, Millions of Us. "Our clients will benefit not only from his ability to scale our infrastructure, but also from his work on the industry's most ambitious virtual trade and programming projects."

Media Machines, a San Francisco-based company that develops tools and content for online 3D virtual worlds, has received $9.4 million in its first round of funding, according to PaidContent, citing SEC filings from PEHub. The round was led by Mohr, Davidow Ventures.

The company was founded in 2003 by Tony Parisi, co-inventor of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) standard back in 1994. Former Electronic Arts VP Keith McCurdy is CEO.

The company's free 3D virtual world Web browser plug-in, the Flux Player, lets users manipulate virtual scenes, worlds, avatars, gadgets and games in a standard browser, in addition to other 3D Web authoring products and services.

Cornell University is aiming to give grad students the opportunity to explore the financial "wild west" within a completely virtual community. A new course, Professor Robert Bloomfield's Business and Oversight in Second Life, will use the virtual world to help students study business in the absence of regulation and to examine the issues surrounding all kinds of business transactions -- all within Second Life.

Second Life makes a good venue for the study of unregulated business; Cornell cites stats of $1.5 million in exchanges daily among its subscribers, along with Second Life's three stock exchanges, six banks and a real estate market -- all of which are ungoverned by fixed laws.

Cornell says the course will require students to write an analysis of any oversights or issues that they observe in this virtual world, and a series of in-world discussions will take place with guest speakers who are currently conducting business in Second Life. In addition, there will also be a number of speakers who are experts in intellectual property, e-business, regulation, and the business of the virtual world.

The first annual Advanced Learning Technologies Summit (ALT Summit) aims to explore how serious games, virtual worlds, social networks and technologies such as robotics and haptics can be leveraged to inspire, educate and train the “next-gen” workforce. It has announced its featured speakers for the inaugural conference:

From the press release, the presenters include:

Ben Sawyer, co-founder of DigitalMill and founder of the Serious Games Initiative, Games for Health, and Games for Change;

Doug Harward, chief executive officer of The Exceleration Group, founder of trainingindustry.com and trainingoutsourcing.com and a leader internationally recognized for his background in training and business process outsourcing;

Karl Kapp, professor of instructional technology at Bloomsburg University and scholar, writer and expert on the convergence of learning, technology and business operations; and

Anne Murphy, executive director of the Digital Promise Project, a coalition that has developed ground-breaking legislation for digital support of education.

The ALT Summit will offer tracks spanning learning in healthcare, education, government and business, and each track will deliver sessions on theory and research, practical applications, examples, and ideas for getting started and gaining support. Current sponsors include WakeMed, IBM, the American Research Institute, Wake Technical Community College, Virtual Heroes and Epic Games.

The ALT Summit will take place at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Cary, N.C., on December 11-12, 2007.

Mobile learning content management solutions provider Giunti Labs has announced a collaboration with Coventry University's newly formed Serious Games Institute (SGI) and Cisco to provide demonstration software showing what can be achieved in combining mobile and virtual worlds e-learning.

The fruits of the collaboration between the SGI, Giunti Labs and mobile learning specialists Ambient Performance will be on display at the Serious Virtual Worlds conference being held at the Coventry University Technology Park TechnoCentre on September 13th and 14th.

The conference will also feature the launch of Coventry University's Second Life island and highly visual and interactive demonstrations including presentations from the Institute's industry and academic partners. Among those making presentations at the conference are Cisco, Forterra, Linden Labs, Giunti Labs, Daden ltd, Ambient Performance, PA Consulting, IBM, and Trusim.

"The extraordinary success of virtual worlds such as 'Second Life' as virtual social spaces for play is leading us to examine the potential for the serious uses of these worlds," said the SGI's director, David Wortley. "The theme for this first Serious Virtual Worlds conference is 'The Reality of the Virtual World' and examines how virtual worlds are now being used for serious professional purposes.

"SGI is focusing on virtual worlds and immersive environments because these are key elements for serious games," Wortley explained. "The SGI is going to be the place in Europe to find expertise in virtual environments as applied to learning - especially as they are used to link virtual and real environments."

Angus Turpin, manager for Giunti Labs in the UK and Ireland, commented: "Giunti Labs are supplying the SGI with back-end development, consultancy and software based on our flagship e-learning and mobile learning content management platform learn eXact, Europe's leading
solution for learning content production and authoring now adding mobile and virtual learning worlds authoring capability."

This will enable the SGI to demonstrate drag-and-drop positioning of digital learning content; 3D hotspot positioning, and triggering and tracking of learning content by the avatar into those zones. It will also allow SGI to have the tools to create, package, manage and track SCORM-compliant contents which will be contextualized and delivered to Windows Mobile 5 PDAs within the SGI Cisco Wi-Fi network. The X, Y and Z co-ordinates of the mobile devices may also be used by other virtual world applications.

"Giunti Labs are proposing to supply the tools, training and support to enable the creation and repurposing of content using its authoring suite and to test extended third party deployment via this test suite, as well as offering the requisite training and support," said Turpin.

Areae president Raph Koster, designer of Ultima Online and previous CCO of SOE, gave his talk at GDC Austin in front of a full-capacity crowd, all of whom were eager to catch a shred of what he’s been talking about for the last year or so – how the web is destroying games in terms of revenue and access.

“As you might know,” he began, “I’ve got this new startup thing going. I want to talk about some of what we’re doing… but I can’t."

"For the last couple of years now I’ve been paying a lot of attention to how the web works, and how the web is eating the game industry’s lunch. Despite WoW we’re rapidly approaching a point where out of the top 10 MMOs, 7 or 8 of them are on the web, don’t sell on a CD and have a million users.”

Areae's Plan - 'Play Anywhere'

Koster wants his company, Areae, to follow this model, and have a concept of ‘play anywhere.’ This means being on the web, being on all platforms, and dissecting why those models are successful. He then got into a technical design discussion of how you go about that. Koster subscribes to the idea that games can be broken down into elements of game grammar, like a (post) structuralist reading of a film. He showed a slide with a bunch of networking sites, and pseudo-games by the traditional definition, such as ARGs, Line Rider, Hotornot, Club Penguin, and fantasy football.

“All of these,” he says “are more popular than EverQuest. Why? After pondering what these things have in common, I think we as an industry have really gotten it wrong about what games are.”

Koster went on to say that games are not the interface, and they are not the display. So you should cut those things out of your design, if you want to design for everywhere. It’s really hard, he admits, but all those other things do it.

“If you’re like me, you’re really tired of hearing about Web 2.0,” says Koster – but he maintains that the elements of the concept behind the buzzword are sound. “The thing is we don’t trust the users to modify our [game] assets,” he says. Things like MySpace allow people to modify the source code, and determine the experience they’ll have.

New Paradigms For The Game Industry

Koster mentioned a recent statement by the co-chair of Columbia records, essentially saying “our industry is dead.” People are filling iPods with free content, and nobody wants to pay, and suggesting that the game industry is getting to be the same way.

The Areae co-founder suggested that the industry monetizes people who even just want to try a game, and of course people want to try before they buy, which is spoken to by the success of XBLA and PSN downloadable demos. He also noted: "In the game industry we try to have the blockbuster openings – those are easy to ruin. The web is about word of mouth."

“The value in web products is not in the content,” he asserts, “but in the data of how people use the content. Amazon’s real value is in what books you’ve already bought, because that’s how they sell you more books. The whole web is based on metadata.”

Koster says that all these companies are trying to figure out how to get away from opening big, from high production values, and from monetizing trials.

Game Grammar

On the lower technical end of his grammar discussion, Koster says “There are very few game systems – we’re usually plugging together things we’ve done before.” This means things like how fast users can press the button, traversing spaces and weighted graphs, determining trajectory, etc. Odds calculation is the hardest one, he says, because the human brain is really bad at it.

He says games are inherently social. All games, even single player ones, are two player. The other player is an algorithm, or the computer. When you play against Space Invaders, they’re playing against you.

There are games where the other player is playing the same game, he says as in Space Invaders (goal is shoot the enemy), or where they’re doing something different, like in Pac-Man or Donkey Kong. There are parallel games, which are like in a footrace, where you’re playing the same game (against physics in this case) where you’re rated at the end for how well you did. Competitive games are playing the same game against each other.

Koster suggested that parallel games are infinitely scaleable – but competitive games are not. Team based games always support limited capacity – you only need so many healers in your group… there’s always a point where adding more roles just breaks down.

Bridging the Gap

He continued that World of Warcraft has massively parallel teams, working against an asymmetric thing, which is a monster, and lots of people can do it at the same time. This is a step.

Koster continued by suggesting that the hot platform is the net. The net says the platform can be anything - there aren’t real hardware requirements or interface problems. The hot topic right now is the non-gamer. The hot feature is other people (as in YouTube), not the systems we write. The hot technology is connectivity and simultaneity. He added: "The hot game is a mini-game. Really small games."

The big thing in the traditional game industry now is haptics – but those aren’t designed for everywhere. “Look at the challenges people have putting a game on the DS and…anything else,” he says.

“When you look at the kinds of problems we ask people to solve, and the things we assume them to do, it’s like we’ve given them a PHD in mathematics. No wonder you sit mom down and she asks how do I move?”

So how do I run everywhere?

Interfaces are a huge barrier - they just get much more complicated, Koster suggested. There’s information overload, and to prove it, he showed a screen from WoW, with scads of boxes and statistics on it.

“If I look at that WoW screenshot,” says Koster, “I see a user interface begging to be simplified.” He calls for something along the lines of just showing the most pertinent information – and already there are hacks to do this. “Every time you make an assumption about inputs or output, you’re shrinking your user base. This is really the secret behind the DS and the Wii – it’s mapped to stuff we already know, which reduces the learning curve.”

Here’s what works in this new model, according to Koster:

- the system is the game, not the interface, not the presentation.
- any button will do.
- long phases take your time – response time is rough.
- be done fast, once you’ve made a decision.
- do it side by side. Has to be massively parallel.
- extended accumulated state – save your profile.
- no roles – classless – teams are deterministic.
- representation agnostic – draw it however.
- open data – change it however.

Things that don’t work:

- twitch games.
- Inputs that are locked to commands – dance mats, styluses.
- Models that rely on specific representations (ie 3D).
- Models reliant on prior art – if you haven’t played every RTS you’re screwed.
- Narrative lock – if you tamper with our story, it won’t be good!

Parallel models:

- Badges (achievements)
- Ratings (skill or social)
- Rankings (high scores)
- Reviews (and tagging)
- Gifting
- Networks
- Leagues (segmentation)

The grammatical elements of those successful ventures he mentioned hit a lot of those grammar points. “The games we’re making today are really bad at hitting those points,” he says, and as such limit their audiences. “There’s no reason why WoW couldn’t be represented by anything other than an RSS feed, and if you could, it’d probably be doubled in users.”

[The preceding article by Brandon Sheffield originally appeared on Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]

Electronic Arts has announced the beta launch of The Sims On Stage, a free interactive online webiste-based toolset that lets users record, watch and share karaoke songs, stories, comedy routines and other creative projects.

The Sims on Stage is based on the SingShot Media karaoke community, which EA acquired earlier this year. EA says "thousands of well-known rock, pop and country songs" will be available at launch; For the members not vocally inclined, The Sims on Stage also offers "Open-Mic Recordings," for spoken-word and comedy performances.

In addition to karaoke, The Sims On Stage will also feature a "Movie Mashup" that will allow members to create original movies featuring The Sims content, some of which will include assets made available only to members of The Sims On Stage community. Recordings can be kept private or publicly shared, and can also be uploaded to blogs and social networking sites.

The announcement continues EA's commitment to The Sims as one of its chief and most important brands - in the recent re-organization of the company, it has been elevated to one of the four main company 'labels' alongside EA Sports, Casual, and EA Games, the only single franchise to be given that honor.

“The Sims has long had one of the largest, friendliest and most creative communities in the world. With the release of The Sims On Stage we welcome a new kind of customer to our way of having fun,” said Rod Humble, studio head of The Sims label. He continued: “The world of interactive entertainment is now broader than ever thanks to new web-based technologies, and we are thrilled to give you a new way of having fun with The Sims On Stage.”

The Sims On Stage is now available in a beta version at its official website.

[The preceding announcement ran previously on Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]

Two new companies have announced licenses of MMO content development tool BigWorld Technology Suite; London-based firm Kwari for its recently announced "pay-to-kill" online first-person shooter (a very intriguing, 'anti-social gaming' concept), and developer Bitcasters for an MMO based around its Storm Hawks animated series.

The Australia-based BigWorld licenses its middleware, comprised of the BigWorld Server, Content Creation Tools, 3D Client Engine, and Live Management Tools and Instrumentation, to game studios developing MMOs and virtual worlds.

"Kwari is creating a new arena of online gaming that is set to change the way we play games," said John De Margheriti, BigWorld CEO. "We are pleased to provide a technology platform that will allow their innovative game ideas to come to life, and we 're confident of the huge appeal that their online products are sure to bring to the market."

Bitcasters adds that, along with broadcast partners YTV and Cartoon Network who are broadcasting the show internationally, it will tie the Storm Hawks Spinmaster toy line and other Storm Hawks products into the online experience it's developing on the BigWorld platform.

“We’re very excited to be working with Bitcasters on bringing the Storm Hawks series online.” said BigWorld VP of business development Gavin Longhurst. “Their talented development team has made the most of BigWorld’s full solution to bring the great characters, great stories and the world of Atmos alive in a unique online experience.”

[This article also ran on Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]

You can now vote on which panels you'd like to see at the 2008 SXSW Interactive Festival to be held March 7-16 in Austin, TX, and several panels are up for consideration that are relevant to the online gaming and virtual worlds space.

Virtual Goods guru and Charles River Ventures partner Susan Wu has proposed three solid ideas: "Virtual Goods: The Next Big Business Model," exploring the ways virtual goods create opportunities for companies looking to explore engaging online experiences; "What's Wrong With Today's Social Networks," which aims to address ways to improve the standard Facebook or MySpace model; and "Human and Property Rights in Virtual Worlds," which addresses the forms these rights may take in a world where online goods are here to stay.

Michael Smith of Mind Candy(Perplex City) offers "Gaming and Tweens: The Kids are Alright," which discusses designing online experiences for kids with safety in mind, while Doppelganger's Andrew Littlefield suggests "Real Life Only Better: Cool Virtual World Communities," to discuss the appeal of creative self-expression in virtual worlds.

These are just a few of the proposed ideas -- in all, there have been 724 panels suggested! But it's a safe bet that virtual worlds, social gaming and online communities will be represented in a worthy way at the Festival, so tell 'em what you want!

CRV's Susan Wu has started an interesting discussion at her blog, based on a chat she recently had with Stanford Language and Information Program Director Byron Reeves. She says he's working with Seriosity (what a serious name!) to develop a platform to allow companies to create virtual economies by assigning currency values to different types of interaction and communication.

As Wu points out, the work Reeves is doing raises some interesting questions on how virtual currencies drive behavior and group dynamics. The questions she asks are sharp and pretty spot on:

- What does it do to a [company’s] culture if all interaction can be boiled down to some quantitative representation?

- Isn’t a company’s culture really just some expression of a collective utility function?

- And, has anyone done any studies measuring what type of correlation exists between the rate of change of a [group/country’s] economic growth and the rate of change of its language? I guess I’m curious if various Chinese dialects are changing more quickly than languages in more static socioeconomic conditions. I feel this must be true to some extent, but I wonder to what degree.

Gordon Walton, the co-studio director at BioWare Austin, gave a packed beyond capacity speech at GDC Austin. The interest is unsurprising given the topic of the talk, Walton's job working on a new MMO, and the stature of BioWare as a company. And Walton's jocular but insightful speech did not betray the expectations set by the eager crowd.

As everyone now recognizes, World of Warcraft is a towering titan above the MMO industry; its success seems unassailable, but at the same time its success is forcing a lot of developers and publishers to jump onto the MMO bandwagon. Clear lessons can be taken from the game's development, and with the help of quotes from Blizzard's own staff, Walton delineated what he felt were the 12 most crucial... though he ruefully noted there could easily be 60 lessons to learn.

Entertainment media publisher 10tacle Studios Asia and MTV Asia have signed a cooperation agreement to create, brand and market an Asian online entertainment channel; users will be able to access MTV content via a "one-stop digital destination," which the companies say will provide online gaming, 3D virtual worlds, social networks and other dynamic digital content.

In an ongoing rollout, this online entertainment channel will see initial release in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines, with additional countries following over the next six months. In their press release, the companies say they'll use microtransactions, sponsorship, e-commerce and advertising as revenue streams typical to the Asian online games market.

“The 10tacle Studios and MTV partnership is a milestone for MTV Networks in strengthening our online gaming, entertainment and lifestyle offering to our audience in Asia. It is anticipated with tremendous synergies between MTV’s branded content and 10tacle Studios’ technology, as well as, the ability to create completely new multi-platform interactive experiences engaging MTV’s audience across the region”, said Robert Kim, senior director of digital media at MTV Networks Asia.

“10T Asia has redefined itself from a traditional games and production business by spearheading 10tacle Studios’ international online entertainment and lifestyle strategy. This close collaboration with MTV opens up incredibly exciting opportunities in the interactive digital media space through the convergence of on-air and online media platforms”, says Aroon Tan, CEO of 10tacle Studios Asia.

Nexon has introduced a brand-new ranking feature for MapleStory Europe. An online rankings database will now let users directly compare their progress against that of their rivals and friends, adding a competitive element to the game.

MapleStory has always ranked players according to their current level and experience total, but players will be able to see where they stand in reference to others when they search the online database of active players in the MapleStory database, by logging onto the Maple Story Europe homepage.

The rankings, which are updated on an hourly basis, are divided into Overall, World and Job categories, allowing players to compare their progress against all other players, those that play on the same channel, or those with the same in-game profession. In addition, the top three fastest movers in each category are singled out for special recognition on the website, giving high-flying players something extra special to strive for.

A fourth category compares players on the basis of Fame, MapleStory’s in-game popularity rating. From Level 15 players can, on a once a day basis, give (or take away) a fame point to any other player in the game. As players who rank highly on the Fame leaderboard are assured legendary status among other MapleStory fans, Nexon expects it to become an interesting and fiercely-fought category.

In addition to the new online ranking system, all posts and comments made on the www.mapleeurope.com forum are now tagged with the player’s in-game avatar, to encourage community involvement and reinforce character customization.

To celebrate the system launch, and to prepare for the upcoming in-game Oktoberfest, MapleStory Europe will run a special "Monster Invasion" event on September 10th, during which players will get to gain extra experience defending Victoria island from swarms of monsters.

[NOTE: This story is cross-posted from sister site Gamasutra.com's comprehensive coverage of Austin GDC 2007, which includes write-ups of keynotes, sessions, roundtables, and associated breaking news from the CMP Game Group's first Austin-based conference.]

Though it didn't attract the biggest crowd at the show, Sulka Haro's keynote speech on Habbo Hotel delivered a lot of wry commentary and useful information on the building of successful online worlds.

Even though his world is mostly populated by 13-16 year olds - by his own admission - Sulake Labs' Haro noted there are lessons to be learned about broadening the appeal of products that touch on one or more of the tactics Habbo Hotel takes in developing its userbase.

Habbo Hotel - The Basics

The talk started with statistics. Habbo Hotel has approximately 7.5m unique players per month globally -- nipping at the heels of World of Warcraft. In the seven years since the game launched, 80 million accounts have been created. Globally, the game typically has 100,000 concurrent users playing at one time.

The creators of Habbo Hotel came from the web development community. According to Haro, the team was originally "not much in gaming. We've since hired people from the games industry... the core product itself was really done from the web mindset of things."

It grew from a "Disco" project with just two rooms that attracted a surprising number of international players even though it was only available in Finnish. "Most of them couldn't understand Finnish but they still went through the registration... there was a massive crowd from Brazil who visited the site for some reason."

This project evolved into a snowball-fighting browser game, but here Sulka learned an important, early lesson. The game allowed players to buy better equipment. "People hate when you buy stuff that lets you do better in the game. There were a bunch of kids who couldn't do purchases..." These players soon grew frustrated with the players who could.

At the 2007 Austin Game Developers Conference, a roundtable discussion called 'Licensing MMOs Worldwide' was moderated by Corey Bridges, an executive producer and marketer for Multiverse.

The panelists included Calvin Yoo, in charge of international business development for Nexon Corporation, Jeff Anderson, CEO of Turbine Entertainment, which is currently starting to license out MMOs, Steve Goldstein, general council for Flagship Studios, who is also president of Flagship’s joint venture with Handbitsoft, and Joshua Hong, CEO and founder of K2 Network, which is licensing Korean titles to the West.

Hit the jump to read the full discussion, which originally appeared at Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.

Get ready for acronyms. In a press release we received, Forterra Systems says that it will be working with the Orlando-based Defense Department’s Joint Advanced Distributed Learning (JADL) Co-Laboratory, with the aim of determining how MMO games might best be used in military counter-IED training -- Forterra says they'll even develop a demo prototype.

In other words, the effort is targeted to directly benefit the current U.S. military mission in Iraq, developing a highly realistic virtual training environment based on MMO technology that can support counter-IED training capabilities. Although this particular venture will focus on the IED mission, Forterra says the results will be applicable to other defense missions and training requirements.

The system that the Forterra team develops might even lead to an optional further project -- its possibly use in actual trials to study the training of soldiers around key aspects of counter-
IED operations.

The specifics of the research and development phase initially involve the provision by Forterra to JADL of its Forterra’s OLIVE (On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment) software platform that enables the generation of collaborative 3D online virtual worlds that can be scaled from single user applications to large-scale simulated environments supporting thousands of concurrent users.

The Forterra-led team includes Intelligent Decision Systems, Inc. (IDSI) and Rustici Software. IDSI will provide support for the instructional design required to determine the efficacy of the MMO tech as it's modified to support SCORM standards, while Rustici Software will provide valuable experience and insight into the technical issues around SCORM standards, Shareable Content Objects (SCOs), and the ADL runtime environments.

“Advanced distributed learning, reuse of content, and game technologies offer potential solutions for the training challenges facing the U.S. military, such as how to effectively combat Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs,” said Mike Macedonia, VP and general manager of Forterra’s National Security Division. “The research that we are undertaking will focus on defining technologies, interfaces, and standards so SCORM-compliant content can be used in an immersive 3D environment where smallor large groups of users that are physically distributed can collaborate for the purpose of training, experimentation or mission rehearsal.”

This rather fascinating Austin GDC panel put together several heads of important startups to discuss the trials and tribulations of forging out on one’s own.

Three Rings CEO Daniel James was the moderator, fresh in from the Burning Man festival, along with panelists Joe Ybarra, employee number 5 at EA and new founder of Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment, which owns the Stargate license; Anthony Castoro, founder and president of Heatwave Interactive; serial startup-ist Nabeel Hyatt, founder and CEO of Conduit Labs, and Raph Koster of Areae.

Hit the jump to read the full discussion, which originally ran at our sister site Gamasutra.

I hadn't heard about its beta announcement a couple weeks ago, but the good folks at Metaversed clued us all in recently about VastPark, a tool that's apparently simple enough that any user can create their own virtual world, and join their creations together with those of others.

Now, at Vastpark's website, it looks like they're ready for the first set of new users, as they're letting in those that signed up to the mailing list a few weeks ago take a first look and snag some bonus screenshots. It seems like invites to the beta are still open though, as they're still taking email addresses.

On the website, it says it's "a virtual content platform featuring free tools, revolutionary distributed content syndication and enables you to deploy your own virtual world or online game within seconds royalty free," -- and that early beta tools are coming. Sounds cool -- we'll keep our eyes and ears open.

[Via Metaversed]

In Friday's keynote at the Austin Game Developers Conference, Nexon America’s Min Kim discussed his firm's incredible Korean success with games such as Maple Story and Kart Rider, and explained how the company's microtransaction model adapted to the West.

Nexon, as Kim explained, was established in 1994 in Korea -- first a developer, then a publisher, they serviced their own games, as well as those of third parties. In 2005, Nexon’s revenues were $230 million, with a net profit of $75 million, and the company had some 1,600 people in its employ. And in 2005, 80% of their revenue came from in-game item sales.

“The great thing about microtransactions is that they’re scalable,” said Kim. “You can spend as little as zero dollars -- but as much as you want. You’re not linked to a certain scale.”

Hit the jump for the rest of Kim's keynote and Nexon's story, which originally appeared at Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.

New Outspark MMO Fiesta has just announced its open beta following a test launch. It describes itself as a 3D cartoon MMORPG, complete with "hordes of warriors, mages, archers, and clerics."

Judging by the look of things, it takes a page out of cute-styled fantasy RPGs like Ragnarok Online, and features a character class/job system that resembles MapleStory's somewhat, albeit apparently simpler. at least as of yet.

Interestingly, there's an elaborate eight-chapter backstory for the Fiesta world, providing some context for new users considering jumping in. Also up on the site now are user forums and the results of a recent dance contest (dancing's all the rage in online games these days, it seems!)

From the website:

Kids Movie Creator" is a 3D world creation and movie composing platform, which are designed for kids aged 7 to 12. In KidsMovie, children are encouraged to use their imagination to create beautiful and interactive 3D virtual worlds and even 3D cartoon movies.

KidsMovie is one of the first professional 3D content creation platforms which can be quickly mastered by young children. Children can create and play safely in KidsMovie both in its online and standalone editions. Such creative activities will help children develop skills in imagination, story making, expression, and communication, etc.

According to the website, kids can create and share content, play together online, build on each other's work, and add character behaviors to avatars. It assures safety, of course, but for the extra-concerned there's a stand-alone mode. It comes in a free limited-resource download (available on CNET's Download.com), or via a one-time purchase for the full version.

When we talk about the future of online gaming, it's impossible not to think about microtransactions and Web 2.0. And not everyone quite agrees with what that future will look like -- so, when some experienced online gaming folks got together to share future predictions at Austin GDC, some sparks flew, as you'll see in the following feature which originally ran at Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.

On the final day of the 2007 Austin Game Developers conference, GoPets' Eric Bethke, Areae's Raph Koster, EA Mythic's Marc Jacobs and Sony Online Entertainment Austin head John Blakely convened to answer a question, in a panel of the same name: What are the biggest online gaming opportunities?

Microtransactions

Jacobs raised issues with microtransactions relating to the value of the items sold, and Bethke chimed in: "Whatever you write in your EULA is your best wish, but we have hundreds of years of English common law about transactions."

"We really really really have to make a distinction between the concept of microtransactions -- which means spending a tiny amount of money -- and the ownership of digital assets," Koster stressed. "They are not the same thing. We cannot equate them." He added, "Betting the farm on business models instead of audiences and consumer needs is always a bad idea."

"Out of the top 10 MMOs in USA and Europe, WoW is probably the only subscription-based [game], and the only one that comes on a CD. Habbo is bigger than WoW in Europe." Koster noted.

"You don't go to The Gap and buy a $99 monthly subscription to clothes," Bethke added.

Jacobs disagreed. "I think RMT doesn't work in a lot of games. I think it's bad for the players and bad for the consumers," he suggested. "I think anyone who says there is 'one model' is wrong. Eric, if you say simply, 'this is bad and there is only way we should be doing it,' then you are engaging in the same thing you accuse me of doing."

So will a big RMT game come? "Yes, it will happen -- of course it's going to happen that someone is going to do a great game that will involve heavy RMT," Jacobs answered. "When it's going to come, God only knows. I don't think it will open the floodgates. I think, like the subscription model, it's just a model and people will try it and, like most MMOs, it will fail."

A possible success route, as Blakely suggested: "Engage your consumers in meaningful ways and give them choices. I'm a consumer, I love choices."

"The thing that is confusing is that RMT is not a model, it's thousands of possible models," clarified Bethke. "I love that, in Nexon's KartRider, if you want to switch [your user interface] you can buy 100 switches for a buck. If you want to be a competitor, you put in 4 cents."

"Think about your life; we are consumers, we thrive as consumers," added Blakely. "Whenever you bring people together, they'll participate in transactions."

"You look at the ecology that's been built up around The Sims, where people have item-based sites -- that is the exact same thing... as somebody selling epic mounts," Koster pointed out.

User-Generated Content

The panelists discussed Web 2.0 and the advent of user-generated content. "It's almost a bizarre question. This feels like two conferences going on at once with two distant branches of the family who don't like each other," Koster said. "To some degree, that used to be the coolest thing about the game industry. Richard Garriott was UGC at one time. We can't be snobbish about UGC. We are all users. There is a category error here."

He continued, "The technical sophistication to make content has gotten too damn high for the typical user. How many of you used to like playing mods? Seen any good ones lately? People can't even make a texture anymore -- it's making eight of them. 50 percent of Americans are creating content on the web... that's only if you count uploading their own photos, writing a blog or contributing to a community site. If you add in [things like rating on eBay] it's 100 percent of users! If you look at something like Facebook... it has levels, it has points, it has items, it has reputation systems, it has kabillions of users... there it is!"

"I hate the distinction between virtual worlds and games," agreed Bethke. "You want directed content to get them started -- they don't know what to do in your world. This is the skeleton? The user-generated content becomes the flesh between the bones. A great game would be a virtual world people could have a full existence on, and enjoy interacting on."

"You mention polish and quality -- which I agree, for seed content, [is] incredibly important, but we need to throw in some words like 'empowerment'." Koster suggested. "From what we see, the huge area [where] user-generated content flourishes is in fansites."

"I think Blizzard should sell gold -- I would buy it," Bethke noted.

Xbox Live Arcade

The topic turned next to Xbox Live Arcade. "Xbox Live is one of the most successful stories in the game industry," Jacobs pointed out. "Look at what Microsoft has done with it, and what people said when they launched it."

"The issue is that on the web, there is such a noise level -- and not just a noise level, a noise level of totally kick-ass product," Koster added.

"I think that the future of gaming will be large virtual worlds with RMT transactions," Bethke suggested. "I think the Web 2.0 guys are failing by not putting in good content," he added, as opposed to content-rich MMOs. "When I'm in the web space, I go 'you web guys, do you not realize you suck at content, you suck at fun?'" Koster agreed -- suggesting MMO guys are missing the boat as well.

"Subscriptions are one big thick chunky tool, it's hard to make them work for that user," Bethke said.

"There is a balancing point with [the value of microtransactions items]," Koster said. "And believe me, your customers will tell you about it."

More tussling over RMTs. The New York Times has run a piece on virtual goods, focusing solely on the buy-sell experience in Second Life, much to the chagrin of Conduit Labs' Nabeel Hyatt:

This is a piece focused on the buying and selling of virtual items, and there is no mention of Maplestory, Habbo, or even Facebook and Hot or Not. For the press to remain ignorant of this being an industry and not simply a single product is now journalistic irresponsibility and they should be ashamed.

This is a member of the mainstream press that has not even managed to type "virtual goods" into Google. If they did, they would see the first three stories currently point to:

1) Sony getting into the game.
2) Susan Wu's article on Techcrunch about Virtual Goods being the next big business model for the web.
3) A link to the friggin' Virtual Goods conference, which would have mentioned all the above companies and many more.

He's got a point. With all the events going on this year discussing the RMT world, frequent venture capital investments in start-up efforts with a virtual goods component, and success stories from major companies like Nexon hitting the news so often these days, it seems like a huge miss for the Times -- especially when, as Hyatt also points out, the Nexon prepaid card is the #2-selling card at Target (where Habbo cards are also sold) behind iTunes.

Global Kids, the nonprofit organization that focuses on using technology to educate and inspire civic responsibility among underserved youth, recently announced a $550,000 MacArthur Foundation grant to use virtual worlds to support discussion and education on philanthropy; now, it has announced more details about its program for the upcoming school year, including the Virtual Video program which the MacArthur grant funds.

This year, Global Kids will conduct programs at more than 20 public schools and its own new headquarters in Manhattan. Among this year's current initiatives, the GlobalKids Online Leadership Program works with students to create online leadership programs:

Global Kids offers a number of programs that give youth the tools to create educational games, work in virtual worlds, construct machinima (digital movies made using interactive three dimensional environments), and take part in online dialogues. Among these programs are the Microsoft-funded Playing 4 Keeps, an after-school program in which young people create educational online games, and the MacArthur Foundation-funded Virtual Video Project, in which youth create digital movies using the virtual world of Second Life.

“We are very excited to begin another academic year with our strongest lineup yet of substantive, enlightening programs,” said Carole Artigiani, founder and executive director of Global Kids. “But the most exciting and rewarding part comes at the end of the school year, when we see how the youth in Global Kids’ programs have grown, developed a more global perspective, taken action on issues they care about, and gained opportunities to pursue higher education.”

Warner Bros. has announced it plans to launch T-Works, a comprehensive online environment based on its animated properties like Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera and DC Comics characters. The ad-supported website will let users watch video, play games, customize avatars and explore a virtual world, which WB says is "tied to a user rewards system."

T-Works will also give fans tools for self-expression and personalization in order to “brand” their digital lives; In its press release, Warner Bros. describes a "grab-and-go" capability which enables fans to incorporate a custom avatar not only into the T-Works world, but into other environments like MySpace and Facebook.

Warner Bros. Animation is in development with Studio 2.0, the original programming digital production arm of the Warner Bros. Television Group, on two projects: an untitled Batman short-form series and an untitled project based on The Wizard of Oz, both of which will debut exclusively on T-Works with more details to be announced in the future.

In addition to the video channel, games channel and portable widgets, WB says the T-Works virtual worlds will let users interact with each other and assume a cartoon identity based on existing characters--they can play, chat and create a personal cartoon home complete with furniture, art, pets and more from Warner Bros. Entertainment’s animation asset library.

“T-Works will offer original entertainment content, social interaction and an intimacy with our beloved and iconic characters like never before in an environment that’s safe and appropriate for all ages,” said Lisa Judson, President, Warner Bros. Animation. “People have literally grown up with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Flintstones and Scooby-Doo, and we’re building an innovative, creative, cutting-edge home where people of all ages can interact and play with our characters in a compelling entertainment environment.”

TechCrunch points out that Paul Twomey, CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers -- better known as ICANN -- told an audience during his keynote address at the 2007 Influence Forum that virtual worlds are the future of global commerce.

Twomey says that all fields, including retail, client services, ads and business-to-business will in the future use an interface like that of The Sims Online, pointing out that Google Earth's "game-like" interface has also been given a real-world application -- and that it's an example of the geolocation services that will continue to play an important role in the next generation of virtual web.

As TechCrunch notes, the head of a major Internet governing body states that this "virtual web" of tomorrow is a certainty, not a speculation. It's interesting, though, how he chose The Sims Online as his example and less the other avatar-populated social worlds we're currently using; a sure sign, perhaps, that while we may be headed somewhere, we're not quite there yet.

[Via TechCrunch]

A new report from Strategy Analytics, titled "Online Games: Global Market Forecast", says the global online games market is already worth $4 billion and is expected to triple in the next five years. In particular, the report says the MMO games market, led by the World of Warcraft franchise, is "blazing the way for electronic sell-through and digital distribution of both PC and console games."

According to the report, the online games category is currently the largest category out of the three main online entertainment markets (music, games and video) in terms of revenue.

Strategy Analytics estimates that the global online games market generated $3.8 billion in 2006 and $5.2 billion in 2007, and projects that the market will grow at a rate of 25.2 percent annually in the forecast period spanning 2007-2011 -- reaching 11.8 billion dollars and representing approximately one third of the total games software market by 2011.

“The rapid growth of the addressable market for digital distribution of both PC and Console games will help clear the way for distribution of mainstream hit titles which has up to now been restricted to the physical retail channel,” comments Martin Olausson, director of digital media research at Strategy Analytics.

“The main driver for sustained growth in the online games market will be the continued uptake of broadband services around the world”, adds David Mercer, Principal Analyst at Strategy Analytics. “Additionally, the very lucrative revenue opportunity in both the massively multiplayer segment and the electronic sell through market will continue to attract new entrants into the online games market.”

[The preceding article originally ran at Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]

Media Networks' MMO portal, Gametribe, has announced that Softstar's Dream of Mirror Online (DOMO), a free-to-play MMORPG already popular in Asia, has launched a closed beta. Players can choose between four races, six classes and six professions to gain experience through quests and missions.

The press release also says the game emphasizes teamwork through a "human relationship system," and features contemporary-style cel-shaded 3D anime graphics.

Sony Online Entertainment has released a free stand-alone version of the client for Legends of
Norrath, the online trading card game based on the successful EverQuest MMO game franchise. Oathbound, which charges players with earning their freedom from jail by fighting against the forces of Chaos, is the storyline's first release, featuring more than 375 digital cards sold in 55-card starter decks and 15-card booster packs.

Legends of Norrath provides several modes of gameplay -- both for casual and tournament players, and an AI system for single-player mode. Victory can be achieved by completing quests or defeating your opponent's avatar; there's also more than 30 loot items like potions, clothing and spells that can be used by EverQuest I and II players in that world.

It's an interesting way to unite a new community, comprised both of new card game fans and players of the EverQuest world, and demonstrates that miniature games within larger, more complex MMOs may have broader appeal for a more casual audience. It adds bonus content for EverQuest regulars without alienating new players who might just like a round of cards -- a good idea for allowing users to tailor their own involvement without missing out, and a trend we'll probably see more of as a way to make MMOs more accessible to others beyond their base audience.

"When we showed Legends of Norrath at GenCon last month, it was just as big a hit with hobby and strategy gamers as it has been with our EQ and EQII players," said Scott Martins, director of development for SOE-Denver. "We've had a great run so far with the exclusive access we've provided for our existing fans, and can't wait to bring it to a much wider audience with today's release.

With the market for MMO games bigger than ever - and World of Warcraft ensconced firmly as the market's current leader, challengers have begun lurking in the fringes in the hopes of getting a piece of that share. But is the MMO market actually an all-or-nothing game? And if not, what's the impetus that leads a player base to change horses?

Neils Clark addresses this question in his Gamasutra feature, "The Academics Speak: Is There Life After World Of Warcraft?" Those "academics" include Metaversatility's Aaron Delwiche, who weighs in on the major factors which might prompt a move from one game to another:

"I think that the whole concept of player types [Richard] Bartle came up with is crucial to finding out who is likely to migrate and how. Socializers are definitely likely to go. Achievers might be inclined to move with their group, if they’re in a guild that’s good and highly organized. They stand a better chance of achieving if they stay with that kind of a guild. I would imagine explorers would be more likely to go off and explore different worlds on their own. And I guess the killers just go wherever the killing is."

MIT's Henry Jenkins opines on how much attention WoW really deserves:

"WoW deserves attention because it has so captured the imagination of gamers over the past few years. That said, I don't think it is healthy for the field of games studies, which is still emerging, to be so fixated on a single game franchise -- no matter what the franchise. A few years ago, it might have been The Sims or GTA, now it's WoW. But we need to spread out a bit more to encompass the full range of game genres and we need to be attentive to new, experimental, independent, and emerging work in the game space."

You can now read the full feature at Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra, which includes extensive input on the MMO issue from these academics as well as Ludium's Edward Castronova and PhD candidates Jeff McNeill and Florence Chee -- who also each share what game they would bring to a desert island, if they could choose only one.

Here's an odd one -- WaterRower, a Rhode Island-based manufacturer of fitness rowing machines, has created a online virtual rowing and racing program, We-Row.com, so that rowers can stay on top of their game during the cold fall and winter months. Users will be able to race other rowers and set their avatar's performance to their own metrics and level of fitness; the idea, it seems, is that they can use the information gleaned from playing head-to-head online to inform their actual training regimens, in conjunction with their home rowing machines.

Kinda a new way to look at "online world with real item tie-in," certainly! The rowing machine actually hooks up to the PC so that rowing fanatics can stroke along against up to five other opponents online. After connecting the WaterRower to a PC, users log in at the site, create a personal profile based on fitness level, weight, height and lifestyle factors, and complete a 2,000 meter row to set a benchmark fitness level. The Web site uses this information to help set personalized workout goals. There's also "online personal training," including customized advice and training programs designed to meet specific goals, such as building strength or increasing stamina and endurance.

We-Row also has all the hot-button community elements of virtual worlds -- users can view each other's profiles to choose opponents for races, and participate in training discussions on a forum. The site's just entered beta -- it also says the software's PC, Mac and Linux compatible-- and there isn't much visible yet, but it could be an interesting idea.

“The colder temperatures of fall and winter mean a lot of people will be bringing their workouts indoors, but not having the shared energy, motivation and support of workout partners can take its toll, even on dedicated exercisers,” said Dominik Kuprecht, director of sales and marketing at WaterRower. “With We-Row.com, WaterRower users get the best of both worlds. They can exercise in the privacy of their own home, but they still can enjoy the benefits that come from working out with others and maintain their racing skills even during the harshest winter months. The excitement of competition makes it an exhilarating way to exercise – whatever the season.”

In a statement on the official NCsoft website, CEO Robert Garriott offered details about the company's recently-announced new relationship with Sony, describing the deal as one which "gives us an unprecedented opportunity to bring our online portfolio of games to a suite of highly popular console gaming systems, including the PlayStation 3."

Acknowledging that many in the industry and the press have asked for further articulation on the partnership and for information on the direction of future titles, Garriott issued the statement in an effort to outline NCsoft's vision for their products in the coming years.

"It has been one of our business strategies to bring customers to a catalog of games where the customer has the choice to play a variety of different products. However, we don’t want to limit ourselves to the PC, especially while the console market continues to grow by leaps and bounds with every new generation...and console makers want to get into the online space," he said.

"The ideal system would be an extremely capable, stable platform, with the best Internet connectivity and greatest freedom of web access and interaction available to the user... we felt like Sony fit the bill," he continued, adding that Sony's vision going forward complements NCsoft's strategy. Nonetheless, he also stated that NCsoft is "far from" plans to stop developing on the PC.

Garriott says the relationship with Sony will allow NCsoft to develop across all of Sony's console hardware platforms, though he specified the PS3 is the focus, "and perhaps the PSP." The crux of the statement was the expression of a desire to build NCsoft's catalog beyond PC MMO titles.

While Garriott says future titles to come are still under wraps, he added, "We are hoping, but can’t promise, to have the first of our products available for the holiday season in 2008."

He acknowledged that this is a short time frame, but stressed, "We won’t just be porting our games over to the PS3," stating the aim of making new products from current IPs that will take advantage of the PS3's user interface, connectivity and play styles.

He admitted, though, that this "tends to take a lot longer" than a simple port. Garriott added that NCsoft is also looking at new and original IPs specifically for the console, specifying that that particular process "will take two to three years at a minimum."

The new console games will be developed via the same distributed model of development currently used for NCsoft's PC titles, Garriott said, though he noted that the idea of starting a new console-specific studio outside of Austin is under consideration, even as the company also looks to other existing studios to house specific projects. "This includes our Austin offices or our other currently existing studios. Console game development won’t just be at one single location," he explained.

The anticipated Sony products will continue to utilize a range of NCsoft's current business model. "There will be the traditional subscription models, micropayment systems and free-to-play games with membership options," Garriott said.

Promising more info to come, he concluded, "It's an exhilarating time for NCsoft."

[The preceding article originally ran at Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]

We recently discussed how nonprofit GlobalKids is using its recently-awarded MacArthur grant to use virtual worlds for education -- and how a peek inside their new program reveals a concentration on Second Life, which is surprising, when you consider that there are a variety of models for education-focused environments available out there.

Headway Strategies' Lee Wilson concurs; he's been attending the EdNet2007 educators' conference, and had the following impressions of a panel focusing on education in Second Life:

First off, I find it interesting that Second Life is getting most of the visibility in Education when other virtual worlds (Habbo Hotel, Whyville, etc.) are doing far more with K12 age kids and some have more intentionally educational content on them. Chalk it up to Second Life being a media darling and to good outreach from their Education team. If you are interested in this arena some of these other worlds merit a look.

Second Life is a big investment, but not where you think it will be. The software itself is free and content is inexpensive. It is expensive to train teachers how to use the new tools and it requires a high end machines (this alone is enough to give many schools a pause).

Focus on the interactivity aspects - that is where the power lies. It is a great tool for collaborative interactivity, immersion, visualization, and simulation.

Don’t make 3D PowerPoint sites. This isn’t a good environment for virtual lectures, it isn’t great for media delivery (even with high end machines), and chat is better in RL (real life).

Integrate it into existing practice. It isn’t going to replace what works well, so spend the time to figure out how it can compliment the learning ecosystem.

Lee also points out that Brecht raised some useful alternative platforms to consider for developing in this area; Croquet, Sun's Wonderland, Multiverse and private worlds from Sony and Microsoft; Lee also recommended Muzzy Lane and Numedeon's NICE (on which Whyville operates) as potential options, as they have been built with educational uses in mind.

[Via The Education Business Blog]

Jonas Karlsson, blogger at Xerox's Really blog, fills us in regarding Qwaq, whose Qwaq Forums is a business-oriented virtual world platform. Karlsson explains that OpenCroquet, on which Qwaq Forums is based, is "mostly the back-end of the system", with Qwaq adding in their own features, including interface and asset management.

In his detailed hands-on with Qwaq Forums, Karlsson says:

Rather than being peer-to-peer (as Croquet), Qwaq Forums is a hosted service which provides a virtual world where users can create rooms for different purposes. The system comes with a set of built-in templates for different styles of meeting rooms and project areas, for example. There are some limited tools for creating 3D content in the environment, but the philosophy is to not replicate functionality that is available in other tools, so the expectation is that users will import 3D models created with tools like Maya and SketchUp(!).

Other neat features are application sharing, integrated voice, and communication via https on port 80. The network part of it was actually one of the things that impressed me most, given the trouble I have connecting with Second Life through our client. When I started up Qwaq, it tried a couple of protocols and ports, figured out my proxy settings, and then connected to the server, without any intervention on my part.

Karlsson notes one drawback -- minimal avatar support, without much customization and personalization, which he correctly notes is an essential component of the virtual worlds experience, even if it's for strictly professional uses. "With too primitive avatars, I find myself feeling like I’m looking in on the world rather than being part of it," he says, adding, "Also, while the reliance on outside tools for content creation makes sense, I think it will limit the amount of creation done by users to those who whose job it is, as opposed to something everyone can do."

Another drawback: isolation, which is an issue all stand-alone worlds deal with, and Karlsson concurs that this will be a problem for all such "business-oriented" virtual worlds. "By setting up private environments that are not connected to a larger world, you are limiting users to the content and interactions that they bring in only. There is no way to cross-fertilize with ideas discovered during random explorations of the world. I can’t bring in new presentation tools or fun animations created by some random resident. I can’t hold a post-meeting networking/sky-diving session (unless I build it myself)."

Still, he notes that Qwaq has plenty of potential (and, obviously, ultra-chic hard consonant assonance), being "one of the most usable" of these kinds of worlds he's tried. Let's keep it on our radar, shall we?

[Via Really]

While we're on the subject of so-called 'serious virtual worlds' (I think Entropia Universe users would express they take their world very seriously), it's a good time to point out the latest in-depth coverage by The Guardian's Aleks Krotoski from last month's State of Play conference. She interviewed Coventry University Serious Games Institute's David Wortley on serious virtual worlds (Krotoski's questions in bold):

What do you feel is a particularly good example of a serious use of a virtual world?

One of my favourites is the Wheelies site in Second Life. The reason for this is not the site per se, but the empowering effect the development of this site has had on its owner, Simon Stevens. Simon suffers from cerebral palsy and is a very intelligent young man who has endured discrimination and hardship from birth because of his speech impairment. Developing the Wheelies site (where his avatar is in a wheelchair) has had a marvellous transforming effect on his life.

They're not a global panacea - what are some of the criticisms for using virtual worlds for serious ends?
The main criticism is lack of security and control in environments like Second Life. Just as in real life, the human imagination knows no bounds for good or evil and the insecurity and unpredictability of some environments limited their use for business purposes. In a social context, they can also have a negative effect if they become a substitute for human contact.

Like John Brecht and Lee Wilson in The Education Business Blog's EdNet2007 coverage, which we recently highlighted, Wortley also offers his own suggestions for platform alternatives for serious virtual worlds and education:

Second Life has been grabbing most of the headlines lately, but which future platforms do you see with great promise on the horizon?
At the Serious Games Institute in Coventry, as well as working with Second Life, we are developing a relationship with the Forterra Olive platform which has the attraction of a more open interface to industry standard tools like 3D Studio Max. We also like the drag and drop capabilities of Visual 3D which should provide some very interesting applications and we are working with Giunti Labs in Italy and Cisco to explore augmented reality applications.

Closer to home, Blitz Games and PixeLearning have developed their own platforms and companies such as Caspian Learning in Sunderland and Immersive Education in Oxford have provided good platforms for the education sector.

Farther from home, I expect to see some challenges from the Far East.

[Via The Guardian]

BT is developing services aimed to enable users of virtual worlds to call or text message real-world pals from inside of virtual worlds, reports CNET UK.

It's presently testing the technology from a private Second Life island called "Area 21", based on BT's 21CN network technology, which it's using for the service (as well as the top-secret Area 51). Project manager Matthew Brotherton of BT's Applied Technology Center told silicon.com, "This is about how we integrate BT's communications services that are exposed as part of the Web21C platform, into virtual environments."

The fact that users of Second Life can create the environment around themselves makes it an ideal initial proving ground for the tech, which if successful, could have very useful implications for both business-oriented virtual worlds and social MMOs.

[Via CNET UK]

A new article in MIT Technology review discusses the benefits and challenges of "sharding," the process by which large userbases in online worlds are distributed across smaller copies of the world to evenly distribute server load and prevent overcrowding. This process means that users of the same virtual world aren't always able to play together -- something not all companies feel is the best situation for their users.

One such company is CCP, who strives to keep its entire userbase integrated in EVE Online. CCP CEO Hilmar Petursson told MIT Technology review that, given EVE's sci-fi futuristic setting, keeping everyone together has additional significance. "When you watch a typical sci-fi movie, you have the sense that you're watching a small part of a larger world," he said, adding that a single-shard environment also makes for more cultural diversity within the game, creating a more precise simulation of a large-scale economy. EVE Online in particular has prized a realistic in-world economy, even hiring a real-world economist to manage EVE's transactions this year. Now, according to the article, up to 400 of EVE's 200,000 users can do battle together in a single location; contrast this with World of Warcraft, whose 9 million users max out at 40-on-40 brawls.

It hasn't been easy for CCP to accomplish this; it recently announced it will shift its clusters to IBM blade servers in search of more storage density. CCP has deployed a cluster of more than 420 CPU cores housed in IBM System x and BladeCenter servers to position it for further rapid growth; EVE Online launched in 2003 and has seen that 200,000 user growth only in the period since then. IBM has said CCP's supercomputing cluster manages more than 150 million daily database transactions, and Petursson tells MIT Technology Review that he hopes the company's new supercomputing clusters will add enough capacity for 70,000 concurrent users.

MIT Technology Review elaborates further on this trend of shard-aversion:

But the problem of avoiding shards isn't specific to EVE Online. Wu-chang Feng, an associate professor of computer science at Portland State University, says, "I would say it's something most MMOs will go to, if they can." The challenge, he believes, is to create an elegant experience for users at the front end while constructing and managing servers on the back end that can keep up with the pressure of large numbers of players online at once. Other companies working on the problem include IBM, which works with EVE Online and other MMOs; Australian game developer BigWorld Technology; and Linden Lab, makers of Second Life.

IBM global technical lead for games and interactive entertainment George Dolbier chimes in:

To scale up to support millions of concurrent users, MMOs will need to make use of the technologies behind Visa's database, or those that support the NASDAQ stock market. NASDAQ, he says, can actually be thought of as a very large MMO, supporting very large numbers of "players" performing billions of transactions daily in a graphically intense environment, all within a single shard.

Dolbier says that it's not a one-way street: other industries could learn from the technology that's being developed for MMOs. For example, he says, a common problem for game companies is how to recognize and manage "hot spots": small areas that suddenly attract large numbers of players, such as a battleground. To keep the game running smoothly, the servers need to detect movement toward the hot spot and react in real time, rezoning the area of activity so that more servers are responsible for supporting it. Technologies that solve this problem effectively, Dolbier says, will have applications in any industry that requires spotting and reacting to trends, or "anything where behavior is dynamic and you need to move resources around rapidly."

[Via MIT Technology Review]

Yesterday, as we reviewed Aleks Krotoski's discussion with the Coventry Serious Games Institute (SGI)'s David Wortley noted that the SGI had been "developing a relationship" with Forterra Systems and its OLIVE (On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment) software platform, in addition to its Second Life work. Now, the official announcement -- the SGI has bought a license to use OLIVE to support the development and application of virtual world applications, game-based learning and interactive digital media resources.

SGI says OLIVE will enable it to generate 3D Internet solutions for "training, planning, rehearsing and collaborating" in the gaming industry. Forterra adds that SGI will also use OLIVE's open platform to create virtual world content with plug-in functionality to meet a range of simulation needs, including simulation environments.

“We selected Forterra’s OLIVE platform given their market leadership in providing private, secure virtual worlds used for solving real problems such as group collaboration,” said David Wortley, Director of the SGI. “OLIVE provides the opportunity to apply game technologies for all kinds of non-gaming enterprises in the corporate, healthcare, government, and entertainment industries. Virtual worlds, with their online, multiplayer environments, offer unique opportunities to take traditional models of learning, simulation and entertainment to a whole new level of innovation.”

Reloaded Studios, a recently-formed Korean game development company, have announced that they have entered into a licensing agreement with German Crysis developers Crytek for use of the award winning CryEngine 2 middleware to develop their new action-strategy MMORPG.

Reloaded CEO Ki-Yong Cho says the studio is aiming to make its MMORPG stand out in a very competitive market, and decided to rely on CryEngine 2's support for an ambitious vision of "massive" landscapes and dynamic content. Reloaded also plans to emphasize the art style in the upcoming title, which Cho says was also a factor in choosing the middleware.

“Our technology team carefully reviewed and analyzed both the features and limitations of all of the major game engines and middleware solutions which are currently available to license, before making our choice,” explains Ki-Yong Cho, CEO of Reloaded Studios. “No other engine came close to offering the dynamic features, developer friendly tools, or provided anything near the visual quality of the CryEngine 2."

Korea based MMORPG developer XL Games also recently announced it had selected CryEngine 2. XL was founded by Jake Song, creator of NCSoft's Lineage, who had been inspired to choose the middleware after seeing it used in AION, another NCSoft title.

“We are really looking forward to working together with Reloaded Studios on this exciting new game development.” said Faruk Yerli, managing director of Crytek.

[The preceding article originally appeared on Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]

Hong Kong-based developer Linking People has let us know about a new flash-based strategy and RPG MMO slated for release in early 2008, and it's described as "MySims meets Habbo Hotel meets the Settlers." It's called Coobico, and it casts players in the role of settlers on a deserted island, tasking them with building up the neighborhood and competing with other settlers to become the island's most influential resident -- the experience "blends features like city-building, roleplaying and social networking in a casual game-experience," Linking People tells us.

It'll be isometric 2D, to boot -- looks like a lot of companies are realizing that high-powered graphics aren't always necessary, especially when appealing to a casual audience. Elaborates the Coobico site: "To put a good face on the matter: it’s a lightweight strategy-game with no retail box to purchase, no cumbersome client software to download and install and no nasty DRM. Just click and you’re in. Maybe you are, just like us, a sucker for stuff like World of Warcraft, but you just don’t have enough time for it. What’s more, we won’t require you to take a summercamp on how to play and navigate around on Qubus’ Island."

The company was founded in 2006 by three German Web developers, Wetzel, Martin and Winter, who prior to founding Linking People, built commercial and promo sites for international customers (they list Land Rover and Bayer as past clients). They're now focused on developing new social networking games and apps for the Asian and European markets, aiming for a "casual blend" of chat, social networks, Web 2.0 and multiplayer games.

But they're not targeting the "sweet spot" tweens-and-teens -- rather, Linking People's gunning for the market pegged as the "core" of casual gaming and the broader market, those aged 30 to 44.

As co-founder Winter explains: "We see this as a huge, financially strong and yet mostly untapped market -- current games and networks are completely focusing on pre-teens, teens and young adults. We see a large opportunity for games targeted at a more mature audience: people who grew up with videogames, who still like them, but nowadays neither have the time to spend hours of gameplay in traditional multiplayer-games, nor like to play casual titles like Match-3-puzzles."

Coobico is Linking People's attempt to address this market; while it's still in development, it should be interesting to see how it turns out!

When we hear about China's strong concerns over "Internet addiction" and rehabilitative camps for deeply entrenched MMO gamers, it can seem a little sensationalized -- but a recent Yahoo! news report, citing the Beijing News, might make one reconsider the issue.

A man about 30 died in a cyber cafe, and it looks like he was marathon-gaming. "According to preliminary findings, the length of time this man spent online might have triggered heart problems," the Beijing News quoted from one of the emergency medics.

Certainly, the man might've been at the wrong place at the wrong time, and it's a convenient situational overlap to bolster the Chinese government's beef with online gaming. Or, it could be that the individual really preferred to stay at the computer rather than attend to his health. Given China's strong vendetta to curtail online gaming, it's hard to tell.

Wonder what he was playing?

[Via Yahoo! News]

Origin Digital is a media services provider that delivers music and video content on demand, and now they're working with worlds like Second Life to bring this tech to virtual worlds. There's been a lot of talk lately about the importance of having this sort of content available inside a 3D environment; that's the entire concept behind Sony's soon-to-launch (we think) Home platform for the PlayStation 3, and other virtual worlds we've been talking with lately have pegged access to music and other downloadable or streaming media in online worlds as a must-have.

An article in NJBiz says Origin's been working in Second Life to begin integrating this kind of content delivery into virtual worlds. “Second Life or any of the other virtual worlds are places where consumers congregate, communicate and get entertained,” Origin Digital CEO Darcy Lorincz tells NJBiz.

According to the article, Origin's partnered with Phoenix-based MountainMeister Media, a vendor of on-demand media for virtual worlds:

Video viewing over the Web is growing fast, according to eMarketer in New York City, a market research firm for e-business and online marketing and Internet market trends. “Video is becoming more prevalent across the Internet,” says Kris Oser, director of strategic communications for eMarketer. Expectations are high for online video, with U.S. viewers projected to grow from 114.3 million in 2006 to 183 million in 2011, according to a report by eMarketer that was released last month.

Online video is a marketing platform that, while a small source of revenue now, has the potential to rapidly expand. “It’s the fastest-growing online advertising medium,” says Oser. “It’s growing 89 percent this year. In terms of actual dollars spent, it’s from a very small base of $775 million.” Online video advertising in the United States will increase to $4.3 billion by 2011, eMarketer estimates.

Origin Digital, founded 10 years ago, is not an advertising firm, but the increased demand for video online may help drive its own expansion plans. Lorincz says the company has a staff of 32 with additional offices in Denver, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, as well as in London. He adds that the staff may expand up to 50 by next year. Lorincz says the company may generate more than $5 million this year, but he would not elaborate further nor discuss profitability. Investors in the closely held company include Constellation Ventures, part of Bear Stearns Asset Management in New York City.

[Via NJBIZ.com]

CNET is reporting that Hoover senior fellow and Stanford professor Michael Boskin will become chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors for Gaia Online; he'll head up the new organization for the teen and 'tween-targeted online world (CNET's count is 2.5 million monthly participants and over 100,000 daily transactions) and provide "ongoing guidance and analysis" of Gaia's virtual economy.

This isn't the first time a virtual world has brought in a qualified real-world economist to oversee in-world transactions; EVE Online announced a similar move earlier this year.

As the CNET article correctly notes, it might be surprising to some to see a man with Boskin's credentials putting his muscle behind the online economy of what is essentially a kids' game. Not only is Boskin an academic, the article says, but he serves on the boards of companies like Exxon Mobil, Oracle and Vodafone. According to his Hoover Institution biography, he also serves "as an adviser to presidents and prime ministers, finance ministries, and central banks around the world, from the United States to China."

"I find it very interesting how many people are willing to spend time" in the virtual world, Boskin told CNET News.com, adding that he was attracted to his new role by "how the economy of these sites, and in particular of Gaia, have evolved; how people are making decisions on how to spend their time, (and) how much time to spend."

Essentially, Boskin said, an economy is an economy, regardless of whether the participants are teens in a virtual world or captains of industry in the physical world.

"The fundamental similarity is people making decisions about how to allocate their time and use their skills," Boskin said. "That is at the core of what is similar about them. There's some things we can learn about what (is going on) in the real economy by what is going on in Gaia.

According to CNET, Boskin will retain his roles at Hoover and Stanford -- but it's interesting to see a qualified real-world economist start considering virtual worlds as a viable, informative and constructive professional avenue.

[Via CNET.com]

Talking as part of an in-depth new interview published on Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra today, Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce has commented on just how and when a World Of Warcraft sequel might appear, also specifying Warhammer Online and Age Of Conan as the MMO's major competition as its moves towards its third year of operation.

When asked "Do you think there will be a need for a World of Warcraft II? Or will it just be expansions for a long time?", Pearce explained:

"The game's only been out for about 2 1/2 years. So I think for the foreseeable future it’s going to be expansions as it relates to World of Warcraft. We haven’t even thought about the idea of a World of Warcraft II. I mean, we are all really invested in the game ourselves as well, we’re part of the community, we play the game. And we love it and we want to make sure that it has a long lifespan.

However, when asked what circumstances would require a sequel, in the eyes of the team behind the multi-million selling MMO title, Pearce explained:

"What would necessitate a sequel? For us as gamers, we are making the games we want to play. So it would really be about the dev team, and if they said ‘OK, we just can't do what we want to do in regards to the Warcraft intellectual property with the current structure’. It would have to be a situation where we said: 'This is what we want applied to what we want to do, and we can't do it on the current framework’."

In addition, when asked what Blizzard might see as some of its major competition in terms of MMOs, Pearce noted:

"There's a lot of great stuff out there, and a lot of good stuff on the horizon. Certainly the Warhammer Online game has a lot of potential, Age of Conan, that looks like it has potential. There's some good stuff out there inbound so we don't spend a lot of time dwelling on what other people are doing. It’s more important that we feel that we're doing right by our customer base, regardless of what other people are doing."

The full Gamasutra interview also includes Pearce's comments, previously revealed on the site, in which he reveals that the company has a third team hard at work on a new unspecified title, separate from World of Warcraft and StarCraft II, plus a multitude of other views on the firm's MMO and RTS franchises.

Virtual Worlds Management has announced that Christian Renaud of the Cisco Technology Center will deliver the Thursday keynote at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo to be held October 11, 2007 in San Jose, California.

Renaud is the chief architect of Networked Virtual Environments for the Cisco Technology Center. Its staff members support Cisco's Corporate Development unit, helping to determine Cisco's future technologies and developing them into new revenue streams for the company.

Renaud will discuss the ways that virtual worlds platforms and technologies will drive the creation of new enterprise apps. "With all the media attention surrounding virtual worlds, this conference is the ideal opportunity for corporations to learn how this technology can be applied for maximum benefit and increased productivity," he says.

Renaud continued: "I hope to help with this effort by distinguishing what it really means within the context of existing and future communications infrastructures and how organizations can leverage the benefits of virtual worlds technologies and applications."

Chinese online game developer CDC Games announced that the company has joined with CCP Games (EVE Online), Ons On Soft (Shine) Sonokong (Shaiya) T3 Entertainment, developers of Audition, and Wemade (Mir II) in founding the Online Game Alliance Against Piracy (OGAAP) to fight the piracy of online games in China.

The goals of OGAAP are to establish a platform for industry participants and stakeholders to exchange ideas and share experiences; conduct market and technology research; propose industry-wide policies and practices; and lobby relevant government bodies and lawmakers to enact anti-piracy legislation.

The alliance will also actively promote public awareness of copyrighted online game usage, educate online game players about copyrighted content and vigorously pursue the continued shutdown of pirated online games as well as the arrest and conviction of their operators.

Piracy has been a major issue for the Chinese gaming market, encompassing activities like operators running private servers, and macro programs that imitate popular online games.

CDC says OPTIC Communications, which is now one of its business units, has helped the Chinese government convict two operators of "piracy for profit" of one of their online fantasy games, Mir II. These two landmark cases both resulted in criminal convictions versus private server operators; one received a three-year prison sentence, and the other paid a fine of $67,000 and was sentenced to six years.

In the latter case, the operator was running an illegal macro program that allowed players to purchase online game merchandise, such as special powers and weapons. With over 20 million users currently registered as players of Mir II, the revenue impact was "substantial," CDC says, before the illegal operation was shut down.

OGAAP is to be a non-profit organization headquartered in Beijing, and says it's already in discussions with several of China's governmental organizations that oversee the games industry to seek their support for the initiative.

"At CDC Games, we have long recognized the potential severity of illicit piracy activities, and have achieved success in individual campaigns against piracy," said Peter Yip, CEO of CDC Games. "The formation of OGAAP is a milestone achievement for the online game industry and will seek to leverage the combined power, experience and efforts of many key industry players."

He continued: "Like other segments in the entertainment industry, we have experienced an increase in piracy, especially with some of our more popular online games. Our primary objective is to reduce, and if possible, eliminate these piracy challenges so our industry can continue its vibrant growth throughout China. This alliance and the recent successful convictions of illegal operators are major steps in achieving our objectives."

The BBC is reporting that IBM students in Ireland are working to create a solution whereby the blind can access and experience virtual worlds -- they've designed audio technology that uses "3D sound" to create a sense of space. Their work is part of the Extreme Blue research initiative which brings groups of students together for 12 weeks to solve a problem set by senior researchers.

According to the article:

The project - called Accessibility In Virtual Worlds - is what the company describes as "a proof of concept" at this stage, but it will be passed on to IBM's Human Ability and Accessibility Centre in Texas for further development.

For their work the Irish team decided to use the Active Worlds online environment rather than the more popular Second Life (which has almost 9.5m accounts) because it allowed them more flexibility.

As the article notes, Active Worlds is comprised largely of user-contributed content, which made it ideal for the students to experiment within the world. "When the user comes into the world, the items are described as well as their positions," researcher Colm O'Brien told the BBC. "There is also sound attached - for example, if there's a tree nearby you will hear a rustling of leaves," said Mr O'Brien.

Text-to-speech software also played a role in the research, reading chat from avatars out loud from their text boxes. The research also found success by attaching "sonars" to user avatars so that the blind can determine the proximity, direction and rate of approach from others.

The research team received feedback from blind mentors -- one in IBM's Dublin lab and two based in the company's Texas research center, and also worked with the National Council for the Blind of Ireland. The research proved that the concept of equipping virtual worlds for use by the blind is feasible, and the team made recommendations and set accessibility standards.

"IBM believes that virtual worlds are going to be the next big evolution of the web and if this happens... it's not right for blind people to be missing out on what the rest of us have available," O'Brien said.

Former Origin and Sony Online exec Raph Koster has revealed the major product from his new venture capital-funded firm Areae at the TechCrunch 40 conference in San Francisco, a new online worlds platform called Metaplace.

According to information posted on the official Metaplace website: "Metaplace is a next-generation virtual worlds platform designed to work the way the Web does. Instead of giant custom clients and huge downloads, Metaplace lets you play the same game on any platform that reads our open client standard. We supply a suite of tools so you can make worlds, and we host servers for you so that anyone can connect and play. And the client could be anywhere on the Web."

The official FAQ continues: "You should be able to stage up a massively multiplayer world with basic chat and a map you can build on in less than five minutes. It's that easy. Inherit a stylesheet -- puzzle game, or shooter, or chat world -- and off you go... Metaplace will support everything from 2d overhead grids through first-person 3d. However, right now we only have clients that do 2d of various sorts, including grid view, 2d isometric, 2.5d heightfields, and so on. We expect to keep working on the 3d client support."

In addition, Koster himself has commented on the announcement on his official weblog, explaining of the technology: "We fully expect most users to be players, not makers. That’s just how it is. So for us, fun is absolutely key. I’m putting my money where my mouth is on that point, too. Yes, we have a new MMO we’re working on. And yes, we’re doing it in Metaplace." Further information on the roll-out schedule of the Metaplace technology is expected to be released in the near future.

PlaySpan, a publisher-sponsored in-game-commerce network, has announced that it has secured $6.5 million in Series A funding from Easton Capital, Menlo Ventures and Asian investors.

The company is looking to position itself advantageously in the virtual goods market, as real money transactions (RMTs) are seeing wider adoption among revenue models for publishers of virtual worlds and online multiplayer games. PlaySpan pegs the market for in-game commerce at $2 billion this year.

The company says it is building a network for microtransactions and in-game financial exchanges to enable more publishers to integrate commerce into their games. The company has not announced any of its partners yet, but its official website says that PlaySpan has signed up seven MMO games to date.

In addition to the funding announcement, PlaySpan also announced today three new additions to its board. John Friedman, board member of IGA Worldwide and General Partner of Easton Capital; Shawn Carolan, board member of IMVU and Managing Director of Menlo Ventures; and Steven Lee, Partner at STIC International are the newest additions.

"[This investment] will help create a new class of revenue opportunities for publishers and will allow gamers to enjoy their game experience with commerce,” said Karl Mehta, PlaySpan co-founder and CEO. “We are extremely fortunate to have a complimentary group of global investors that bring solid experience in the gaming, internet and financial service industries.”

We recently talked about Empire of Sports, an MMO from Infront devoted entirely to the world of competitive sports, recently announced at the Leipzig Gaming Conference. At the time the game was unveiled, we were intrigued – after all, aren’t MMOs usually devoted to the fantasy set? When you think of it, though, sports in a persistent universe is a strong concept for an online game, especially in an era where many companies are developing casual alternatives to the Warcraft universe – and the MMO model whereby individuals train and compete against one another to get stronger makes it a natural environment for a sports game. And of course, the idea of being a “team player” is right at home in competitive sports, a useful consideration as the industry learns the importance of community and a strongly networked player base.

Worlds in Motion talked to Empire of Sports’ managing director, Christian Müller, about how the idea, born when he, a 30-year gamer, got hooked up with a sports marketing company, came to be. Müller, previously impressed by his first experiences with the immersive, persistent WoW universe, had what he describes as “a revelation.” “I didn’t expect it to be that powerful and attractive,” he says of his first experience with the world’s most popular fantasy MMO. “I was already working in sports for some time, and I felt like, ‘couldn’t we do something like that, with sports, in a virtual world?’” At the time, Müller explains, French developers F4 approached Infront, which focuses on sports marketing, and the idea came to life.

Sports For Everyone

There’s been a lot of talk lately of “casual” MMOs – persistent multiplayer worlds that can appeal to a broader audience. So what defines a so-called casual MMO – is it the amount of time investment required, the complexity of the control scheme, or the depth of the world and its story? “We are a casual MMO, in the sense that sports is casual,” Müller explained. “We don’t want people to have to spend five hours to do a football match, and the ski races take only minutes. Nevertheless, we want to attract casual players; at the same time, we can appeal also to the hardcore.”

Sports is a tricky medium by which to appeal to this “hardcore” audience, so how will Empire of Sports address them? “It’s RPG character development, really,” Müller elaborates. “Specifically, developing the avatar in various sports, tuning muscle groups and stuff like this, so you can invest a lot. And it’s also a skill-based game. You have to press a button at the right time, and if you are not close nothing will happen. We also have pro gamers testing it, and they are really interested, and they didn’t expect this.”

Further, Müller identified three elements he feels define a casual MMO, particularly Empire of Sports – the business model, a casual play element and a focus on community. “Virtual worlds can be a very important cultural element,” he noted. “It’s starting to become like the East, and I hope we can contribute a little with Empire of Sports.”

Here's video of Raph Koster's presentation of Metaplace, the project that he and his company, Areae, have been keeping under wraps leading up to its debut at the TechCrunch 40 in San Francisco.

OnNet USA has announced the closed beta test for its World War II flight combat MMO, Heroes in the Sky. Beta testing will run until September 20th, from 4-7 PM PST each day.

Heroes in the Sky has both single and multiplayer online worlds. Currently, players can choose from two historical maps -- Normandy and the Pacific -- and the game's "Dog Fighting" feature provides three different gameplay modes: Survival, Deathmatch and team Deathmatch.

Heroes in the Sky is free to play at Gamescampus.com, OnNet's gaming portal which was itself introduced in April of this year.

“We are extremely excited to bring Heroes in the Sky to our gamers. This game offers many hours worth of enjoyment as they fly their way through a variety of missions, “said Chris Keswani, team leader, Heroes in the Sky.

Sony's Tokyo Game Show keynote address has revealed it is delaying its PlayStation 3-specific Home online world from a release date later in 2007 to Spring 2008, with Sony exec Kaz Hirai waxing lyrical on the possibilities for the virtual environment.

As part of the keynote, attended by Gamasutra, Hirai commented: "The power of the PS3, as well as the networking, by putting [these] together we can offer the realistic 3D virtualization of society -- what we call PlayStation Home. I'm sure you're expecting a lot... this was originally scheduled to be launched by the end of this year... it is going to be taking place in the springtime of next year."

The reason for the delay? Hirai cited user feedback. A new service called Dress: Everybody's Fashion Entertainment will be added to Home, but there were no details.

Later in the keynote the discussion turned to Home during the moderator-led Q&A session, and Hirai had plenty to say. "I've always said that I like to call it an interactive game -- something that has interactivity in my definition will be a game. I think that home is a new method or way to enjoy interactive entertainment. In the broad sense I call this a game as well."

When it comes to whether or not Home is a new business model, Hirai noted: "We have had a lot of discussion within the company and we are thinking about it a lot. We have had for a very long time a very traditional type of video games business model... however in this networked society I think we can have this new world called Home, that our users can enjoy, that we can also provide applications through Home's functionality. I think that there can be many business models."

Hirai touched on Home's ability to support in-game advertising, and sales in a "virtual mall." "The more I think about it, the more I think there are a multitude of business chances that can be created not just for ourselves but our business partners as well. This will also open the door for non-game companies that have not had access in the past. We have been meeting with such non-game people... we have provided some of our ideas and we have also tried to listen to the ideas that they have to see what kind of advantage that there could be for these non-game people."

When it comes to Home's delay, "We want this to be a worldwide service and at the same time we want to be sure we have functionality" for all territories. "We want to be sure we have a range of services for our users all over the world -- that's how we want to start the service. So we decided to delay the service launch date."

When asked how Home is different from Second Life, Hirai stated the obvious -- it's on the standardized PS3 platform. He also said, "We want to make sure that this is somewhat of a controlled environment, instead of a lawless environment. We want to make sure that we have that level of comfort and security."

[This article is cross-posted from sister site Gamasutra, which will offer full coverage of Tokyo Game Show over the next few days.]

In a recent press release, Nokia has announced that D3Publisher will use its SNAP mobile platform to develop connected games for Java-based mobile phones. This means that the mobile version of D3Publisher's Earth Defense game, expected to be available by end of 2007, will be equipped with mobile connected functionality, to let players battle against each other, check scores and communicate via their mobile devices.

Lots of online game makers are coming to understand that users want to tailor their access to the world, and this kind of technology is enjoying increasing scrutiny as it becomes more evident that mobile connectivity is a good avenue for this -- users want to be able to check in with their game without a full login, whether it means checking item auctions, messages or character stats on the go. Expect more online games to have mobile options using technology like SNAP. An online mobile game will necessarily be a simpler experience than a full PC or console-based MMO, and while the mobile version of Earth Defense seems to be a separate, stand-alone mobile online game, it provides a good peek into how this technology can be used as an integrated adjunct to existing MMOs.

Nokia plans to distribute Earth Defense Force on select Nokia handsets, and make the game available for global operator-assisted download.

"SNAP Mobile provides us with a carrier-grade platform that ensures a consistent mobile gaming experience for our dedicated fan base and expands the reach of our games to a global level through Nokia's distribution channels," said Yuji Konishi, Director and the Vice President of Mobile & Network Business Division of D3Publisher. "After much consideration, SNAP Mobile emerged as the ideal partner that could take our established Earth Defense Force game and make it suitable yet entertaining for a wide selection of mobile devices, while still retaining the online features that our game players have come to enjoy."

Groove Media has announced the beta release for its multiplayer online UTour Golf game, which will allow players to compete for real cash prizes in a "pro golf simulation". It's free to play, and users who join the beta will get a chance to brush up ahead of upcoming tournaments. The game is part of Groove's SkillGround technology platform, which assigns all players a skill ranking in its various titles to keep competition on even footing and to secure transactions.

In UTour Golf, players can select from a variety of golf courses and game rule sets, enter tournaments or compete head-to-head. It's also got tiered tournaments from Rookie to Legend, and UTour Golf promises automatic skill matching and accessibility for players inexperienced at video games. It also emphasizes its community features; players can chat in-game, track and compare stats, invite friends to participate and practice, and view the prizes available.

"The proven technology of our SkillGround platform ensures a fair environment for cash competitions," said Jon Walsh, CEO of Groove Media. "The transparent ranking system along with an accurate skill matching system makes UTour Golf fun for rookie and veteran players alike."

Among the interesting demonstrations at this year's TechCrunch 40 was FlowPlay, a self-described "next generation social entertainment platform for casual games." In other words, it's a network for browser-based casual games that implements an customizable avatar-based social element, where users can earn virtual goods and either integrate the gameplay experience into the social world, or simply do one or the other.

It seems to be targeted more at girls, with the ability to style avatars fashionably with accessible, 2.5-dimensional cel-shaded graphics in the anime style. Additionally, it looks like another one for the teen-and-'tween set.

Apparently the FlowPlay folks used their time to show a demo video, less discussion, and their new website has precious little information ready about the product itself.

[Via TechCrunch]

We recently took a peek at Qwaq, whose secure virtual workspace represents some strides for "serious" virtual worlds. The company's Qwaq Forums uses Open Croquet mainly as a back-end, adding its own tools and features. Now Intel is getting involved, as the announcement comes that Qwaq will bring Miramar, Intel's 3-D information space technology, to market.

The agreement, announced at the Intel Developer Forum, will enable a new desktop visualization edition of Qwaq Forums that will integrate 2-D desktop applications and shared 3-D information workspaces so that large numbers of users can be served by enterprise information. Qwaq and Intel say they'll be working together to integrate Miramar technology into a new cross-platform edition of Qwaq Forums, which is expected be available next year.

“Early adopters at Intel are currently using the Qwaq Forums to improve their teamwork," explained Justin Rattner, senior fellow and director or Intel's Corporate Technology Group in his keynote on the future of virtual worlds. "The combination of Miramar and Qwaq Forums will enable information, which is now only available to individual departments or divisions, to be easily accessed and shared across the enterprise, in dynamic unified views,”

Rattner added that Intel envisions the desktop visualization edition of Qwaq Forums could be used to coordinate and enhance productivity among the company's global workforce.

Qwaq Forums is designed to allow users to establish workflow steps, create or review information in software applications, and evaluate designs in 2-D and 3-D collectively; at the same time, they can discuss topics using built-in text and voice chat. Moreover, the Qwaq Forums virtual workspaces are persistent, allowing users to view changes or modifications to forums that might have occurred since their last visit to the virtual space.

“Virtual workspaces have already proven their value for enterprise collaboration,” said Greg Nuyens, Qwaq chief executive officer. “The desktop visualization edition of Qwaq Forums provides distributed enterprises with a powerful new way to visualize and share information globally. Intel’s selection of Qwaq Forums to be the delivery platform for its Miramar technology is further recognition of the strength of our architecture and our approach to enterprise collaboration.”

When we reviewed Gene Endrody's Sherwood Dungeon for our Online Worlds Atlas, we were impressed by the solid simplicity of Endrody's completely free, Google ad-supported MMO. Nonetheless, it's a game for those who like stat management, combat and level-grinding. Now, though, it looks like Endrody's Maid Marian has launched a more temperate solution: Club Marian, a "massive multiplayer social hangout where users from around the world can chat, dance, drive and create music in a fun 3d environment," as the site says.

There are apparently three islands to explore, a music maker, emotes, customizable avatars and even a sports car to drive -- and everyone gets one!

The interface resembles Sherwood Dungeon a bit, only with a hipper look to the avatars and a few stylish updates (guess the medieval look isn't in fashion in Club Marian), and instead of inventory management and armaments, users can chat, dance, or take their car for a spin. Though the range of customization isn't particularly wide, it's broader than Sherwood Dungeon's, and users can choose from an entire color palette for each clothing and hair option, and for the car, too.

It's still completely free and runs in the browser on Shockwave. Neat work, Gene.

MindArk's Entropia Universe is featured in the new 2008 Guinness Book of World Records for having sold the most valuable virtual items and real estate among virtual worlds. Its Club NEVERDIE, an asteroid space resort bought for $100,000 by gamer Jon NEVERDIE Jacobs, is listed as "The Most Expensive Virtual Object."

The virtual resort boasts a nightclub, shopping mall, 1000 apartment complexes, commercial space ship docking, mega sports stadium, and hunting and mining biodomes, and is said to be the highest-grossing privately owned virtual event venue online; in its press release, MindArk guesses it'd go for $1 million if it were ever placed back on the market.

The $100,000 record was almost broken this year when a virtual bank license was sold in Entropia Universe in May for $99,900 USD. MindArk estimates Entropia's daily turnover to be around $1.25 million.

"The inclusion of the space resort and Entropia Universe in the Guinness World Records book confirms the viability of our real cash economy," says Marco Behrmann, Chief Information Officer at MindArk PE AB, the development company behind Entropia Universe. "Participants realized early on the enormous potential in Entropia Universe for real commerce. In fact, the space resort had recouped its initial acquisition cost and was operating at a profit after only 8 months, and remains one of the primary event locations in the Entropia Universe."

San Francisco-based developer Perpetual Entertainment has pushed back the release of its PC MMORPG Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising, due to the need for further beta testing.

This is the second time the target launch has been delayed; the prior incident coincided with layoffs at Perpetual in December 2006.

However, in an exclusive interview with Gamasutra, Perpetual CEO Chris McKibbin maintained that a formal ship date has never been solidified. "We have been targeting a fall launch and we are extending the time in beta to focus on quality and polish," he explained. "From our standpoint we want to give our game more time to get to [that level] of polish, rather than rush to a ship date."

McKibbin stressed that Gods and Heroes is a content-complete closed beta, whereas prior testing as of early 2007 had involved only an art-complete build.

Additionally, McKibbin told Gamasutra that Perpetual would be laying off another 30-40 employees. "The size and bar of content creation is very high and requires a pretty sizable team," he said, "The process of really play-tuning and balancing takes a much smaller, more focused and agile team, and so that is the transition right now."

He added that Perpetual would be assisting its former employees in finding new positions, either as part of the team of Perpetual's Star Trek Online or with other developers.

Asked about reports that Sony Online had shifted from co-publisher to solely a marketing role with Gods and Heroes, representing a backing-off the project by Sony, McKibbin called it a "non-story that people spun a little." He clarified: "There was no change in our relationship with Sony... part of the confusion comes from the difference between online games and packaged goods games. Perpetual has always been the financer and creator of Gods and Heroes. What [Sony was] doing initially versus what they are doing now is the same; marketing and distribution, and that's it. We have a great relationship with them, and there hasn't been any change with that."

Though McKibbin said that his team is "pretty happy" with the current progress of beta testing, he was hesitant to set a ship date. He allowed, however, that Perpetual is hoping for an early 2008 release.

"We put a high value on listening to our beta community and then reacting and making those changes, and we want to continue and give ourselves more time to do that, and give the community more time to play the game," McKibbin said.

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

On the heels of Mattel's resounding BarbieGirls success, and Be-Bratz, the follow-up effort from MGA, Hasbro has thrown its hat into the ring of virtual worlds with companion toys. It's spun its long-standing Littlest Pet Shop miniature toy franchise into an online world, Littlest Pet Shop VIPs (Virtual Interactive Pets).

Hasbro says the initial Littlest Pet Shop VIPs line, targeted at 'tween girls, will include a dog, cat, turtle, penguin and panda, plush toys with "secret codes" on their collar that can unlock the virtual version of the pet. As is standard fare, the pets and environments are customizable, and users can play 16 mini-games, earn "Kibble" points to care for the pets, play minigames and engage in community events.

Hasbro says the Littlest Pet Shop VIP toys, priced at $14.99, will be available on retail shelves exclusively in the New York Metro area in 2007 beginning in mid-October as well as online at Hasbro's online store, and several mass market retailer websites such as Wal-Mart and Target. A global retail launch, including 18 new VIPs, will follow in early 2008. There's also a limited free play mode available at the website, where girls can "borrow" a pet to check out the gameplay before bringing home their own.

“This is a very exciting time for the Littlest Pet Shop brand,” said Valerie Jurries, vice president of marketing for Hasbro’s girls brands. “We wanted to take this incredibly popular property and do something truly spectacular for the millions of girls who have come to adore the Littlest Pet Shop line over the years. Creating an engaging and meaningful online connection between girls and their Littlest Pet Shop pets was an instinctive next step. VIPs delivers a rich, immersive online world where girls and their pets can have endless hours of fun exploring, playing and bonding.”

Brescia, Italy-based Koinup has announced the launch of its eponymous social network, "entirely dedicated to your virtual life." Whereas MySpace, Facebook and their ilk are a social network for one's real life, it seems that Koinup is going for meta -- a social network to share, document and keep tabs on the life of your avatar and its friends in the virtual space.

Users can create profiles, write journals and stories, publish pictures and share machinima videos all based on their world of choice. Koinup promises almost unlimited free storage space for uploads, too, all with the aim of aggregating and enabling ease of access for multiplayer game and virtual world-focused content.

"Virtual worlds, MMORPGs and Metaverses are the new frontiers of internet entertainment and creativity," Koinup says in its press release. "Each day milions of people spend their time in virtual environments and use these innovative spaces to express themselves and to create art, photos and videos."

"Although Second Life has received the most attention from marketers and the press, its traffic is low compared with the crowds at virtual worlds specifically geared for children and teenagers," notes the report, titled “Kids and Teens Online: Virtual Worlds Open New Universe.”

eMarketer pegs the appeal for young folk down to the marriage of video game elements with social networking and communication -- connecting and communicating are "the two recurring themes" for online youth, it says. It adds that virtual worlds also allow kids to tap into their creativity, indulge their desire for self-expression and exercise their proclivity for exploration, compounding their appeal.

“The bad news [for marketers],” says Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst and author of the report, “is that it is difficult to know what all this virtual interaction really means. What value is there in a person’s avatar drinking a Pepsi? Or wearing a shirt bought from a virtual store? What if a person’s virtual activities have no bearing on their real-world activities?”

Rumors that Google may be making the move into a virtual world have been swirling for some time. The comparison between Google Earth and a fully-vested online world, or, at least, the potential for it to become one, has been made more than once. Now, students at Arizona State University are being offered the opportunity to test a new product "that will be publicly launched later this year" if they fill out a questionnaire -- the invitation page of which mentions "a major Internet company" and suggests the mysterious product is related to social networking, 3D modeling and video games.

Lots of signs here point to Google -- the project name is "My World," with a globe logo, and Google's Sketchup is its own 3D modeling software, after all. The questionnaire also asks if the respondents have a Gmail account, and if they'd be willing to get one if not. Additionally, the devotees at Google Operating System note that Google and ASU have a special relationship -- the university uses Google Apps, the site search is powered by Google Search Appliance, the university uses Google Maps and the campuses already have 3D models in... Google Earth. More than this, the university has provided photos for the Google Mars project, Google employees have been guest speakers at ASU, and Google has its own office on ASU's Tempe campus. Only ASU students can complete the questionnaire.

We already know Google is looking to outdo Facebook with an open social networking platform as soon as November -- if they're looking at these arenas as intently as they clearly are, a true virtual world would be the logical next step!

[Via TechCrunch]

Kaneva has launched a free in-world casual game called Dance Party 3D. They describe it as a social experience, a multiplayer dance game with dance battles, competition and a build-your-own-nightclub feature. Interestingly, Kaneva claims the number of users Dance Party 3D can support for gameplay and socializing is unlimited.

It also promises over 55 million possible options for avatar customizability, with new fashions available daily. Avatars teleport into one of the two new Kaneva clubs created to feature the game, or into one of the of Dance Party 3D Clubs created by Kaneva members. Once inside a Dance Party 3D club, players step onto the dance floor to start battling other players -- or, they can simply watch, chat with others and cheer on their friends.

User-created establishments, where users design the club layout and DJ their own music, can move up the leaderboards based on ratings from other users

Additionally, Kaneva’s also selling a series of four "collector" game cards in retail outlets in $10 and $25 denominations. The cards can be redeemed for immediate access to the game and unlock extra virtual dance gear exclusive to the cards and, in the $25 denomination, bonus credits that can be used to buy more virtual items in Kaneva.

Kaneva’s Dance Party 3D is free to join and play. It’s the first game to support an unlimited number of players for game play and socializing, along with the added ability to explore a growing 3D world with thousands of virtual homes and hangouts. ribe

“Kaneva’s 3D virtual world is full of fun, friends and exciting entertainment,” said Christopher Klaus, founder and CEO of Kaneva. “Today’s launch of Dance Party 3D is an expansion of our community’s love to connect, dance, compete, share music and build cool clubs.”

At the 2007 DEMOfall conference, which runs September 24-26 in San Diego, Web commerce and media solutions company View22 Technology unveiled a new "3D Web community" to allow users to create, share and explore interactive 3D scenes in their browser. It's called SceneCaster, and it aims to connect online worlds with internet commerce and social networking.

At the time of this article's publication there are few details available as to how, exactly, SceneCaster works; the website features a beta countdown and a "coming soon" screen. According to the press release, though, SceneCaster allows users to create, share and discuss their own 3D scenes or to transform existing 3D scenes using a simple drag-and-drop interface. Integrating with Google's 3D Warehouse and providing access to that content catalog, it aims to enable userrs to search for, collect and customize content for their own scenes.

"SceneCaster is one tool in the 3D Internet landscape that helps make immersive, social media accessible to everyone," said Sandy Kearney, global director, Emerging 3-D Internet and Virtual Business at IBM. "By providing an easy-to-use environment and a wide range of content, SceneCaster offers an exciting marketing opportunity for virtual environments."

A number of firms joined SceneCaster at DEMOfall 07 as launch partners, including Akamai, e-interiors, iStockphoto, Kohler, Oddcast, SmartFurniture, Wolfgang’s Vault and ZeroFootprint. Smart Furniture president T.J. Gentle said that SceneCaster can help his customers create virtual versions of their interior spaces to better visualize how SmartFurniture's products can fit into their design scheme, while allowing friends and family to collaborate. SceneCaster promises more partners and sponsors to be announced following its US debut.

Writer Daniel Terdiman has announced a new book, titled The Entrepreneur's Guide to Second Life. It's all about making money in the metaverse, and while it focuses on Second Life, it seems like it'll be a useful tome for anyone interested in exploring avenues of self-motivated commerce in virtual worlds.

According to Amazon, the book, available on November 5th, overviews virtual world economies and highlights their opportunities and challenges. A chapter devoted to virtual business basics discusses marketing and advertising avenues essential to thriving Second Life businesses, and there are tips and tricks on multi-stage business plans, too. The book also explores less tangible avenues, like machinima, blogs and media, content creation and speculation on virtual currencies.

Terdiman will also be speaking at The Electric Sheep's upcoming Entrepreneur's Club gathering coming up on October 4th, presumably to promote the book and to share expertise.

The importance of allowing users to express themselves in their own personal way in online games and virtual worlds has been universally recognized these days. One company, however, feels that there are limits to this -- Chinese MMO company Shanda has actually frozen the accounts of male players who choose to play female avatars in-game.

Shanda subsidiary Aurora has stipulated that only females can play female characters in its King of the World MMORPG. What's more, those who claim to be female players actually have to prove it by appearing on a webcam.

Not only does this limit the customization options for male players, but it's a safe bet that being forced to verify their gender on-camera will turn off some female players, too, an odd move considering the desire in all gaming markets to open online gaming to more women. Neither has Aurora stated that female players are prohibited from representing themselves as male.

In social interaction online, many men bemoan the hazards of trying to establish social relationships with women who aren't really women, and Shanda and Aurora seem to be attempting to secure its userbase by alleviating this concern. It remains to be seen, though, whether the number of users discouraged by the policy, be they females facing a new barrier to entry or males no longer allowed to represent themselves as they like, will measure up to those who appreciate it.

But with Shanda's stock recently achieving a new 52-week high as it saw a 77 percent increase in year-over-year revenue in 2006 on the heels of its switch to a virtual goods-based model in 2005, perhaps it can afford to be exclusionary.

[Via MMORPG Blog]

A great article on the Digital Urban blog addresses the issue of copyright and IP rights in online worlds, correctly citing the gray area wherein it's hard to tell how real-world ownership rights translate to the realm of ones and zeroes. The article cites some Nike trainer sneakers the author received as a gift in Second Life, which were user-created, without any thought of permission to use the almighty swoosh.

While, as the article notes, some brands do have legitimate Second Life presences, others don't -- and it's as of yet unclear what ramifications that might have in a world where goods, logos and symbols can be copied, mass-produced, swapped and sold as readily as typing text. It's a good question -- what legal issues might loom around the corner for "fake" goods in a world where nothing is "real" in the traditional sense?

Moreover, the article continues:

Along similar lines does reconstructing the built environment in virtual worlds infringe copyright on use of branding with say importing a Woolworth's retail unit to communicate built form? Issues of copyright of geographic data are however perhaps minor in terms of the blatant cloning of real world goods such as trainers, cars and clothing in Second Life.

The looming threat of legal action is however worrying, if we can copy real world objects and use them virtually surely it is flattering to the company and not an issue of future court proceedings?

Not to mention that counterfeiting isn't restricted to virtual versions of real-world brands. I would argue that Blizzard doesn't find, say, gold farming or counterfeiting items in World of Warcraft "flattering", but many have suggested that WoW and online games should sell gold, rather than oppose the sale thereof.

[Via Digital Urban]

Electronic Arts is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the classic MMO game Ultima Online, which originally launched on September 25, 1997, with special in-game activities and rewards, plus a new amnesty program that invites former players back to try out the major game update, Ultima Online Kingdom Reborn, for free.

The "Return to Brittania" campaign will allow past subscribers in good standing to play for free through October 9, 2007 using their former account name and password.

During the in-game 10th anniversary celebration, players both old and new will be able to take part in a monster hunt with special prizes including an ankh pendant necklace, map of Brittania, an Ultima Online commemorative sculpture and virtue armor set. Additionally, all players will receive 10 décor tokens and a wand of fireworks in their characters' inventory.

Gamasutra is also planning a 10th anniversary celebration of its own for Ultima with a special feature on the game, to debut in the near future.

"Ultima Online has thrived for 10 years and achieved the status of an MMO classic, thanks in large part to the devoted player community," said Mark Jacobs, VP and general manager, EA Mythic. "We are very excited to celebrate this special anniversary with players."

[The preceding feature originally appeared on Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]

Worlds in Motion was piqued recently when we found out about Coobico, a new, free-to-play flash-based strategy MMO being developed by Linking People, a Hong Kong-based developer founded by a trio of German Web developers. Slated for early 2008, it's self-described as "MySims meets Habbo Hotel meets the Settlers," casting players on a deserted island and charging them with building a neighborhood, collaborating or competing with others.

That doesn't sound so revolutionary in and of itself. But what's interesting about Coobico is that it's not geared towards the usual suspects that many companies are rushing to appease these days -- the kids and 'tweens. Instead, Coobico is a casual MMO for adults age 30-44, the core of the casual gaming market.

We spoke to Worlds in Motion co-founder Lutz Winter about Coobico and creating an MMO for a different audience, and asked him what elements he thinks make an MMO "casual."

Traditional Elements for a Traditional Audience

"The genres of brainteasers, strategic-games and collect-and-build stick better with the casual market than shooters and hardcore-RPGs, because they don't require a steep learning of eye-hand coordination and endless hours of grinding and leveling up a character," Winter explains. "[With] World of Warcraft and the like, you can't compete if you are not spending enough time for leveling. According to a recent study from Electronic Arts, Jung v. Matt and German GEE Magazine, some 79 percent of the German gaming-market shares this opinion. This is not a niche market, it's an emerging trend."

An audience of players in their 30s and 40s is looking for something a little different in their multiplayer experience, then -- what is it, and how have they been underserved by other products on the market?

"'More' is the typical game-industry's approach to everything: more levels, more graphic power, more customization and even moreso, intertwining features. Here is a lesson that the game-industry can learn from the Web 2.0-world -- less is more, really," Winter opined. "Less is what a casual audience of above-30-year-olds are looking for. They don't want to waste their time and money on upgrading graphic-hardware just to play Crysis in all its beauty. They are looking for some thirty minutes of ease and challenge besides their working-life, their family and hobbies, instead of spending endless hours of grinding in an online-game."

He continued: "On the other hand, our target group are people who feel underwhelmed by casual titles like puzzle games, which miss appeal and [lack] replay value because they are just a bit too non-immersive; it doesn't earn me a lot of bragging-rights to beat level 30 of Tino's Fruit Stand."

Avoiding Community 'Culture Shock'

Communities are the key to online worlds, Winter says -- and the current community within MMOs currently reflects, he notes, the industry's "max-out principle," where the learning curve to fully engage in the virtual society is steep. "This doesn't mix well socially with the casual market," Winter says. "Such social discrepancies -- almost like culture shock -- are among the biggest shortcomings of recent multiplayer-products."

Winter recalls a story that illustrates his point: "I remember, I once followed a flame-war in a Final Fantasy XI forum, where players were bashing each other because the healer of a group had used the wrong spell to protect the group's tank against a certain monster (which he obviously didn't know enough about). One of the wranglers concluded that he wanted to make the online-life of that healer as miserable as possible from now on. Can you seriously imagine that above-30-year-olds have time or interest to engage in such bunk?"

Catering to a New Target Group

How does Linking People plan to reach, engage and retain this audience? "We will be winning a lot of contests, and thus make ourselves heard of," jokes Winter. "No, really, I recently read
(Guild Wars co-founder) Jeff Strain's presentation on "How to Create a Successful MMO", and I quite disagree with him on a multitude of facts -- he seems to never have heard the term 'Long Tail Market'! I second his opinion that people will not easily adopt new MMOs if they are already enganged in one or two of their choice -- but I beg to differ with his bottom-line."

The "bottom line" Winter cites is this Strain quote: "You must make a game that is so overwhelmingly superior that it can actively break apart an established community." Winter disagrees. "Instead, how about catering to a new target-group which never stuck with a traditional MMO in the first place?" He suggests.

Blending Social Networking With Massive Worlds

Winter goes on to describe Coobico as a "genre mix" of an MMO and a social network. "Alongside, we've got some additional viral features up our sleeves which will hopefully turn into a nice multiplier," he adds. "Word-of-mouth is a very strong medium to us: we will be offering a great product for free, and giving it a try will be a breeze. Coobico's quality will make adopters stay."

Are there any MMO games or social worlds providing a good example? Though Winter stresses that his aim is to create a unique mix of genres, he allows, "There are titles offering a similar gameplay, like The Settlers and MySims, but collect-and-build-games are typically not massive social worlds at heart. Social worlds like Habbo Hotel and Gaia Online, on the other hand, resemble other aspects of Coobico, but they are essentially just boosted chat-environments enabling you to play minigames, not real multiplayer-games."

However, Winter explains, socialization lies at Coobico's core -- the community must build settlements together, form groups and quest together. "Coobico will actively match settlers with their surrounding neighborhoods," Winter adds. "Neighbors are not an abstract concept in Coobico -- they are players running settlements close to your own estate; you can visit their village, and compete or collaborate with them."

Players will have a full-blown set of social networking features at their hands: they can keep a profile, take and collect pictures, pull in their favorite blogs and feeds, invite their friends and connect and communicate with each other as they play.

Exploring Coobico's Business Model

What about Coobico's revenue model? Winter says it's free to play, as subscription fees and club models "do not suit our market well." He explains, "Coobico will be free and sponsored by advertisement-partners through various forms of in-game-advertisement. Players will be able to purchase in-game currency to buy virtual gear, but this is just an option for those who don't like to earn their inventory and income through in-game-activities."

"We chose a revenue-model of in-game-ads because some of our asian core-markets don't offer mature micropayment-solutions and markets," he adds. "Especially in our Asian markets, we are going to launch additional premium services once we established Coobico as a brand name there."

Earlier this year, Trion World Network announced a partnership with Hewlett Packard to develop the technology infrastructure for a dynamic, multi-platform content delivery system. Following that, the broadband games and entertainment publisher and developer announced it had raised 30 million dollars in investments for their endeavors. Now, the company has announced some new additions to its executive leadership.

The company has brought on Peter Matiss as vice president, marketing and sales, and Won Seok Chung as senior director of business development. Matiss was previously Webzen America's VP of marketing and sales, and prior to that, he helped build a variety of franchises like RollerCoaster Tycoon, Monopoly, Risk, Dungeons & Dragons and Sid Meier’s Civilization for Atari. He'll now lead all brand development, marketing and sales activities at Trion.

As for Chung, he's former department head and director at online social networking destination Cyworld, where negotiated contracts and strategic partnerships. Before joining Cyworld, Chung spent several years as a NCSoft executive, spearheading joint ventures with the likes of Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Intel, NVIDIA and Sina. He'll play a similar role at Trion, identifying and negotiating strategic alliances for the company globally.

The company adds it's currently interviewing potential partners, IP owners and developers for its global publishing platform.

“Matiss and Chung are critical hires for us,” Dr. Lars Buttler, CEO and co-founder, stated. “Trion is a new type of publisher, uniquely positioned to be the go-to partner for premier IP created for the connected world.”

Jakks Pacific and Nickelodeon & Viacom Consumer Products announced that they have executed a domestic-based master toy licensing agreement to produce a variety of products based on the Neopets virtual world, by which Jakks will create a full line of toys and merchandise to capitalize on Neopets and its characters. The Neopets world lets kids adopt virtual pets, accumulate points for virtual goods, and play minigames.

According to comScore, Neopets drew 5.9 million visitors in the month of August, making it Neopets' strongest month yet and marking a 50 percent increase over the same period last year. The company says 'tween users spend an average of 2 hours and 33 minutes on the site.

The Jakks toy line will focus on plush Neopets toys, but the aggreement also covers action figures, accessories, playsets and plug-and-play interactive toys, as well as role-play products, vehicles, youth electronics, water toys, novelties, stationery products, kites, and craft activity toys. Jakks’ Neopets collectible plush products are expected to begin to hit retail shelves in early spring 2008, with figures, playsets and other Neopets products shipping to retailers nationwide for fall.

Additionally, the plush toys and other upcoming Neopets consumer products will tie into a new multiplayer “Neopets Key Quest” in the game. The toys will contain codes that allow kids to unlock virtual extensions of the toys to use as part of the Neopets Key Quest game, with virtual versions of the toys represented in the users' Neopets profile.

"We plan to add engaging real world components to the already hugely popular virtual world of Neopia," says Jakks CEO Stephen Berman, "and maximize the deep online connection kids have with Neopets through a collectible roll-out strategy, which is one of Jakks’ core strengths. Neopets has all the makings of a great toy property.”

“Consumer products based on the Neopets brand will continue to expand to mass retail in 2008," added Nickelodeon & Viacom consumer products president Leigh Ann Brodsky. "We are thrilled to have a creative partner like Jakks Pacific aboard as our master toy licensee.”

"Father of the MUD" Richard Bartle once identified four different types of online gamers, who could be sorted based on their answers to a series of questions known, sensibly, as the Bartle Test. According to Bartle and his test, those who play online are either Achievers, who prefer to gain concrete measurements of succeess; Explorers, who prefer discovering areas, creating maps and learning about hidden places; Socializers, who prefer to interact with other players, or Killers, who prefer to be in conflict with other players.

Bartle has maintained that a mastery of each gamer type on the part of MMO developers will help them tailor and balance gameplay to attract the broadest audience. According to Zen of Design, GoPets' Erik Bethke focused his business model solely on the Socializers -- "carpet bombed" them, in his words. Apparently, though, broadening the focus by researching patterns of item purchases in his pay-for-goods model yielding some interesting results, as Zen of Design reported:

One eye-raising stat came from the fruit tree. The fruit tree simply produces a piece of fruit once per hour, providing what Erik describes as one of the few ‘Achiever’ elements in an otherwise purely Socializer game.

What they found was that people who purchased the fruit tree were 11X more likely to be active players, and of active players, 4X more likely to be heavy users than your standard active player. Thus, fruit tree buyers (and theoretically, Achievers) are 44X more likely to be profitable customers than your average schmuck. At least in GoPets.

Another eye-raising stat came from the Content Creator, one of the few ‘Explorer’ elements in an otherwise purely Socializer game. What they found were that these people were 16X(!) more likely to be active players, and 4X more likely to be heavy users than standard active players. Thus, content creators (and theoretically, Explorers) are 64X(!) more likely to be profitable customers than your average schmuck. At least in GoPets.

Bethke himself chimed in on the discussion and reported that mixing it up, even emulating the crafting dialog layout from World of Warcraft, resulted in revenue that doubled in only seven days. Now Bethke wants to expand GoPets to include questing and combat. It's interesting evidence directly from the field that these ideas have solid merit!

[Via PlayNoEvil]

Worlds in Motion recently spoke in-depth with Nexon America's Min Kim, who among many topics discussed KartRider, the multiplayer online racing game in closed beta ahead of its move to US shores. Now comes the official announcement -- Nexon America has given the green light for KartRider open beta testing scheduled for October 2nd.

KartRider features oldschool kart racing with a variety of personal customization options for character personalities and cars. It prioritizes accessibility and convenience, aiming to make the controls easy and the gameplay oriented for bite-sized sessions, a mechanic increasingly called for in appealing to casual audiences. There is already a very serious overseas userbase for KartRider, though -- Nexon says over 30% of the South Korean population has played the game before.

KartRider's open beta will offer a choice of several characters and multiple race courses; beta testers can have two different carts, paint jobs and license plate modifications, and a "My Garage" feature that lets users socialize with friends, show off their kart modifications and check out new pit stop items.

Open beta testers can also try different single and team race modes including "item mode", which featuries the use of creative items used to gain an edge, and "speed mode", a test of driving skill focusing solely on speed and drift.

Nexon adds it's planned promotions, contests and in-game events geared to coordinate with the launch schedule as things unfold.

Forterra Systems has announced a strategic investment and technology advancement agreement with US intelligence venture capital organization In-Q-Tel to add more features to Forterra's OLIVE (On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment) software platform for virtual worlds.

Forterra's already demonstrated serious intentions for OLIVE -- quite literally, the Coventry Serious Games Institute most recently bought a license to use the platform for game-based learning. And prior to that, Forterra announced it had teamed with the Orlando-based Defense Department’s Joint Advanced Distributed Learning (JADL) Co-Laboratory to determine how MMO games might best be used in military counter-IED training.

So what are these new features? Firstly, OLIVE will be able to import Google's Sketchup 3D models (could this have to do with the nebulous rumor of a Google virtual world, since Google also has a close relationship with In-Q-Tel?). It will also add a network proxy that will allow the system to go through a greater range of firewall configurations, a 3-D conferencing and document sharing application; and additional 3-D content including scenery, avatars, buildings and other objects needed to support the new apps.

“Forterra has developed a technology platform and business model for virtual worlds that we believe is capable of supporting analytic transformation and the critical needs of the U.S. Intelligence Community as well as related applications in the private sector,” said Steve Bowsher, EVP of investments at In-Q-Tel. “Agreements like this with Forterra represent the best of public and private sector business models, designed to deliver innovative technologies to the U.S. Intelligence Community, linking them to new and emerging technologies in the commercial market and providing strategic incentives for companies like Forterra to develop and enhance technology solutions that benefit the federal government market as well as a broader commercial market.”

The amount of the investment was not disclosed.

It's easy to gripe about Second Life, what with its recent loss of luster and backlash in the media. A recent article in Inc. did a comprehensive interview with Linden Labs CEO Philip Rosedale, and a blogger at Found Read synthesized the interview into a clever top five that highlights what Rosedale did to get Second Life funded and off the ground (top five from Found Read, Rosedale quotes from Inc.)

1. Rosedale recognized his big idea for Second Life early, AND that it was too early for the market. So he waited, as Rosedale explains: "This is a nonstarter right now because for this to be interesting it has to be sexy, it has to be fun, it has to be fast, it has to be within human response times. It has to be like a video game. And in the mid-‘90s you couldn’t do 3-D on a PC."

2. Rosedale recognized that he needed more training if he was to be successful with his Big Idea later on. "I needed some experience working with other people and learning how you get people to work together and work on a really big system. I figured I would get to see all that at Real [Networks where he worked before founding Linden Labs]. And I did."

3. Even with big-name backers, Rosedale heard ‘No’ a lot because not everyone accepted his vision. But he understood that they accepted him. So he kept going. "Second Life was just unfundable. It was just the dumbest idea ever. Mitch Kapor [the founder of Lotus Development] was the only person who got it. Mitch invested in 2001 after I had invested about a million dollars of my own money. I think some of the early angel investors were largely investing in me."

4. When he saw that word-of-mouth marketing wasn’t working, Rosedale bit the bullet and made lay-offs. "When we couldn’t grow it as quickly as it needed to, we had one round of layoffs. There were 31 of us and 11 of us left. That was in late 2003, when we pretty well thought we were dead."

5. Finally, he recognized that getting customer buy-in meant “letting go” of the development, and placing it in the hands of his users. The rest is history. "We recognized that there was a core of people who were really starting to want to build the content and invest in it and really value it. And we said, What you have in Second Life is real and it is yours. It doesn’t belong to us. We have no claim to it. Whatever you do with Second Life is your own intellectual property."

The entire Inc. piece is worth a read, and credit to Found Read for so aptly summarizing the salient bits!

[Via Metaversed]

On September 24th, Raph Koster (on his first trip to Japan!) gave a talk at Tokyo University as part of the foreign game design session of the CoFesta Game Industry Seminar. 4Gamer has complete coverage of the talk in Japanese, but Livejournal user Jaerik was kind enough to translate.

Koster took an inventory of the audience, getting a census on their professions. After asking for a show of hands from sales and marketing pros, he quipped, "could you folks leave the room and come back later?”

Koster reflected on his past work as a pioneer of the essential MMO -- lead designer of Ultima Online, chief creative officer and Lead Designer for EverQuest II and Star Wars Galaries. That being said, he asserted, “I don’t believe the future of the industry lies in the way large companies develop games anymore.” The current business, he said, is focused on the gamer as consumer and has unconsciously fixated on catering to their preferences, without attention to the increasingly obvious fact that the "core" market is only one small part of a larger world.

He pegged another problem with the industry as it stands -- since the 80's, the scope of game content has increased in some cases by a factor of 150, with the average development budget over 22 times larger than back then. It's analogous, Koster claimed, to the film industry, wherein with projects so large and pricey, a "blockbuster" opening becomes a business essential, complete with enormous marketing campaigns with the aim of recouping production budgets. The result? A vicious cycle hostile to new and risky ideas.

But the advancements of communication technology has begun to poke holes in the approach -- word of mouth carries plenty of weight in an era of instant messaging and mobile communication, and Koster adds that young people seem to have become mistrustful of mass media, in favor of social networking and ligthweight web portals. Despite the strength of the retail game market in the U.S. and Europe, Koster believes that more than half of the industry's revenue will eventually come from casual and downloadable game content.

Moreover, Koster's much-championed user-generated content will be an extension of this trend, he predicts, adding that we'll soon see the game industry start to reflect the more than 50,000,000 people Koster says participate in generating their own content through blogs and websites. And, he continues, Web 2.0 concepts are the key to moving the game industry into the future.

The result? Users with an invested self-interest will raise the bar for the entire market, and the online products model as an adjunct will avoid expensive stockpiling problems with a focus on more long-term niche markets

“We tend to believe that the content makes the game, but this is not true. Rather, the system should be the game," Koster says. He concluded with his tips for the game design of the future: Good things come in small packages. Large things are expensive and fail easily; cyclical metrics are the way; large design docs are a nearly complete waste of time; use digital distribution aimed at niche markets; add user-generated content, leverage the role of individual fame to establish lifestyle image through associative branding, and have an open platform.

[Via Raph Koster's Website]

Learning about HiPiHi, "China's answer to Second Life," we've seen a bit of how cultural differences result in different approaches for virtual worlds. "Meet-Me," the virtual Tokyo by digital marketing company Transcosmos, hopes to leverage these cultural differences to make its product competitive in a Japanese audience.

Kunimasa Hamaoka, who oversees Meet-Me, told the Associated Press that the Japanese audience would prefer a more predictable, secure and socially proper environment than the anything-goes Second Life world provides.

Meet-Me's avatars have a softer, cuter and more fantastical look than the realistic bent popular in Second Life and in Western games like TheSims. In place of fantasy teleporting, Meet-Me is navigated via walking, running or vehicles like trains, much as in real Tokyo. Additionally, the world runs on Tokyo time in terms of when it's night and day.

"This will be a place where people can enjoy themselves with a sense of safety — like Disneyland," he said. "There's total freedom to act in 'Second Life,' which requires individual responsibility. It's very American. Almost everything is OK, including evil." By targeting the sensibilities of a strictly Japanese audience, Hamaoka hopes to achieve greater penetration in the Japanese market, often difficult for Western games, MMOs and virtual worlds.

When Meet-Me opens in December, it'll have cyberspace shopping, entertainment, games and Christmas lights. Like Second Life, visitors will be able to buy virtual plots of land, housing and furnishings, and customize their avatars' appearance, hairstyle and gender. Hamaoka also hopes to add virtual outposts for real retailers.

But unlike Second Life, Meet-Me will be under strict control by Transcosmos, with more policing, filtering and measures to prohibit profanity and obscenity in the hopes of keeping the peace. "apanese aren't going to take to the culture of Second Life," Hamaoka told the AP. "It's the kind of place where you can get shot in the back as soon as you log on."

A Linden Lab official told the AP that it sees Japan as a key market and hopes to continue building Japanese language services, adding that Japanese alternatives are more like video games and not in competition with outlets for creative expression.

Earlier this week, we took a look at a research report published by market researcher eMarketer about kids, teens, 'tweens and virtual worlds that found that 34.3 million US child and teen Internet users will visit virtual worlds once a month in 2007 -- and eMarketer expects that number to rise to 34 percent in 2008, and to 53 percent by 2011.

Worlds in Motion spoke to eMarketer's Debra Aho Williamson about her findings. "I think what’s attractive about virtual worlds for kids and teens is that they exist at a 'sweet spot' between online games, which are very popular with younger kids, 'tweens and boys, and social networks, which are very popular with teens, particularly girls," she explains. "I think that virtual worlds combine aspects of both of those things."

Zeroing in on major factors in online social worlds, she elaborated. "There are a lot of games, there's the opportunity to meet friends, interact socially, learn about other people and express your interests. So I think those are the two driving factors." Real-time interaction also plays a big role, she says. "[It's a] very immersive experience. You don’t just 'poke' somebody like on Facebook -- you can actually, physically, poke somebody. What that means is that there’s that much more real-time interaction, no latency, no making a post on someone’s wall and waiting for them to respond. It’s all occurring in real time."

What Makes Kids' Worlds Special?

So what does this mean for marketers? "First, a lot of marketers went into Second Life, and now we're seeing a backlash these days- -- it's maybe not working out as well as they hoped," Williamson says, but cautions against marketers being turned off completely from virtual worlds by anti-Second Life hype. "They need to take a second look," she advises, "Especially if they're in the market of targeting kids and teens."

Moreover, Williamson sees some key differences in kids' worlds specifically that separate them from Second Life or other generally-focused environments. "Several of them have years of experience being ad supported and developing ad campaigns within virtual worlds, she notes, highlighting Neopets, Whyville and Habbo -- all of which began their experience in the late '90s and early '00s and have been ad-supported since then. "The second thing," Williamson adds, "is that there’s a strong focus within virtual worlds for kids and teens on engaging users and coming up with a marketing campaign fully integrated with an environment. It's not an island you have to go visit, but something part of the fabric of the virtual world.

The Real-World Tie-Ins

Companies like Whyville do that very well, as Williamson says, with its educational campaigns on disease biology and environmental studies that are integrated within the Whyville world, as we found on our visit there. As a side note, eMarketer's report indicates that Numedeon is looking to continue growing in the virtual worlds space on the heels of their success with the kids:

“In the coming months we will go from being a one-trick pony to having multiple virtual worlds under management,” Whyville’s Jim Goss told eMarketer. “We’re going to build our own and have a portfolio of virtual worlds operating on the same tech platform,but going after different demographics.”

Virtual Playing Becomes Real-World Paying?

But from the standpoint of marketers, does what kids and teens do in virtual worlds necessarily have any bearing on their real life behaviors? "In a lot of cases, I think it does," Williamson opines. "I believe that children and young teens particularly will be more apt to be like themselves in the virtual world. But overall, I think people who like something in real life will follow those interests in the virtual ones. If they like music and street culture, they might gravitate toward VSide. Fans of The Hills go to vMTV. If they own a Webkinz they go to the Webkinz world. So there are obvious interest correlations. I think that you express your interests by which virtual world you choose to interact with."

Moreover, the high focus in customizing and decorating in these kids' worlds can play an important role for advertisers. "People take a lot of pride in decorating," she says. "If there are real brands available, they might choose those real brands just as they might in real life. I think ultimately a brand impression is a brand impression, and there's still a real person behind the avatar that will be exposed to the brand regardless of whether that person in the virtual world is similar or dissimilar to how they are in real life."

A Question Of Security

One caveat -- a parent herself, Williamson was concerned when the results of her research revealed that these kids' worlds were not as safe in terms of kid security as they sometimes claim. "I think that ultimately some of these worlds could be targets for sex predators just as social networks have been," she says. "Actually, it's almost easier to hide behind an avatar than it is to hide behind a social networking profile. In my research I registered for a whole bunch, and signed up for BarbieGirls. You can select your age, and I signed up as a 7-year-old girl." Williamson explains that she was asked to provide a parent's email address to verify she had permission to be on the site. "So I just gave them my address without saying anything about who I was, and all I got was an email that [essentially] gave me a [verification link] that said, 'You affirm that you are the parent of this child.'

From there, I had this experience in the BarbieGirls world, and I wandered around, and within minutes I [was] approached by several avatars asking to be my friend. My only choice was to say 'yes' or 'no', and I have no way to figure out who they are, how old they are, or anything about them. So as a parent, it definitely raised some concerns. I wasn’t sure who these people were that were asking to be my friends."

A Brave New Frontier

And safety is definitely a growing concern, given the other result that surprised Williamson -- just how much traffic the kids' worlds get. She cites July 2007 comScore data that pegs Webkins and Club Penguin at more than five million unique visitors each in that month -- and not just kids and teens. Nicktropolis had 2.2 million, and Stardoll, which is avatar-based but has no actual virtual world at all, logged 2.3 million visitors. Contrast that with only 414,000 visits to the Second Life URL in the same time period. "Obviously, you don’t have to go to SecondLife.com to actually get into the site," Williamson says, "It runs on its own. What this captures is only visits to the URL -- but still, it’s a huge difference."

Why, then, all the continued attention to Second Life? "Right now, it’s really the only world out there for adults," she says, although There.com and Activeworlds, to name a few, also target the same base. "I think that the majority of marketers target adults," she continues. "They don’t target kids and teens. So I think that’s one reason. Honestly, I also think Second Life has a great PR team and they did a lot early on -- it’s kind of funny, but all of a sudden there were all these articles, and I remember thinking, 'I wonder who they hired to do PR!'"

"Marketers are looking at something new and interesting to latch onto," she adds. "We’re on the vanguard, the edge, doing something 'cool'. Maybe we will get some PR from it, and maybe a little bit of learning. Its not an adjunct; it's part of the world. And I think that says a lot."